FEATURE
By Sean Martin
Jason Birnbaum didn’t know the cost, nor could he have comprehended what he’d gain.
An encounter that could have been awkward or uncomfortable instead was turned by fate, chance, or providence into the catalyst for a career, one that has seen the north Jersey native become one of the nation’s top instructors.
Birnbaum, 45, is the director of instruction at Manhattan Woods Golf Club in West Nyack, N.Y. His expertise and acclaim – he is among GOLF Magazine’s Top 100 Teachers – and Manhattan Woods’ location in the shadow of the Big Apple means that his clientele ranges from powerful businessmen and professional athletes to PGA Tour winners.
Justin Tuck, the former New York Giants All-Pro and Super Bowl-winning defensive end, has improved from a 15 handicap to a 6 while working with Birnbaum.
“He’s done a phenomenal job developing my understanding of the layers of a golf swing,” Tuck says.
Birnbaum’s success is credited to his own curiosity, his embrace of technology and willingness to work with his students’ unique strengths and preferences. That can be seen in the rise of his most successful student – the long-hitting New Jersey native who has become one of the world’s top players.
Birnbaum has coached Chris Gotterup for more than a decade, taking him from a teen who was interested in other sports and hardly recruited out of high school to a four-time PGA Tour winner. Gotterup, 26, won two of the first four events on the PGA Tour’s 2026 calendar to crack the top 10 in the Official World Golf Ranking. It marked the continued ascension of a raw talent who first came to Birnbaum when he was a teenager.
Birnbaum has refined Gotterup’s game, helping him add the accuracy and shots needed to compete at golf’s highest level. But he’s done it in a way that allows Gotterup to capitalize on his natural gifts and retain a swing that is very much his own.
But there are also unique aspects that have remained the same, like Gotterup’s preference to aim left of his target. Many coaches would have tried to correct that tendency, but Birnbaum recognized that it was key to Gotterup’s swing, and so they built around it.
Birnbaum’s teaching career started after he sought a lesson of his own, while he was playing on the golf team at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn.
The nation’s best golf instructors were heavily concentrated in Florida, Texas, and California, but Birnbaum was perusing a magazine’s list of top teachers when he noticed that one was within driving distance: Mitchell Spearman at Manhattan Woods.
Excited that a teacher of such renown was so close, Birnbaum called the club and booked a lesson. Birnbaum didn’t know the entirety of Spearman’s reputation, however. Spearman also was known as the most expensive golf instructor in the world. Birnbaum found out the hard way, after he’d already made the 80-mile drive for his first lesson.
“I almost died when he said it was $1,800,” Birnbaum recalls.
Spearman was sympathetic, so he took Birnbaum to breakfast instead. The pair clicked, and Birnbaum was soon hired to be the famed instructor’s intern and right-hand man.
“I did all the dirty work,” Birnbaum says. “I cleaned his office, dropped him off at the airport, set up the range, all that stuff. In exchange for that, he taught me the business of teaching golf. I pretty much traveled the world with him.”
Birnbaum spent the last two years of college working for Spearman, front-loading his class schedule so he could spend the remainder of the week getting a hands-on education from Spearman.
Birnbaum had long been intrigued by the complex enigma that is the golf swing. Growing up in Oradell, N.J., Birnbaum got hooked on the game when he was 12 years old, accompanying his grandfather, Vincent Ungaro, to the local muni, Rockleigh Golf Course, while Birnbaum’s parents ran a local restaurant.
Birnbaum turned to instructional books to accelerate his progress. Then he started decoding the two-dimensional images of his swing on his video camera. In college, Birnbaum would video the swings of his teammates and offer advice.
“In the late ’90s, he was the only college golfer I knew that owned his own video camera,” says Birnbaum’s former teammate, Mark LaTourelle. From there, Birnbaum became an early adopter of Trackman, the technology that allows golfers to see what happens during the split seconds of impact.
“He knew right away that if he could master Trackman, he could separate himself from other teachers,” says Adam Kugler, a 27-time club champion at Alpine Country Club and longtime student of Birnbaum’s.
Working with Spearman allowed Birnbaum to get an early taste of teaching elite players. He was able to work with future PGA Tour player Alex Rocha and European Tour winner Oliver Wilson as they were starting their professional careers.
Rocha had been a first-team All-American in college, and Wilson was on a victorious Great Britain & Ireland Walker Cup team. Birnbaum also worked with former PGA Tour winner Jim McGovern early in his career. It was a full circle moment for Birnbaum, who used to follow the fellow New Jersey native as a kid watching the old Buick Classic, a former PGA Tour event at Westchester Country Club.
Birnbaum’s most successful student would come to him under more humble auspices.
Gotterup was around 13 when he took his first lesson from Birnbaum at Alpine Country Club, where Birnbaum taught for a decade before returning to Manhattan Woods in 2016.
“I had no idea who he was,” Birnbaum says of Gotterup, whose father, Morten, is a two-time New Jersey Senior Amateur Champion. Their first lessons were indoors during the winter, but one thing was still immediately evident.
“I remember the sheer strength,” Birnbaum says. There was just one problem. “He’d either hit a perfect shot or a massive slice.”
Still, it was a good foundation from which to build. Such power offers an innate advantage. Gotterup was more of a lacrosse player than a golfer at the time, but as he got better his passion increased.
“He could shoot anywhere from 70 to 90,” Birnbaum says. “Once we got the driver under control and he didn't have any penalty shots anymore. Things got really good really quickly.”
Gotterup’s mental game was another asset. He perfectly combined a fierce competitiveness with a devil-may-care approach that exempted him from the self-imposed pressure that sinks many promising players.
And better he got.
Lightly recruited out of high school, Gotterup honed his game during his four years at Rutgers University, just 20 miles or so northwest of his hometown of Rumson, N.J. From a 74 scoring average as a freshman, he was named the 2019–20 Big Ten Player of the Year following his junior year as the highest-ranked Big Ten Golfer and No. 23 nationally with a 70.39 scoring average. He also picked up wins at the Met Amateur and New Jersey Open in the summer of 2019, leading to MGA Player of the Year honors. His play improved further after transferring to the University of Oklahoma for one season, where he won the Haskins Award as the top player in collegiate golf. The meteoric ascension continued when he turned pro. He needed just one season on the Korn Ferry Tour to earn his PGA TOUR card.
“I definitely knew I was a work in progress, and still am,” Gotterup says, even while sitting among the game’s elite. “But I knew if I continued to work and at least had faith in what I was doing that I would be able to be in the position someday.”
And by his side through all of it has been an instructor who knows what it’s like to find success from inauspicious beginnings.
“The office that I cleaned as a kid is my office now,” he says.
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