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This swing coach thinks outside the box
This swing coach thinks outside the box
LORNE RUBENSTEIN
Sean Foley is Stephen Ames's swing coach, but he enjoys speaking about more than
stance, posture and angle of attack. You're not keeping up with Foley if you're not
reading Jared Diamond and Noam Chomsky, and if you're not thinking about physics,
neurology, biomechanics and significant world problems, such as child poverty.
This isn't Foley being precious or pretentious. It's Foley being himself, and it's always
stimulating to speak to him. This time he was talking on Monday, having watched Ames
win the PGA Tour's Children's Miracle Network Classic in Lake Buena Vista, Fla. Ames
had spent the week with Foley at his home in Windermere, Fla., near Orlando.
“Have you read Jared Diamond's last couple of books?” Foley asked, referring to the
UCLA geography professor's Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies and
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.
“You have to read the afterword of Chomsky's Failed States,” he said. The subtitle to the
linguist and political pundit's book is The Abuse of Power and the Assault on
Democracy. Chomsky examines what he considers U.S. imperialism, and it's a safe bet
that few golf coaches and fewer, if any, PGA Tour players would be reading his work or
sympathetic to his views. This only makes Foley that much more interesting.
It was but a step or two from Foley's recent reading to a discussion of the yips, but not
only as a malaise that affects the golfer. The yips might cause a person who speaks often
in public to freeze, a musician to stumble at the piano or a surgeon to have problems
making incisions.
“It starts with the visual cortex,” Foley said, adding something about the hippocampus,
the region in the brain where long-term memory is stored. The discussion now veered
into golf and sports psychologists who offer sage advice such as “Pretend you're hitting
into the ocean” to tour players who can't hit a fairway. The problem is that they're not
hitting into an ocean on the course. They're trying to locate a narrow fairway with trees
on both sides.
Foley wasn't high on some mental coaches, but he did have high praise for Dr. Rich
Gordin. The Utah State University professor is a sports psychologist who has worked
with Mike Weir since 1997, and he's not averse to far-reaching discussions.
“Rich Gordin is a beauty,” Foley said. “We had way too many Scotches at the British
Open. We got talking about quantum mechanics.”
Foley has probably talked about the subject with Weir's swing coaches, Andy Plummer
and Mike Bennett. They teach the stack and tilt approach.
“I've been hanging out a lot with Andy and Mike,” Foley said. “They're great guys who
think outside the box.”
That comes naturally to Foley. He's been doing some work with Chris Welch, a
competitive cyclist. They plan to use force plates to study the influence of the ground on
how one hits a golf ball.
“The funny thing is that our feet don't work properly most of the time,” Foley said. “It
was a long time in an evolutionary sense before we even wore shoes.” Maybe that's why
Sam Snead liked to hit balls without shoes.
Foley, 32, spends May to September in and around Toronto. He's the national coach for
the Canadian Junior Golf Association. He runs the Junior Golf Academy of Canada at the
Orange County National Golf Club in Orlando, his home the rest of the year. He and his
wife are expecting their first child in five months. One of his ambitions is to work with
Tiger Woods.
“I think I could inspire him to do amazing things, given his money and intellect,” Foley
said. “I don't see why I should paint a small picture for myself. I believe it will happen.”
Meanwhile, Ames has won again. Foley was nearby when Ames hit a deft bunker shot
from left of the 18th green last Sunday to three feet from the hole. He made the putt to
win.
“I'm always 100 yards away from him during a round,” Foley said. “He likes to see me.
The sun was setting when he was hitting the shot. The ball goes up into the light rays. It
was a great angle for me. The crowd went crazy.”
Ames went back to Foley's new house, where they had a couple of beers. For Foley, life
is good these days. And interesting. More than interesting. Fascinating, and why
shouldn't it be that way?
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