Harman's bullseyes dominate the Open

The bow and arrow hunter from Georgia wins one for the short(er) hitters and the cosmic putters.

The golf nerds already knew Brian Harman. Even the late Norm MacDonald, perhaps the funniest man in the world, knew Harman. MacDonald loved to watch golf tournaments and not just for wagering purposes, and he adopted the 5-foot-7 lefty as his favorite.

“I love watching you, Brian,” MacDonald told him in a Tweet, two years ago. “You have it all. What will win you your majors, the Masters likely being your first, is your easy perfection with the blade. Respect.”

Otherwise, Harman was the junior phenom from Savannah, Ga. who, when he turned pro, found himself hitting first a lot. Lefthanded singles hitters are fine, but there’s a reason Tony Gwynn was involved in baseball, not golf.

Harman was the 54-hole leader at the 2017 U.S. Open but got steamrolled, as did everyone else, by Brooks Koepka. He could always putt and he impressed people when he held off Dustin Johnson, then the world’s best player, to win a PGA Tour event in Wilmington, N.C. He had 29 Top Ten finishes over the past six years and was consistent enough to make the FedEx playoffs for 11 consecutive years. But he was far better at making money than history.

Still, there’s a course for every horse, and a week in every pro’s life in which the door swings open. Few have slammed it behind him as emphatically as Harman. He seized a 5-stroke lead on Friday and won the Open Championship by six on Sunday, as unrelenting as the rain. At 36, he became the champion golfer of the year, and sewed up a spot on his first U.S. Ryder Cup team,

He was asked how he had kept his poise and he laughed. “I was a wreck last night,” he said.

The whole key was keeping himself positioned in whatever moment he was in, but on Saturday night he was failing. “I took a shower this morning and I told myself, ‘Nothing bad has happened yet,’’’ he said. It never did, as Harman shot 13-under-par, hit 75 percent of his fairways for the week, and gobbled up Royal Liverpool’s slow, flat greens. He had 60 putts within 10 feet of the cup and made 59 of them.

There’s a lot of talk about the desirability of slowing down the golf ball and thus preserving the “integrity” of the great courses. Royal Liverpool placed its evil pot bunkers at the 300-yard mark on most holes. This was cake for Harman, who doesn’t hit it 300 yards and thus played from behind the trouble. He was in three bunkers all week, including one on the 72nd hole, where only Jean Van De Velde could have lost. After he chipped his ball out of one of those bunkers, he holed out his next chip for a par.

There were some goofy aspects to Royal Liverpool, including the “internal out of bounds” that made no sense, and a 17th green that was perched on a throne surrounded by bunkers and drop-offs. But they all had to play the same track, and Harman had long since surrendered his heart to the delights of links golf.

It was reminiscent of the way Zach Johnson crushed the par 5s at Augusta National in 2007 by getting up and down for birdies. Johnson is the Ryder Cup captain and a buddy of Harman’s.

Johnson also captured the hearts of many journalists when he was asked to “talk about Brian.” Johnson nodded and said, “Sure. So ask me a question about Brian.”

Harman ranks 144th on the PGA Tour in driving distance but is seventh in accuracy. The distance has always been about the same, but Harman finds many more fairways than he used to. The rest of it is solid schooling, most of it supplied by the late Jack Lumpkin, and just a gamesman’s knack for winning.

Harman was the youngest player ever to make a Walker Cup team, and when he won the U.S. Junior Amateur he immediately flashed back to the previous year, when a wayward drive extinguished his chance to beat Charlie Beljan. “The choke has been avenged,” he said.

Harman played the country boy for the British media, who loved it. He talked about bow-and-arrow hunting, although he left out the story about the day in Savannah when he immediately pulled over, grabbed his rifle and blew away a wild boar in the underbrush, with his dad in the car.

“You don’t want to get in front of me when I’m out there,” he said.

He said he was looking forward to the arrival of his new orange tractor so he could cut some grass and plow some fields in place. Asked how much he paid for it, he hedged and then smiled. “I don’t want to say because my wife (Kelly) doesn’t know yet,” he said.

And he gestured toward the claret jug and said, “I’m going to have me a couple of pints out of this here trophy.”

Harman didn’t mess up the narrative by disclosing that his dad Eric is a dentist and that he himself was a 3.8 student in finance at Georgia, which is primo stuff even when you aren’t playing golf tournaments every weekend.

Not all major tournaments come down to a 10-footer amid a hush heard all over the world. Sometimes it’s a one-man show. A perfectly competent, but unheralded, player finds a short-cut and hides from the field. Louis Oosthuizen did it at St. Andrews in 2010. Shane Lowry did it at Royal Portrush in 2019. If golfers could figure out how and why that happens, they’d do it all the time.

“I don’t know why I haven’t won more often,” Harman said. Unlike Scottie Scheffler, who says his putting woes are a “made up story” by the diabolical media, Harman freely acknowledges his glitches.

“I’ve put a lot of work into this game. I’ve played a lot of good golf and at times, maybe I haven’t gotten enough credit. I just kept thinking there would be a week when it all came together. But this is definitely surreal.”

Later on Sunday, Harman’s victory echoed all the way to Truckee, Ca., at the Barracuda Championship. That’s the event that uses the Stableford scoring system, which was invented by a member of Royal Liverpool.

Patrick Rodgers was he best amateur in the world at one time, as Harman was, and he also has won PGA Tour money. But Rodgers has now played 246 tour events without a win. He seemed in control at Barracuda but got snipped in a playoff, when his drive nestled into a divot. He lost to Akshay Bhatia, 21, who turned pro when he was 17, is unmistakable with his glasses and his 6-foot-1, 130-pound scarecrow build, and is lefthanded like Harman. For the first time, two southpaws won PGA Tour events on the same day.

Back at Royal Liverpool, Scheffler finished 23rd, the first time in the 2022-23 season that the world’s top-ranked player hasn’t placed in the top 20. Rory McIlroy notched his 20th Top Ten finish in a major but hasn’t won any of the last 36. Tommy Fleetwood played beside Harman on Saturday, and some feared that the vibes from Fleetwood’s fans would subsume Harman. Instead Fleetwood retreated and wound up finishing tenth.

The leaderboard was largely devoid of LIV golfers, who might have missed the loudspeakers and the team concept. Instead, Harman demonstrated the depth and breadth of the PGA Tour, a place where any of the foot soldiers, at any time and place, can step out of formation and lead the parade.

“I remember thinking, ‘When is it going to be my turn again?’’’ said Harman, who knows it doesn’t work that way. Eventually you have to point your arrow at the sky. He did that on Sunday and, conveniently, no one was in front of him.