HOYLAKE, England — More than a dozen years later, Georgia men’s golf coach Chris Haack still remembers what Brian Harman said to him as he walked off the 15th hole at the Inverness Club in Toledo, Ohio.
Harman, a senior and the Bulldogs’ top player, was battling Rickie Fowler in a back-and-forth match that would decide which team would advance to the semifinals of the 2009 NCAA championship.
On the 15th hole, Fowler two-putted for par. Harman had to make an 8-footer to remain 1 down in the match. He drained the putt. When Harman looked up, he noticed that Fowler and Oklahoma State Cowboys coach Mike McGraw were already walking toward the 16th tee box, leaving him to walk back across the green to retrieve the pin.
“That just fries me,” Harman told Haack as he walked off the 15th green. “I’m about to whip his ass.”
Both players made birdie putts outside 15 feet on the 16th hole. On the 17th, Harman made another birdie, while Fowler’s try lipped out. On the 18th, Fowler hit his approach shot to about 30 feet. Harman’s ball landed 8 feet from the hole. Fowler missed his birdie attempt, and Harman sank his for a third straight birdie to win the match.
“That was one of the best matches I’ve ever seen,” said PGA Tour player Harris English, one of Harman’s teammates at Georgia. “I wish it had been on TV or someone had a video of it. He found something to piss him off, and a pissed-off Brian Harman is nobody you want to mess with on the golf course.”
While Harman might have stunned the golf world by capturing the 151st Open Championship at Royal Liverpool Golf Club on Sunday, Haack, English and others who have known him since his junior golf and college days had been waiting for him to win something big. They probably didn’t think he would finish 13 under and win the Claret Jug by 6 strokes, which tied for the second-largest margin of victory by an American golfer in the storied tournament’s history. Tiger Woods won by 8 at St. Andrews in Scotland in 2000.
“He had such a great pedigree,” Haack said of Harman. “He was always a great player and very competitive. But I think the one thing that has eluded him was just getting to the winner’s circle probably a lot more times than he would have liked. He’s certainly put himself in contention with all those top-10s.
“This is more of what I thought I might see at some point. I think as he has gotten older and wiser, he is probably playing smarter and seemed to have a good game plan all week.”
An English fan delivered Harman the motivation he needed during Saturday’s third round. After Harman made bogeys on two of the first four holes, the man told him, “Harman, you don’t have the stones for this.”
“That helped,” Harman said.
In Sunday’s final round, he had bogeys on two of the first five holes and his lead was reduced to 3. But then he made back-to-back birdies and added two more on the back nine.
“He’s always had a chip on his shoulder, absolutely,” PGA Tour player J.T. Poston said. “That’s what makes him good. He just goes out there and he’s like, ‘I don’t care how I’m going to do it, but I’m going to beat you.'”
Harman, 36, is only the third left-handed player to win The Open, joining Bob Charles (1963) and Phil Mickelson (2013).
Growing up on a golf course in Savannah, Georgia, Harman dreamed of winning not The Open but a green jacket at Augusta National Golf Club.
“You grow up in Georgia, it’s all the Masters,” Harman said. “It’s proximity. But I came here and I was like, ‘Wow, man, this is unbelievable.’ The fans are incredible. Everyone understands golf over here. It was just a delight to play.”
Harman’s father was a dentist, his mother a chemist. Neither was a golfer. After Harman started playing the game with other kids, he persuaded his mother to take him to see legendary instructor Jack Lumpkin, the director of instruction at Sea Island Resort on the Georgia coast. Lumpkin, who had learned under Claude Harmon (Butch’s father), liked what he saw from the 11-year-old. He told him to come back every six months.
The first time Sea Island resident Davis Love III saw Harman play, he was throwing clubs in a junior tournament. PGA Tour pro Brendon Todd, his teammate at Georgia, remembers competing against him in a junior tournament in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Todd was 17 and two years older than Harman.
“He was the most talented, angry kid I’d seen that point,” Todd said. “I remember walking off the golf course being like, ‘If that guy can just calm down a little bit, he’s going to be out-of-this-world good. He was just a stud.”
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