Sean Foley’s Playlist Keeps Him Grounded While Working the Pressure-Filled PGA Tour
At midnight on March 3, De La Soul’s first six albums were released on major streaming platforms. For Sean Foley, the release of the legendary hip-hop group’s catalog to the digital world was a long time coming. From an upbringing in suburban Toronto to college at Tennessee State, a predominantly Black university in Nashville, to a career teaching some of the best golfers in the world, De La Soul has been an anchor in the life of the 49-year-old swing instructor. The group’s quirky and socially conscious lyrics are the sacred texts of his religion—hip-hop.
Early in his career when he was struggling to make a living teaching golf, Foley listened over and over to the group’s 2001 AOI: Bionix album. Last week after a day in Orlando at the Arnold Palmer Invitational working with his student, Byeong-Hun An, he played these songs deep into the night, reflecting on the life he’s led since he first heard the album more than 20 years ago. In the second verse of “Trying People,” De La Soul’s Posdnuos says, “Throughout my change to grow, some of my people got left behind.” Foley knows the sentiment. “I actually made the second verse of that song come true in my career,” he told me. “I made my dream happen. And then I dealt with realizing that I didn’t have any friends and that people were going to come for me.”
Foley’s world has changed considerably since he first heard those lyrics, but both the vicissitudes of life and golf have kept him grounded and in pursuit of more clarity and purpose for the next opportunity or the next chance to help a golfer become great. He remains one of the best-known golf instructors in the world. Under his tutelage, his players, by his count, have won 35 PGA Tour events, seven Korn Ferry Tour events and 68 worldwide. Yet, he learned something valuable from his hero, Malcolm X, that gives him encouragement for more growth.
“Look at all the transformations that Malcolm continued to have,” he says. “He kept challenging what he believed and he kept challenging what he understood and you know, he just kept becoming and becoming and becoming, and so that’s always been something for me.”
Sean Foley's players have won 35 times on the PGA Tour while under his tutelage. He's pictured here with Kevin Chappell at the 2018 PGA Championship.
John David Mercer/USA TODAY Sports
This year Foley is launching with David Woods, a Palm Springs–based teaching professional and fellow Canadian, the ProSendR, a teaching aid that is designed to give golfers the ability to get the face more square in the backswing. “If you’re going to give one lesson for the rest of your life, it would be to improve people’s backswing position,” Foley says. “Golf is a hands and arms game, and the downswing doesn't have much time. The problem with the downswing is a lot of the forces we create in the downswing open the face. So getting people to get the face in a stronger position and then in a position from there to release it into an even more stronger position—the ProSendR is an excellent aid for that.”
Foley is good at talking and projecting a world filtered by golf, biomechanics, philosophy, history, sociology and hip-hop. He was prominently featured in Netflix’s Full Swing docuseries about life on the PGA Tour, where he offered his perspective on some of the game’s best young players. He believes the series could be very helpful in growing the golf audience beyond the die-hard fans. “I have golf buddies that have wives who don’t play golf, but they binge-watched Full Swing and were asking to go to Bay Hill so that they can follow Tony Finau,” he says.
Foley is likely to see his own star rise with nongolfers with his appearance in the show. For the most part, he can’t walk 10 feet at a PGA Tour event without being stopped by a person in the gallery, but he can stroll throughout a packed Top Golf and not be recognized.
Few golf insiders have seen more than him over the last 15 years around the tour. He’s probably been hired and fired by more players than any top teacher on the PGA Tour. “It’s been a long time since I took anything personally,” he says. “I still have friendships with everyone that I stopped working with.”
He may no longer work with Tiger Woods and Justin Rose, but he lives daily with memories of their tournaments when he was their coach. “I think of all the scar tissue that I have from the majors,” he says. “It’s very hard for me to go on tour now and go to a golf course and not have this triggered memory of one of my players making a double at the wrong time.”
Some of his worst memories were the 2017 Masters, when Rose lost to Sergio Garcia in a playoff, and the near-misses for Woods in both ’12 and ’13 at the British Open.
“When it matters that much to you and you care that much and you invest as much time in the people and yourself, it’s going to hurt, and I don’t mind the pain,” Foley says. “I don’t think the key to life is being happy. I think the key to life is really being able to endure pain because life is difficult.”
Foley is at the Players this week with An, who is making a resurgence after a couple of tough years. On the drive up to Ponte Vedra Beach from his home in Orlando, the De La Soul catalog kept him company. It’s his theme music that will carry him into the spring for the excitement of the Masters. “Stakes Is High” reverberates in his head: “Stakes is high / You know them stakes is high.”