Reading Steve Elkington’s Twitter feed is a guilty pleasure for a percentage of his fellow tour profes- sionals. It’s the same patter he has offered inside the ropes ince his amateur days in the early 1980s: trenchant, profane, funny, cranky. The difference is that 40,000 followers eaves- drop on an @elkpga tell-all spanning 9,000 tweets. • You got to cut Tiger some slack people... He’s only been with [Sean] Foley for 2 years & only did one year of college... It takes a while. #process • NBC golf would like to bring you uninterrupted bull[----]
for 55 min per hour with limited golf shots..... #reversemasters
• Had a kid dressed as @Keegan_Bradley last night
at Halloween ...backed up & down stairs 12 times before
he got his candy....
For more than a year those snippets were the only way
most peers kept track of Elkington. He withdrew from two
PGA Tour starts and missed a Web.com Tour cut in 2012.
Combine that with a lackluster 2011 (he missed 10 of 17 cuts)
and his arrival on the Champions Tour may seem diminished.
#disasterintheoffing?
Yet the 10-time winner in the U.S., who turned 50 on Dec. 8,
calls last year one of his best, in respects exceeding 1992 (“got
married, won the Australian Open”) or 1995 (“first child, won
the PGA [Championship], paid for my house”). Elkington
learned a word he needed to look up in the dictionary: “I
suppose I’ve been on sabbatical.” Elkington shunned the peripatetic life for his own bed in suburban Houston. He spent
quality time with wife Lisa, joined college-bound daughter
Annie on campus visits and played as much golf as possible
with son Sam, nearly 16.
Idyllic, yes, but Elkington was not idle. Entering his home
office by 5 a.m. daily, Elkington and a small band of associates
dove into the digital computing universe in ways no other
athlete has attempted. They began in April 2010 by going
live with secretinthedirt.com, a distinctive golf instruction
website with an iconoclastic audience mirroring Elkington’s
quest for swing-related discovery. They then switched gears
in the second half of 2012 and, in a fevered rush, created an
iPhone app, CapZoo, that propelled them into Silicon Valley’s
social-media revolution.
“I don’t see anything wrong with dipping your finger in a
new thing if you don’t mind getting your ass kicked,” Elking-
ton says. “That doesn’t bother me.”
Elkington splashes onto the Champions Tour with the same
gorgeous swing, but as a combination of 1920s barnstorming
player and Internet startup CEO. He will promote Secret, Cap-
Zoo and some of the best-known digital companies on his ap-
parel and bag and with a massive two-story trailer, nicknamed
“The Big Show,” which will serve as home and office. Payroll
for most golfers is a caddie’s check. Elkington’s ventures have
five full-timers, and he is juggling the quest for venture capital
and growth. “It’s not like I’m a kid anymore,” he says.
What Elkington and crew have accomplished is mind-
boggling. At least when the Bad News Bears wowed Walter
Matthau they played baseball. Elkington does everything
from his iPhone, using a laptop or desktop computer only
in extreme circumstances. “I’m pretty impressed with how
tech-savvy Steve is,” says Tom Otvos, the veteran digital
engineer who strengthened the website and coded CapZoo.
“He’s able to figure stuff out and know what works and what
doesn’t work. It wasn’t like he’s a total newbie.”
Secret in the Dirt co-founder Mike Maves, a scratch
amateur from Canada who quit the game cold turkey a
decade earlier, sold his family’s second-generation insurance
business to nurture the website. Most of the group they as-
sembled lacked digital experience and geographic proxim-
ity—textbook telecommuters, they’ve never been all in the
same room and some have never even shaken hands. They
shared a zeal to build something aligned with Ben Hogan’s
message that study and practice breed enlightenment.
Maves’ word for Secret is agnostic. “We feel that this idea of
social learning—of people sharing with each other what is
working—is the best way to move these golfers forward and
help them improve,” he says. “It’s not about tips or trying to
get great in an afternoon.”
Secret was gestated after Elkington telephoned Maves
upon reading his e-book Secret in the Dirt, an attempt to
clarify Ben Hogan’s Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of
Golf. Elkington and Maves discovered an affinity for classic
instruction, such as Henry Cotton’s folksy My Golfing Album.
They have identical goals but different paths—Elkington the
font of ideas who can be blunt with feedback; Maves deep
in the technical guts while building consensus. “They’re op-
posites, and that’s a good thing,” says Terry Okura, who knew
Elkington for nearly 20 years and joined up after Secret’s
launch. “They keep each other in check.”
The website resembles a percolating grillroom or practice
tee occupied by rank beginners and tour winners alike. One
feature is The Forum, a message board with everything from
swing theory to on-course confidence builders. Another
is The Vault, which added its 1,000th video late last year.
Among the featured instructors who gained prominence
within Secret: Martin Ayers, Paul Kopp, Craig Foster and
Geoff Mangum. These teachers passed muster in a crucible
likened to television’s “American Idol,” gaining recognition
according to how readily their lessons serve site members.
Haven’t heard of Secret in the Dirt? The group disdained
advertising and promotion to prove the concept would
thrive unaided. As with do-it-yourself home remodeling,
DIY instruction isn’t for everyone. Maves likens it to a site
about underground bands: “Are you interested,” he says,
“in what’s on the radio or would you like to hear something
a little more obscure that’s equally great but it’s still in the
basement of some club?”
Through organic growth Secret has members from more
than 125 countries. Maves equates the 30,000 unique month-
ly visitors to Twitter, where a core stokes conversations and
