July 6, 2006.
Cameron McCormick knows the date. Not because it’s another fact stored in his encyclopedic brain, but because he’s been asked about it so many times. That was the date the Australian instructor gave his first lesson to the 12-year-old wunderkind from Dallas.
It was the date he met Jordan Spieth.
“I speak about it on a fairly regular basis,” McCormick said. “(It) was the date my life changed, I guess.”
Their relationship has lasted a decade. Spieth has won two majors and a FedExCup. McCormick was recognized as last year’s PGA of America Teacher of the Year.
This week’s AT&T Byron Nelson is Spieth’s hometown event, the tournament where many people heard his name for the first time. He was just 16 years old when he contended in the final round in 2010; he finished 16th, six shots behind winner Jason Day.
McCormick and Spieth had their first lesson less than 10 miles from TPC Four Seasons Resort, the site of this week’s event. McCormick was the director of instruction out of Dallas’ Brook Hollow Country Club when he was introduced to the player who would become his most famous student. He’d been a golf instructor for about 5 1/2 years when Jordan’s father Shawn called to ask for lessons for his son.
“(Cameron) wanted to have a conversation even before he wanted to see me hit shots. He wanted to know who I am, what my goals are," Jordan Spieth said. “I thought that he was so passionate about (teaching) that we could continue to grow together."
They’re having the same conversations a decade later.
“Being with him for that amount of time, you have another level of trust,” Spieth said. “We've kind of seen almost everything now and I think that's very useful.”
This is the story of how an Australian who didn't take up golf until he was a teenager became the trusted instructor of the reigning FedExCup champion.
McCormick’s wife Somer was surprised to see a poster hanging on the inside of their closet door. Upon investigation, she saw it was a list of goals her husband wanted to achieve in his teaching career. It was an instructor’s version of the poster a young Tiger Woods had in his bedroom in Southern California.
“He left that up there for a couple years. He ended up accomplishing his goals much quicker than he ever thought he would,” Somer said. “I think that says a lot about his personality, that desire to learn and set goals.”
Now McCormick places Post-It Notes on his desk at home. The small notes aren’t a to-do list, but inspiration to keep him progressing toward those goals.
There’s a famous quote attributed to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the first president of Turkey, that Somer believes aptly describes her husband.
A good teacher is like a candle – it consumes itself to light the way for others.
Golf instruction wasn’t always McCormick’s aspiration, but those around him say he’s always been on a quest for self-improvement. When teaching became his profession after his brief pro career ended, he spent countless hours learning not only about the golf swing but also how to maximize human performance.
“He’s so well-rounded, when it comes to biomechanics, knowing everything about ball flight and swing plane, psychology and motivation and how to train,” said SMU head coach Jason Enloe, a two-time Web.com Tour winner who worked with McCormick. “I would say that’s his biggest strength, teaching players how to practice to get the best out of their performance when it matters.”
That’s one reason Spieth has had a chance to win the past five majors, including victories at last year’s Masters and U.S. Open.
McCormick acknowledges he was overly technical during his playing career and early in his teaching career. He was playing in an era obsessed with technical perfection, in the wake of Nick Faldo’s overhaul under David Leadbetter. It was an experiment that led to Faldo’s six major championships but didn’t work for everyone.
McCormick learned there was more to instruction than teaching technique.
“Yes, he wanted to give good fundamentals and good-looking swings and proper techniques, but he was always pushing performance,” Enloe said. “I could tell in the back of his mind he probably was just like, ‘Dude, c’mon man, it’s not perfect but it’s great. Let’s focus on the training aspect.’ ”
Spieth shot 63 a month before his first lesson with McCormick. His success was the result of that same self-belief we’ve seen in his pro career. His swing needed some work, though. He kept too much weight on his left sid in the backswing, his hands were too high at the top of the swing and his club was laid off. He’d drop the club to the inside on the downswing, producing a reliable draw. They had to make changes to help him produce different trajectories and become a more consistent player.
McCormick knew enough to keep some of the idiosyncrasies that make Spieth’s swing unique. He walks with his knees slightly bowed out, a perfect gait for a Texan but his anatomy forces him to straighten his right leg on the backswing to increase his turn. Spieth’s bent left arm and “chicken-wing” follow-through help Spieth control the clubface through impact.
