By Brett Cyrgalis
Michael Hebron has an old paperback copy of Ben Hogan’s Five Lessons that is colored inside with long strokes of pink highlighter and choppy marks of black pen. There are notes scribbled in the margins, and the edges of certain pages are creased and creased again. It’s a small book that has been worn down with love and care, shining in hues of yellow-going-on-brown as it sits open on Hebron’s lap in the sunlight of a warm spring day.
“Some of the stuff I’m finding in the book now is incredible,” Hebron says.
It’s been a life of curiosity and learning for Hebron, who is 83 and has not slowed down one bit. This year, he took up the sponsorship of the Long Island Golf Association’s Women’s Amateur Stroke Play Championship – now “Presented by Michael Hebron” – to go along with his namesake tournament, the Michael Hebron Championship, a men’s amateur stroke-play tournament traditionally held at Bethpage Black. (Because of the Ryder Cup at Bethpage this year, the tournament will be a one-day event at Montauk Downs.) Hebron also hosts the LIGA Junior Boys and Girls Championship at Smithtown Landing Golf Course, the public course on Long Island that he has called home since 1969 and that he has operated since 1984.
Hebron is in the PGA of America Hall of Fame and has won just about every award in the industry, and yet he still pours over Hogan in search of some new insights. He spends the vast majority of his time thinking about the nature of learning, and it shows.
Hebron organized the inaugural PGA Teaching and Coaching Summit in 1986, held in Fort Worth, Texas. That is when he first met Hogan. There is a picture of their meeting still proudly hanging in Hebron’s basement, along with a set of Hogan’s clubs, resting in the bag Hogan used as playing captain of the 1967 U.S. Ryder Cup team.
But this isn’t strictly idolatry. For Hebron, the connection goes back to a lot of what Hogan said in 1957 when he wrote Five Lessons, most notably a section from the introduction: “If you were teaching a child how to open a door you wouldn’t open the door for him and then describe at length how the door looked when it was open. No, you would teach him how to turn the doorknob so that he could open the door himself.”
Hebron came up as a very technical instructor, using a lot of the concepts found in The Golfing Machine, a dense little physics textbook. But even before he was awarded PGA National Teacher of the Year in 1991, Hebron had already begun his journey into understanding how we learn, eventually taking classes at places like Harvard, MIT, and UCLA.
Hebron’s transformation is explained deeper in some of his most recent books, such as 2017’s Learning with the Brain in Mind and his 2023 release, It Depends. Both are written in collaboration with professor emeritus of neurobiology and behavior at Stony Brook University, Dr. Stephen Yazulla. Hebron is working on a new book, The Magical Performer, which he hopes will be out soon.
“Everybody has been magical once,” Hebron says with a smile.
This body of work has an outsized influence in the coaching sphere, as every instructor has run up against the same problem: Why are some students getting better and others are not? The industry’s respect landed Hebron on a list of 21 teachers labeled “The Legends of Golf Instruction,” released by Golf Digest in January of 2024.
“He has been a major influence on my game and my approach and my teaching,” says Susie Meyers, who was named in the Top 100 Teachers in America by GOLF Magazine and has known Hebron since she was 17 years old and an aspiring LPGA player. “He’s just a unique mind. Not many minds work like his.”
Meyers played on the LPGA Tour, and when she wanted to transition to teaching, the first person she reached out to was Hebron. He encouraged her to take her first club job, at Ridgeway Country Club, in Westchester County. From there, she helped Jim McLean open his academy at Doral, in Florida, and helped Hank Haney open his academy, in Texas. She taught PGA Tour pro Michael Thompson for almost 15 years. Now she has her own academy in Tucson, Ariz., and talks to Hebron regularly while also editing some of his writing.
“It’s just fun to talk about how the how the mind and the brain work, because we’re just at the tip of the iceberg for what we’re finding out,” Meyers says. “It’s so intriguing. And for Michael to dig so deep into all of this, it’s groundbreaking. He is not respected enough as he should be, in my opinion, in the golf instruction world.”
Maybe what’s most remarkable about Hebron is his unwavering and selfless dedication to the game of golf. He has taught legends of the game on the range at Augusta National and has been offered countless head pro jobs at elite private clubs. But he has remained at Smithtown Landing, where he thinks he can make the most impact with over 700 kids coming through his golf camp every summer.
The LIGA has been appreciative of Hebron’s support going back to his sponsorship of its Public Links Championship over 15 years ago. Then, in 2009, the LIGA decided to stop hosting that tournament under the guise that it was the only event with a restrictive field, not allowing private-course players. (Quick aside: The USGA also stopped hosting the U.S. Amateur Public Links Championship when it instituted the U.S. Amateur Four-ball Championship in 2015, coupled with the fact that the U.S. Amateur became open to public course golfers in 1979. The MGA still hosts men’s and women’s Public Links Championships.)
The LIGA did want to keep hosting an event on Bethpage Black, so they asked Hebron if he would sponsor a new tournament held there and even put his name on it. He agreed – as long as the trophy was named after his mother, Florence. The Michael Hebron Championship began in 2010, with two rounds of stroke-play competition on one of the best golf courses in the country that also happens to be public. This winter, Hebron reached out to ask if there was a women’s event that he could get involved with, and he will now support the LIGA Women’s Amateur Stroke Play Championship as he continues to give back to the game he cares so much about.
“Amateurs are the soul of golf,” he says. “Without amateurs, we don’t have professionals. So for me to have an opportunity to do something for amateur golf, it’s more rewarding to me than being in the Hall of Fame as a teacher.”
Hebron is leaving a legacy in golf that goes far beyond the Met Area, a legacy caring for students and for the game, and finding a way to make it all more enjoyable by understanding how we learn. It’s a legacy that is not done being written (literally) but will have a lasting impact on the game – not that legacy is anything Hebron has ever been concerned about.
“That’s somebody else’s thing,” he says. “I’m just being Michael.”