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MEET THE
MOST EXPENSIVE GOLF GURU IN THE WORLD
New York Observer
HOW TO BUY A BIRDIE (By Nick
Paumgarten)
Mitchell Spearman is the most expensive golf
pro in the world. He charges $1,500 for a three-hour
private lesson, $3,000 for a full day.
Mr. Spearman has tinkered with the swings of Nick Faldo
and Greg Norman, Dan Quayle and Phil Knight. But so
have dozens of swing doctors with names as well known
in golf as those of their touring clients. What sets
Mr. Spearman apart is his price.
He is only 37, though he has been a pro for 21 years.
He winters in Orlando, Fla, at Tiger Woods' home course,
but early each spring, just after the Masters tournament,
he comes to New York to spend the summer mining the
motherlode: the conspicuously wealthy, eternally frustrated,
pretematurally competitive, occasionally gullible men
of Wall Street, a good portion of who spend and appalling
amount of time and money in their pursuit of a viable
golf swing and a bankable handicap. Many of them make
their pro a central figure in their lives. They fly
him to Asia and Australia, to outings at Florida and
Pebble Beach - passing along his name to clients and
friends as they would a sure bet.
"When you figure out how to
find me, then you're ready to be taught,"
Mr. Spearman said the other day. "It's
a lot of money. But I'm setting my price for what the
demand is. It's a market like anything else. The main
advantage of charging so much is that people take what
I say seriously. When I charge so much, I'm in charge."
It was a weekday afternoon, and Mr. Spearman was standing
on the practice tee at Manhattan Woods Golf Club, a
two year-old club in West Nayack, just off the Palisades
Parkway, half an hour north of the city. As a visitor
tried to hit a few shots with a seven iron, Mr. Spearman
maneuvered a video device around him, like a dentist
taking X-rays. In a mild voice - British accent, with
some Australian-sounding vowels - the instructor asked
questions of his pupil, who was hacking hideous divots
in the soft earth as the ball launched off in various
directions.
Then Mr. Spearman began to teach: "You've
just shown me a wide variety of shots. Obviously, consistency
is a big issue for you. Your grip needs additional work.
Your setup and posture need work. Your wrists don't
really hinge in the manner I'd like to see, so that
the raising up of your body is to compensate for the
fact that you don't hinge your wrists …"
Heenge yaw wreests.
For 10 minutes, he talked breathlessly about leverage
and timing, posture and positioning. "Take
a look at this," he said, standing over
his monitor. "Have a look at
yourself."
Mr. Spearman is no Shivas Irons, the mystical Scottish
pro in Golf in the Kingdom, Michael Murphy's 1972 rumination
on the metaphysics of golf. Nor is he a Ty Webb, Chevy
Chase's soul golfer in Caddyshack. ("It's
American humor that I never quite got,"
he said of the film.) He is not mysterious or coy. He
is a swing mechanic, a pure technician. Like Chauncy
Gardner, his metaphors aren't metaphors, even though
they occasionally sound like them. "Sometimes,"
he said, "I think about going
to a driving range at night and just going up and down
the line giving tips." He dreams of golf,
but they are mechanical dreams about certain swings.
"You wake up having Hogan dreams,"
he said. "We all do."
As he talked he began to sweep the head of his sand
wedge back and forth absent-mindedly across the same
patch of grass. In his lifetime, he had done that probably
a million times. Dressed in a slate Nike pullover, gray
pleated pants, white shoes, wraparound cycling shades
and a Manhattan Woods cap, he looked fine-boned and
fit. His hands were hair-less and small, like a child's.
He was interrupted by the bleat of one of his two cell
phones a few yards away in the cart. He excused himself
and took the call.
"Hello, Dick." He
said softly. "How are you?"
"Unfortunately, I'm booked for
Friday," he continued, "The
next time I'm available is the 9th of June."
He listened, "Yes I think I've
heard of it, yes." He said. "Well,
I wish I was able to help you before you went."
Mr. Spearman hung up. Dick, he explained, was the chief
executive of a major Wall Street firm (that's all Mr.
Spearman would say). Dick needed a lesson soon. He was
headed to Pebble Beach for a tournament and needed to
hone his game. This happens to Mr. Spearman a lot: Clients
want him to fix their swings prior to competitions or
company outings.
"They don't want to embarrass
themselves," he said.
So on Memorial Day at 8 a.m., he juggled his schedule
and made room for Dick, who was concerned that his 15
year-old son kept beating him, even though Dick had
been playing for years and considered himself an athlete.
The morning went well. For Dick - "a
keen golfer with no consistency" - the results
"were there right away."
Then Mr. Spearman drove back to his sublet near Lincoln
Center. He changed and went to the big Knicks game as
a guest of another client, a banker. They sat near the
court. It was a great night.
ADOPT-A-PRO
"My clients normally want to
adopt me," he said. "They
say they need me to come with them."
Powerful middle-aged men tend to form attachments to
their coaches, to their fishing guides and tennis pros,
as though they are training for the day when they will
turn over their lives to doctors and nurses. Certain
kinds of successful men like a bodyguard or a mistress.
