By Brian Wacker
HOUSTON—Sean Foley has taken on his share of reclamation projects (see: Woods, Tiger and Willett, Danny, among others). Now the man with the Bob Marley verse “None but ourselves can free our mind” tattooed on his arm, is in the midst of another one: Lydia Ko.

Just five years ago, Ko was a tour de force on the LPGA. At age 17, she became in February of 2015 the youngest player to reach No. 1 in the world. Six months later, at age 18, she was the youngest woman to win a major championship at the Evian Championship. By 19, she was a two-time major champion and a silver medalist at the 2016 Rio Olympics.

Her accomplishments didn’t rival that of a young Woods or Jack Nicklaus—they surpassed them. The phenom was living up to her billing and then some after having become at age 15 the youngest player to win on the LPGA Tour when she captured the CN Canadian Women’s Open in 2012.

Ko also played the game with youthful exuberance and joy and, at just 5-foot-5 and not terribly long off the tee, she possessed a style that was more van Gogh than Michelangelo, with a short game that was pure artistry.

There were, however, warning signs that it might not last.

Ko changed caddies eight times—in her rookie year alone. The same pattern was true with coaches—Guy Wilson, David Leadbetter, Gary Gilchrist, Ted Oh, David Whelan and Jorge Parada were all hired and fired in a parade of quizzical moves.

Other changes occurred, too. In the fall of 2018, Ko dyed her hair platinum blonde at the urging of friends Michelle Wie and Allison Lee. She had also become noticeably thin, having dropped 15 pounds, and at the ANA Inspiration in April of 2019 Juli Inskter cracked on Golf Channel that it looked like Ko “needs to go to the buffet counter a little bit,” while analyst Judy Rankin followed with, “We all want to see five more pounds on Lydia.”

Her once-dazzling game, so fluid and effortless, eventually began to slip, too. The constant changes (caddies, coaches, equipment) chipped away at her confidence and an over-analysation of her swing short-circuited her thoughts. Ko hasn’t won a tournament since 2018 and earlier this season she fell outside the top 50 in the world ranking for the first time since her first year as a professional.

Stuart Franklin
Among instructor Sean Foley’s clients over the past decade is Tiger Woods.

Enter Foley.

Ko, who also lives in Orlando, first reached out to him more than a year ago.

Not long after, Ko was back to being a brunette, watching a handful of videos of her swing from the height of her powers and trying to work her way back to that form. This year, the COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated her progress and 5 1/2 months ago she called Foley again and told him that she thought she was ready. The next morning the two went to work at Isleworth.

“The goal was to get her to understand her swing, how it works, why it works and to get her to hit that baby fade,” Foley said.

That’s only half true.

The other goal was to make the game fun again, which is why Foley, among other things, gave his pupil various games to play while practicing on the course—teeing it up from the back tees with no woods, playing the forward tees with driver, playing a worst-ball round, intentionally hitting every approach into a greenside bunker.

“The other goal was to get her to enjoy the game and the creativity of it again,” he said. “She’s so creative. She’s brilliant. But here was a girl who was looking at videos and numbers. That’s not her.”

All of which perhaps explains the upward trend in her recent results as she arrives for this week’s U.S. Women’s Open at Champions Golf Club.

In her last 10 starts, Ko has finished in the top 15 on seven occasions, including in August’s Marathon LPGA Classic, where she finished second, and at last month’s Pelican Women’s Championship, where she tied for fourth in her last start before heading to Houston. She also finished sixth at the ANA Inspiration in September for her best result in a major since a T-3 at the 2017 Evian.

“I’ve been looking at lots of my videos or swing videos,” Ko said at the LPGA Drive On Championship in October. “Kind of weird to Google or YouTube yourself, but I’ve been doing that to just see my swing as an amateur.

“[Foley] I think has gotten me not to think too much about the lines of everything. I’ve tried to change my mindset of not trying to take a video of my swing every single time I’m on the driving range. … It doesn’t need to look like a perfect swing for me to just play golf.”

There have been some technical adjustments, too, although nothing close to a major overhaul. Instead, Ko simply adjusted her distance from the ball, worked on alignment and has tried to make the arc in her swing as big as it can get.

“That’s it,” Foley said.

Not all of it, though.

Ko has also put on 13 pounds of muscle, added 12 mph in clubhead speed and introduced a small waggle to her routing before pulling the trigger. Perhaps most importantly, she no longer obsesses over every swing or shot.

“When we first started, she had 50 questions a day,” Foley said. “There’s no questions left. In 5 1/2 months together, she’s seen her swing twice. She used to video every shot.”

And while this week marks the final major of the year, it’s hardly an end point for Ko. Rather, it’s simply another step toward returning to the top of the game.

It’s also worth reminding that Ko still is just 23 years old.

“Maybe she’ll be the best in the world again, maybe she won’t,” Foley said. “The danger is that you get so good so quickly that when you lose it, you don’t remember how you did it in the first place.”

But for Ko, she’s simply enjoying the journey and the process of figuring it out.

