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ST. SIMONS ISLAND, Ga. – Scott Harrington has dealt with his share of difficult times as he’s chased his dream of playing on the game’s best circuit.
Since 2004, he kept trying to get to the PGA Tour but fell short each and every year. Tournaments on the Korn Ferry Tour and Mackenzie Tour in Canada started to stack up without a victory. Year after year without earning a PGA Tour card stacked up alongside.
But he kept at it.
Nothing, however, was more challenging than a battle he joined in 2017 when his wife, Jenn, was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. After nearly four months of chemotherapy, she was declared cancer-free that December.
But in May 2018, the cancer returned and she was put on an intense chemotherapy program for three months, followed by a bone marrow transplant. Harrington took the rest of the year off to be by her side.
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For the second time, Jenn kicked cancer’s butt and is now in her 13th month of remission.
“She’s doing great, thank you,” Harrington said.
He is as well.
After more than 200 events on the Korn Ferry and Mackenzie tours, Harrington finally earned his PGA Tour card by finishing in a tie for second in the Portland Open in August to be one of the top 25 on the Korn Ferry Tour money list.
At 39, he’s the oldest rookie on the PGA Tour this season.
In October, he tied for second in the Houston Open. On Thursday at Sea Island, he hit the front page of the leaderboard with a 5-under-par 65 on the Seaside Course in the first round of the RSM Classic at Sea Island Golf Club. He trails leader Webb Simpson, who shot 7-under 65 on the Plantation Course, and Cameron Tringale and K.H. Lee, who each shot 6-under 64 on Seaside.
Much of his good play, he said, is from the relief in knowing his wife is doing well. Still, she’s never far from his mind.
“Obviously we get pretty high anxiety when she gets her scans every six months to make sure everything is still gone,” he said. “But the relief when we’ve gotten the positive news has been huge and it definitely lets me kind of just focus on what I’m doing out here.”
The belief in himself he carries around is doing him wonders, too.
“I knew I could play out here and to be able to go out and do it (when he tied for second in Houston) is certainly validating and reaffirming,” he said. “I knew that my game set up well for this tour. But Houston was big for me. To be in contention in the final round, and there’s some really difficult shots down the stretch on that golf course. To pull them off the way I did on the back nine did give me a lot of confidence. It’s definitely something I can harken back on whenever I need to go in the memory bank.”
So are the memories from traveling all those back roads in professional golf.
“I love grinding, I love the struggles, I love the ups,” he said. “You have to love the digging out of the dirt. When things aren’t going so well, you have to be able to get some satisfaction out of trying to find it again.
“It can be a maddening game, as we all know, but I knew that my good golf was really at an elite level and I felt like that for a long time. My results were maybe not quite showing up on paper, but I knew that I was getting better. And I always felt that I would get to this level and once I got here, I would be able to stay here.”
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