How Sean Foley helped guide Michael Thorbjornsen to his first PGA Tour win
· Yahoo Sports
Sean Foley is the Confucius of the practice facility on the PGA Tour. He spouts off lessons that apply to life as much if not more than they repair faulty golf swings, but there's a certain magic in the way he goes about his craft.
"Humans first, golf second," says Foley, the golf philosopher.
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At his first lesson a month and half ago with Michael Thorbjornsen, the frustrated, uber-talented 24-year-old who had failed to get over the hump in his first year and a half on Tour, Foley dispensed this simple chestnut that could've come from a fortune cookie: you're so much closer than you think.
Foley proved prescient as the former Stanford star shot a bogey-free 63 on Sunday to win the Rocket Classic, his first PGA Tour title.
“These kids get out here and they think they need to do this, they need to do that, and it's like, yeah, you do but you don't need to do it in the next week,” Foley tells Golfweek in a phone interview Monday.
Thorbjornsen had worked on his swing since he was a kid primarily with his father, Ted, but a year ago at the same tournament in Detroit, Thorbjornsen’s dad asked Foley to speak with his son. They didn’t connect that week but Foley has known Thorbjornsen, the 2018 U.S. Junior Amateur champion, since he was about 15. When father and son butted heads this season the way fathers and sons tend to do, Foley and Thorbjornsen finally met in June and Michael showed him videos of his swing from when he was 18 at Stanford, which he called the best that he'd ever hit the ball in his life.
“He said, ‘What do you think about it?’ And I was like, ‘That's what I want you to do.’ And he's like, ‘Well, that's how I've always done it,’ and I'm like, ‘Well, you guys got off track. I just want to take you back to where you've already been,’” Foley recounted.
Foley, 52, cut his teeth working with the likes of Sean O'Hair, Hunter Mahan and Justin Rose before getting the chance to coach Tiger Woods from 2010-14 after his split with Hank Haney. But Foley may be doing his best work in the last five years. He's developing a reputation as a fixer of players who have lost their game.
He’s guided Ben An back from the depths of the Korn Ferry Tour to making the Tour Championship, resurrected the career of Michael Kim and helped Tom Kim regain his mojo and return to the winner’s circle at the Genesis Scottish Open last month. At one time, he also coached Si Woo Kim. Asked if he ever taught Anthony Kim, he cracked, “No, I only partied with him.”
“I feel like it's taken me probably 20 years to understand how to do my job and so now I'm not dangerous at all. I've kind of made all the cardinal mistakes that I'll ever make. I mean, I'm probably going to still make mistakes but not the big ones,” Foley said.
Thorbjornsen didn't need a massive overhaul; most of the players he works with don't, he said.
“This game or your perception of it can beat you up and you think you're miles away but you're not. The things that he’s great at (driving the ball, in particular) are really hard to teach people,” Foley said. “The goal is to create repetitions to build access to new patterns. We created a blueprint to where he needs to maintain his height in the back swing; he needs to get his hands to pass a little bit more out, and then from there get his right side of his body through the shot.”
It wasn’t the exemptions into big tournaments such as the Masters that Thorbjornsen touted on Sunday after his victory. Rather, it was the three 7-irons he hit on the last three holes that were executed to perfection into three different wind directions, just the way he drew it up, Foley said.
“I spoke to his dad yesterday after he won,” Foley shared, “and just said, ‘Hey man, remarkable to take a child from such a young age in this game and have him win on the PGA Tour. Hats off to you,’ and his father said, ‘Well, you deserve a lot of credit for this,’ and I said, ‘I really don't agree with you on that. My job's been quite simple, to be honest with you.’”
The hard work already had been done, the talent already was there and Foley just gave him that certain je ne sais quoi that he's known for and sent him back out for the next battle. As Confucius said, "Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall."
Adam Schupak is Golfweek senior writer covering the PGA Tour.
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: How Sean Foley helped guide Michael Thorbjornsen to his first PGA Tour win