Unlocking PGA Tour Potential: Insights and Analysis
Sean Foley studies the development of PGA Tour players, identifying key factors that distinguish top performers and how early achievements impact their careers.
Video Transcript
No, tons.
I mean, I, I see it every single week out on the PGA Tour.
And there's always a new player that comes out, and I see his golf swing.
I'm like, "How is this guy not a top 10 player in the world?"
Like, what is he doing wrong to not be to this level?
And I, I And it happens every single year, I'll see a player like that that catches my eye.
But back to Michael, Sean, and, and really to Tom Kim, these are two players that have high expectations.
You know, Michael hadn't necessarily won early, but he's a PGA Tour U graduate.
Uh- Yeah and of course, tons of confidence coming out of Stanford.
Tom Kim, wo- won early and won easily.
Imagine, imagine Tom- And it felt like he was gonna carry those expectations, right?
Imagine Tom when he was 20 if he was playing college golf when he was 10th in the world in pro golf.
I mean, come on.
Tom, Tom, Tom turned pro at 16, right?
His, his- his, his mom and dad had a restaurant in Seoul.
Tom turned pro, they sold the restaurant, and they went on their way, and then he won his first pro tournament in the Philippines.
I mean- Yeah at 16 years old, guy would've been on the AJGA.
And so when, when, when a guy like that comes to me, it's like, okay, he already has the solution, right?
Like, think about it like this, Smiley.
The, the guy who's 350 pounds on the treadmill at the gym has a six-pack, you just can't see it.
And so the, the fact of the matter is when we start to struggle as human beings, unfortunately we utilize additives rather than subtracting.
We, we, we add to the problem rather than subtract from it.
So the first thing I ask anybody who comes to me, is, "Do you have videos from junior golf?"
So, "Do you have videos from, like, 14, 16, 18, and then when you felt you were really good?"
And most of the time when I look at that and then I look at the video I just took, they look very different, and only one of them is correct.
Huh.
And so being able to say to Tom, "Hey, look, we're gonna do 2,000 We're gon- we're gonna basically do, like, 2022, but with a slight upgrade in your hand path at the top of your backswing."
So the first thing we worked on was posture.
And then Tom was, you know, he liked this idea of feeling connected.
I'm completely out.
Mm-hmm.
For me, when it comes to connection, it's how fast can the towel fall out from under your arms if you're hitting a full shot, right?
Um- Very quickly.
And, you know, he, it just was a guy whose hand path went out.
If anything, he got laid off.
Tom moves laterally, slightly side to side, and he rotates.
There's almost no vertical impulse.
He doesn't, he, he doesn't push out of the ground or anything.
So what I've seen, there's only really three types of movement, right?
So you got the Rosie, the You got the Rosie, the Fleetwood, and the, the Adam Scott, the swings that we all really like to watch, right?
Mm-hmm.
These guys create, create in the ground, even though that's a consequence, right?
I mean, we're, we're holding on to the club, so this is by far the most important part in a golf swing.
Mm-hmm.
But those guys move laterally, vertically, and in rotation at tour averages in all three.
They're the only three who've ever been the trifecta.
And then you got a guy- Wow like a Zach Johnson, who there's not much lateral, and then there's the vertical, okay?
Not much lateral with the vertical's gonna be a pretty good push draw, right?
So- Mm-hmm once you start looking at certain things, Tom hits it very straight, but it, it just drips right, and then his miss is, like, a bit of an overcut.
So all we have to do is manage his path, and most of his path comes from if he gets aimed right, his right hip gets high and his chest gets open, and then from there he's just not Tom Kim.
So I, I'd love it to be way sexier and be like, "You know what I did, is I split the atom and we figured this out."
But, you know, if, if you, if you take Lewis Hamilton and you put him in the best car and he's the best driver and he has the wrong tires in the rain, he's finishing 20th, Smiley.
So we can't, we can't I, I always tell myself, "Why are you thinking so deeply about this?
The solution's gotta be much, much closer."
So I feel like I'm still learning Tom a little bit, and I feel like I'm still learning Michael, but when I told Michael what I wanted to do with him, he showed me the video of himself at Stanford at 18, and I was like, "That's it.
You were already doing it.
We're gonna do that."