The post A more fun, natural approach has Lydia Ko contending again appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By Brian Wacker
Another month, another change for Justin Rose. A few weeks after parting ways with equipment sponsor Honma, the Englishman has split from his longtime swing coach Sean Foley. They were together 11 years.

The Telegraph first reported the news on Tuesday.

“I spent the past three months working on my game at home,” Rose told the newspaper. “I made a lot of progress and wanted to keep that momentum going when I returned to competition in Fort Worth. I felt it was a good time to take complete ownership of my swing and game. That idea is something Sean has always wanted for me.”

Rose, who finished one shot out of a playoff and tied for third at last week’s Charles Schwab Challenge, met with Foley over dinner at Lake Nona in Orlando before departing for Colonial. There, Rose outlined his desire to oversee his own swing.

Though both men said they’d been discussing the move for a while, the inevitable was accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, with Rose living in the Bahamas and Foley based in Orlando.

“These things are never easy because as soon as they occur, you have so many memories,” Foley told Golf Digest. “All I can do is second [what Rose said]. Eleven years as a coach of a team or player is a long time. Rosie’s like a brother to me. We had an incredible run together.”

But over the last several months Rose’s consistency has dipped. In five PGA Tour starts this year, he has three missed cuts and just one finish in the top 50. He has also slipped to 14th in the world, his lowest ranking since 2017.

Still, Rose reached incredible heights with Foley by his side.

Under Foley, Rose won all 10 of his PGA Tour titles, including his first major championship at the 2013 U.S. Open at Merion. He also reached No. 1 in the world on five separate occasions, won a gold medal at the 2016 Rio Olympics and captured the 2018 FedEx Cup. His latest victory came at the 2019 Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines.

“I am grateful for the successes I had under his tutelage and the career goals I was able to achieve,” Rose told the Guardian. “The door is open whenever I have questions or want his guidance, as he continues to be one of my closest friends.”

Foley, whose other clients include Cameron Champ, Danny Lee, Brendan Grace and Lucas Bjerregaard, said he was equally appreciative for his time with Rose.

“In that time I’ve learned so much about the game, the swing, coaching,” Foley said. “I’m grateful for the time we had. It’s the end of something, but it feels like something new [for Rose] and I’m excited to see where it goes.”

The post Justin Rose, coach Sean Foley split after long, successful run appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

A year on from the victory at Jumeirah Golf Estates that finally ended a rollercoaster 30-month ride from Masters champion to serial cut-misser, Willett has given his body and swing a full bill of health.

RELATED: How Danny Willett escaped golf’s doldrums

He says Foley’s inquisitive, data-led coaching and bubbly personality, coupled with a back relatively free of pain, has him in a positive space entering the Race to Dubai decider. 

“You know, I think anyone who has ever met him knows that he’s a charismatic guy,” Willett said of Foley, Tiger Wood’s one-time swing mentor who is at the DPWTC this week.

“The time when we first got together, I was in a pretty low place, and you kind of needed that. Me and Mike are really close. Pete [Cowan] was like a father figure in how he kind of put his arm around you and we’d go over some things, and I’m still really close with them guys.

“But Foles just brings a different energy to the table in how he does things with his work and backs it up — with whatever we do, he backs it up with a lot of science and facts, and we use TrakMan data to get to the bottom of some things.

“Yeah, he’s an incredibly intelligent guy, and I like the fact that he’s always wanting to change and wanting to get better and wanting to do things to increase his knowledge of what he’s teaching. I’m the same in what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to increase and gain knowledge in what I do so that I feel like I can choose which ones I want to kind of use.”

Pressed on whether he believed his game was back to where it was before he edged Lee Westwood and Jordan Spieth by three strokes for the green jacket three years ago, Willett was quietly bullish.

“In terms of playing-wise, I think I could potentially be better than what I was then. Very different ball flight. Very different golf game and very different outlook on probably what is a good or a bad day or how things go.

“So I think as a whole, the potential is there to be better. Whether that means you’re going to win anything else, no. But [given] what we’re doing, the potential is definitely better.”

Willett kicked on from win in Dubai last November to capture his seven European Tour title at the BMW Championship at Wentworth this summer and enters this week’s season-decider in 18th place in the Race to Dubai standings. While he’s in good shape physically, the partnership with Foley and other areas of his game remain a work in progress. On Tuesday, putting coach John Graham accompanied Willett during the Pro-Am.

Willett with putting coach John Graham during practice prior to the DP World Tour Championship. (Photo by Andrew Redington/Getty Images)

“Yeah, body-wise is good, pretty good, anyway. We’re not in the physio bed anymore. We’re back in the gym training, working out, doing whatever we want basically. Apart from a bad night’s sleep or whatever it is, or you travel badly, just the normal things that I’m sure everyone kind of goes through on a day-to-day basis, we’re pretty solid.

“The swing moves are always a continuous thing. We’re always getting work on that and we’re always trying to get better and change things.

“I think we’ll be working forever. I don’t think there’s an end goal, really, with the swing. We’ll keep trying to get better. I’ll keep changing things, if I feel like it will help me with what I’m doing. You might have felt something two years ago that was good and then because it kind of got bedded in, you lost that feeling and you’ve got to change it to get the same thing, but a different way.

