ROME — Brian Harman remembers all the phone calls from Team USA captains, breaking the news that he hadn’t made the team. There was one from Jim Furyk in 2018 ahead of the Ryder Cup in Paris. Harman was heartbroken but he also understood.
“I wouldn’t have picked me either,” he said.
Steve Stricker called in 2021 ahead of the Ryder Cup at Whistling Straits and while Harman thought he had a more legitimate chance to make that team, he understood that he hadn’t done enough to make himself stand out. More disappointment last year when he failed to make the U.S. Presidents Cup team led by his good friend Davis Love III.
“I’ve never not gotten picked, and felt like I truly deserved a spot,” he said.
He removed any question of doubt this year when he won the British Open in resounding fashion, his first victory on the PGA Tour since 2017, and earned an automatic selection to Zach Johnson’s Ryder Cup team. At age 36, Harman is at once both the oldest player on Team USA and a Ryder Cup rookie. Johnson, for one, always has recognized something of himself in Harman, his St. Simons Island, Georgia, neighbor.
“He is a bulldog and he is feisty,” Johnson said. “Just tough, relentless, gritty and he wants his back against the wall. So I don’t know how he’s going to play in the Ryder Cup, but I’d be willing to bet that the best of Brian Harman probably will come out at some point during that week.”
Harman had a decorated junior and amateur career and proved his mettle beating Rickie Fowler in match play at the 2009 NCAA Championship.
“We’ve never talked about that match,” Harman said during his Wednesday pre-Ryder Cup press conference. “We were college kids. I was trying to beat him; he was trying to beat me. I got the better of him that day. He’s had an incredible career. I’ve done OK.”
As an AT&T commercial put it, just OK is not OK. Harman had won just two times in more than 300 Tour starts before capturing the Claret Jug and earning the moniker of Champion Golfer of the Year. His failure to live up to his hype began to weigh on him.
“If I’m being honest, I was embarrassed,” Harman told The Athletic. “I was embarrassed by my career.”
But winning the British changes the way his career is looked at by fans, media, his peers and by himself. He was tabbed “Brian the Butcher” by the British tabloids, in part for his fondness for hunting and the way he skewered the field. He chuckled at the nickname so much so that his wife threw him a Brian the Butcher theme.
“We had T-shirts, golf balls, and one of the rotating cameras where you can hold a Brian the Butcher picture up and take pictures. It was fun,” he said.
But hunting has taken a back seat to prepping for the Ryder Cup. He’s waited a long time for this chance. He accepts the fact that he likely will be heckled again as he was at the British Open, where the local faithful were rooting a little too hard and openly for England’s Tommy Fleetwood to come out on top. Harman proved he can handle the big moments and said the naysayers only fueled his fire to win. But even he knows that being in the crucible of Ryder Cup competition is a new frontier for him.
“It’s kind of like if you’re trying to give someone advice if they’re about to have their first child,” he said. “There’s nothing you can tell them to get them ready for it. No, your life is going to change, it’s going to be really hard, but you’ll get through it. There’s lots of people that have done it, and it’s up to you how you handle it.”
Brooks Koepka is another one who admires the way Harman plays with a chip on his shoulder.
“I just love that. Never gives up. Always battling to the end and ready to prove people wrong,” Koepka said.
He has already proven that his career is nothing to be embarrassed about.
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