But others get a golf guru. They pay him well, take
him along on trips and defer to him as they do to no
one else. They envy a life saturated with the game and
covet the talent. They cling to it. It rarely rubs off,
but it is exhilarating to be around. Besides, the game
is so perplexing, it helps for a typically self-confident
man to have a companion and guide as he negotiates the
deep waters of his own incompetence. It comes to the
point where they can no longer go it alone.
Money can buy such men company, though it cannot always
buy them a swing. In that way, the pro, despite the
fact that he is essentially a hired hand, maintains
psychic hold over the client. You wind up with two men
at opposite ends of a monetary transaction, each feeling,
in his special way, superior to the other.
"I did a Morgan Stanley outing
with Mitchell in Orlando," said Eden Foster,
the head pro at the Maidstone Club in East Hampton.
"As there is usually is, there
was a guy who didn't want to hear anything. But by the
end, the guy thought Mitchell was God. No matter how
much someone comes in acting like they know what they're
talking about, the pro knows a lot more than they do.
They don't know a tenth as much about the game as Mitchell
does."
"You don't feel like hired help,"
Mr. Spearman said, "You feel
special."
Some very rich men have made Mr. Spearman feel special.
Kerry Packer, the Australian media magnate, once had
Mr. Spearman flown in his jet to Australia for three
weeks to help him prepare for the AT&T tournament
at Pebble Beach. Mr. Packer wound up winning. "That
was due to the three weeks we spent together."
Mr. Spearman said.
One client, a shoe manufacturer, flew him to Indonesia
to impress his friends in the government. Under armed
guard at a driving range in Jakarta, Mr. Spearman conducted
a clinic for the Indonesian prime minister and an army
general at 4:30 in the morning. Okay now, general, heenge
yaw wreests.
He has coached former Vice President Dan Quayle: "Excellent
golfer. His swing was a little short. He didn't quite
get back on his right side. I still get Christmas cards
from him." He gave Nike chief Phil Knight
a lesson at Manhattan Woods: "He
has a poor setup, but he's got a tidy game."
He has taught casino magnate Steve Wynn. Starwood chief
Barry Sternlicht, Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus,
among others.
But when it comes it his Wall Street clients he's mum.
"Lets just say I work with top executives from
all the big firms on Wall Street," he said.
He does countless outings for the firms, ministering
to pods of competitive men and women, careful not to
diss them in front of their peers or flatter them too
much,.
"It's fascinating to see them
chill out when they're here," he said, "I
only see them in golf clothes. I don't see them in their
jackets and ties. People say, 'God, so-and-so's a real
ballbuster!' But I don't see that out here."
A CHILD PRODIGY
When he was 7 years-old, Mr. Spearman, born and raised
in London, got turned on to the game by his aunt, Marley
Spearman, a British amateur champion. By the time he
was 16, he had given up school for his tour card and
was giving lessons at the local club for £6 an
hour.
At 18, he came to the United States an introduced himself
to David Leadbetter, who was then an up-and-coming golf
instructor. He spent six weeks at Mr. Leadbetter's school
in Orlando, Fla, honed his swing and became an acolyte
to Mr. Leadbetter, helping him set up Leadbetter clinics
all over the world.
Mr. Spearman's connections to executives at International
Management Group and its founder Mark McCormack -
"They took a shine to me" - helped
him make relationships in the golf world. Soon he was
helping a newcomer named Ian Baker-Finch hone his game,
guiding him to a British Open title in 1991. (Mr. Baker-Finch's
game later imploded, and he quit the sport.) He took
on other tour clients, most of them coming off some
kind of a meltdown: Greg Norman, Curtis Strange, Jerry
Pate, Laura Davis. He hung around the tour, giving swing
tips, gaining credibility. His latest project is the
resuscitation of Nick Faldo's game.
Two years ago, he set out on his own, and started coming
to New York in the summers, making Manhattan Woods his
summer base.
The clubhouse at Manhattan Woods is not yet finished.
Until June 6, the club is operating out of a cluster
of trailers. The course, designed by Gary Player, is
owned by Ken Lee, a Korean businessman and
"keen golfer who likes to gamble when he plays."
There are 150 members, with room for more. The initiation
fee is $150,000, the annual dues, $12,000.
It is a lovely course, but a far cry from the exclusive,
rarefield clubs around New York - Shinnecock, Winged
Foot, Maidstone - with all their baggage. It is the
perfect place for a man to cultivate new clients with
lots of money. They go away with new swing thoughts,
and send their friends north.
The other day, on the lush practice range, after 45
minutes of instruction, his visitor began hitting practice
balls straight and true toward the second of three greens,
140 yards out. He had a new swing, a new outlook on
life. "That sounded good,"
Mr. Spearman said. "You can
see and hear the difference."
But then, seeing the student's new swagger, he qualified
his praise. "Of course, you
don't own it yet. I'm not that good. And neither are
you." He snickered. "That
was a joke."
To view the other Press
articles featuring Mitchell click
here . . .
For more information on Mitchell
Spearman click
here . . .
For more information on the
Tour
Players Mitchell is
currently working with click
here . . .
For information on the other
Staff
working for Mitchell Spearman Golf
click here . . .
For information on receiving Individual
or Corporate
Instruction please
click
here . . .
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