“It’s how the game goes. It’s a strange old game. We’ll keep working for the next 30 years.”

The post Willett’s pre-Masters swagger is back ahead of DPWTC defence appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By Matthew Rudy
Walk the range at a tour event and you’ll see a squadron of instructors capturing video, with the teacher and player huddling to figure out which magic adjustment might make the difference between first place and 50th on a given week. It’s certainly interesting to eavesdrop on what they’re discussing—in fact, it’s why we’ve been showing swing sequences in Golf Digest since the 1950s. But hearing about Dustin Johnson’s key to hitting his 4-iron incrementally better is only going to help you so much.

What does a top teacher see when he or she looks at your swing? And what kind of things are you missing when you have your buddy shoot you from down the line during your next practice session? We asked three top teachers—Jason Guss, Jason Sedan and Tom Rezendes—for the fundamental things they look at in an initial swing lesson, and how changing your focus to those things instead of the “prettiness” of your move will make you get better way faster.

“Can we all be honest with each other and accept that virtually nobody has the genetic gifts to roll out of bed and swing like Adam Scott or Anne van Dam?” says Rezendes, who runs the NorCal Golf Academy in Walnut Creek, Calif. “The important part to remember is that you don’t HAVE to do that to play well. A trained set of eyes sees what adjustments you need to make for you to swing your best, not necessarily look like a swing model.”

1. What your face angle is during your backswing
Where the face is pointing during the whole swing might be most under-paid-attention-to fundamental in golf. “Almost every good player has either closed the face or is about to when they come out of the transition at the top,” says Jason Guss, who runs the Jason Guss Golf Academy at Hawk Hollow, in Bath, Mich. “Players who struggle don’t have it square ever, or they’re even opening it at the start of the downswing—which causes a whole other chain of events. If you’re looking at your own swing or any other, is that face angle looking down at the ground when the club is halfway down to the ground on the downswing? I like to help players get keyed in on the face instead of the wrist movements that produce it because those wrist movements are so small.

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2. How your technique matches your intention
What you’re trying to can (and should!) have a huge impact on what your swing looks like. “Students send me video of swings all the time and my first question is always the same—what are you trying to do here?” says Jason Sedan, who runs Fore Door Golf at Lake Winnipesaukee Golf Club in New Hampshire. “Most amateurs record a swing on the range, and it’s just a random swing that came after a random practice swing. But every shot should have a goal, a shape and a speed at which you’re trying to swing, and rehearsals that are about that exact thing.

“The next part is that the speed you swing changes a lot of the relationships within the swing. A video of a player making a smooth swing with a pitching wedge can tell a way different story than one where he or she is smashing a driver. You want to look at the full context, not just for one move you want to tear down.”

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3. The underlying cause of your main swing problem
Putting an ankle brace on for a broken finger isn’t going to be very effective. Which means you need to look for the main source of your issues. “The phrase ‘over the top’ is one a ton of amateur players read and hear about, and a lot of them accurately see it about their own swings,” says Sedan. “But the way they go about fixing it doesn’t address the fundamental reason it’s happening. You probably see it as a swing path issue, but the swing path issue is a symptom, not the problem.

JD Cuban

“If an over-the-top swinger just tries to flatten the club in transition and swing more ‘from the inside,’ all you’re doing is creating a swing that produces weak blocks to the right. Does that ‘fix’ the over-the-top? I guess so, but it just moved the problem into a different box. If you don’t address the open clubface that produces most over-the-top moves, you’re not addressing the problem.”

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4. The movement of your swing in 3D, not 2D
A golf swing moves in three dimensions, which is hard to see on video. “You’ve heard of ‘angle of attack,’ but what does it really mean? And it’s so hard to see without a TrackMan or a trained eye,” says Guss. “But angle of attack gives a lot of clues about your bad shots. A player could be hitting these low hooks with the driver because he or she isn’t getting the weight transferred to the lead side. Ball position and swing direction work together. If you want to hit a higher shot or tend toward a fade, you adjust that ball position forward, which moves the swing direction left and the angle of attack upward.”

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5. How your body segments work together to produce speed
“Most players (and a lot of teachers, to be honest) are focused on the basics—grip, posture, alignment—because those are the easiest to see,” says Rezendes. “There’s a place for that stuff, of course, and a place for launch monitor data like clubhead speed and distance, but I’m watching for a swing’s kinetics—how you produce force. What is making you do what you’re doing in your swing, and how is it impacting your shots?

“For example, how centered your thorax is over your pelvis has huge ramifications for how much energy you can deliver into the ball. And if your hip joints are working correctly in conjunction with your pelvis, that’s a major differentiator between good players and players with less skill. Good players turn ‘into’ the trail hip joint instead of rotating the whole pelvis in the backswing. That might seem like a subtle difference, but it’s why Cameron Champ hits it the way he does instead of the way you do. He’s producing more energy, not finding a set of swing positions.”

The post Five things the best golf instructors see in your swing that you don’t appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.