“I thought it would not only be incorrect, but a travesty if we ever changed that,” McCormick said.
Spieth's improvement under McCormick -- he won the 2009 and 2011 U.S. Junior Amateurs -- helped the teacher gain the student's trust. The competitive Spieth also enjoyed McCormick's emphasis on competition.
"He loved games back then he loves games to this day," McCormick said. "Almost every session that we have ever had closes with some type of skills challenge against some benchmark. The games are where he finds his true self, that competitor that he is."
McCormick moved from Australia to the United States once for golf and another time for love. Both were the result of happenstance encounters.
He was a standout in Australian rules football growing up in Melbourne, one of the leaders of a team that produced a handful of professionals, before biology cut short his career.
"The best players were developing physically and I was being left behind and couldn't compete," McCormick said. "I came to golf as a second option."
No one in his immediate family played the game, just an uncle who lived a couple hours away. He played a few rounds when he was 13, but didn't start seriously pursuing the game until he was 16.
He was shooting around par by the time he graduated high school. After travelling southern Africa for three months, he worked for his father’s construction company in the morning and practiced golf all afternoon. He also caddied in some tournaments. One of his assignments was an American, Kevin Youngblood, who'd just turned pro after playing for Texas Tech. He told McCormick about college golf in the United States.
McCormick went to community college in Kansas, then played at Texas Tech. His long hair and Australian accent stood out in the west Texas town of Lubbock. He met his wife Somer in his last semester.
“I was a senior. She was a freshman,” he said. “We turned around and saw each other. I had long blond hair almost down to my shoulders and she had blond hair. She was my dream girl and I was her dream guy.”
The romance that started so close to his graduation, and eventually led him back to the United States, is just one reason he asks, “It was a very interesting series of events that we can connect (as) defining moments, can’t we?”
McCormick played professionally after graduation with little success, traveling between Australia and the United States as he chased his pro golf dreams. He lived part of the time in Florida, traveling and sleeping in a Volkswagen van as he played mini-tour dreams. He worked for his dad’s construction company when he was back in Australia to raise money for tournaments and return trips to the States.
His playing career was over by late 1998 after a couple unsuccessful Q-School attempts in Australia.
“Common sense, logic and economics were all speaking to me at the same time,” McCormick said, “and those three voices said I better do something else.”
He proposed to Somer in Australia in late 1999 and moved back to Texas in January 2000.
Golf instruction still wasn’t on his horizon. He was applying for jobs that would use his international business degree but worked at The Lakes at Castle Hills, a golf course outside Dallas, in the meantime. He’d ignored golf since the end of his playing career but quickly fell in love with being back at the course. That's when he gave his first lesson.
“I realized (teaching) is something I could do,” McCormick said. “That initial flicker of competence can pretty quickly light a fire that can burn, given the right fuel.”
That started an all-consuming quest for knowledge.
"Everything that I did back then, everything that I do now, is about bettering myself, my own personal mastery," he said.
That requires excelling in efficiency, whether listening to a TED talk while driving, staying up late reading or giving lessons on his day off.
He travelled around the country to observe top instructors like Butch Harmon, Chuck Cook and Randy Smith. He also sought expertise outside the golf community, learning from people like Paul Schempp, an expert on how people develop expertise, and legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden.
“I did not understand why he said he had to work, but he was surfing the Internet or reading books,” Somer said. “I did not understand how important that growth was for him at that stage, absorbing all that there was to know. I don’t think he goes a single day without learning something new.”
Cameron calls it an “educational odyssey.”
He's now the director of instruction at Trinity Forest Golf Club, a high-end Ben Crenshaw-Bill Coore design opening this year in Dallas and is scheduled to become the host of the AT&T Byron Nelson.
His students include the past two U.S. Junior champions, Will Zalatoris (2014) and Philip Barbaree (2015), as well as So Yeon Ryu, the 2011 U.S. Women's Open. McCormick estimates he teaches approximately 2,000 hours per year, while giving about a dozen lectures per year.
The teacher and student have grown alongside each other.