Brian Harman’s spicy 45-second interview delivers hidden lesson
Atotal of 15 golfers spoke with the press about their opening rounds at the RBC Heritage Thursday. At a tournament with 69 golfers, that’s plenty! Roughly 22 percent of the field. You had Ludvig Åberg after his sterling 66. You had Rory McIlroy fawning over Åberg’s round in the context of McIlroy’s own 67. You had Collin Morikawa (65) talking about that same secretive swing thought he had during Masters week.
The trend with that group was obvious: Everyone had played well. But there was one outlier among the interviewees. A pro who shot worse than 69 and still spoke: Brian Harman.
Harman had been four under through 16 holes, but finished bogey-double bogey for a one-under 70, coming a week after a back-nine 47 at Augusta National. It’s frustrating stuff. The kind of golf you don’t really care to talk about. But this is a golfer who grew up 30 miles away, in Savannah, made his Tour debut here 20 years ago and brought the Claret Jug to this part of the country just nine months ago. The player whom local media most care about. Harman clearly wasn’t in a chatty mood after his first round, but he came to the mic, anyway, and delivered 45 seconds of gold.
There’s a varied list of words that could be used to describe the interaction, depending on how you look at it: raw, spicy, brief, careless, annoyed, revealing. Chances are, you’ve never seen a 4-question interview wrap up in less than 45 seconds, but now you have! Bill Belichick would be proud. As a viewer, you’re free to be disappointed that a man who plays a game for a living would ever be that curt. Or you could critique the form of the questions. Can you walk us through that hole that has you extremely pissed off?
But let’s pause for a moment before doling out blame. We almost never see this side of the pro game. Most of the golfers on your TV are the ones playing well. Or the ones who normally play well. Åberg is thrilled with his form. It’s traveling everywhere. McIlroy is figuring things out, and “figuring things out” still looks like 67. Morikawa feels like he’s nearing the end of the tunnel.
Harman gave us a peek into what it feels like when you sloppily toss away an otherwise great round…and it’s dinner time…and you’re annoyed…and there’s probably nothing to fix with your game…and you’ve got somewhere to be, but someone wants you to explain your round first. That, my friends, is as relatable as pro golf gets. It’s authentic, and it might be exactly what the PGA Tour needs more of.
Dammit, this game is hard. And one of the enduring aspects of pro golf is that its leaders are concurrently just like us and also not like us at all. We play the same game and they play it impossibly better. But we also run through the same set of emotions doing it. It’s why Joel Dahmen’s “Full Swing” episodes — the first celebrating one of his highest peaks and the second diving into one of his lowest valleys — have been the show’s best. The good golf is fun but sometimes the bad golf is just as important.