HOYLAKE, England — When Brian Harman missed the cut at the Masters in April, he blew off steam over the weekend by hunting for turkeys and pigs. Harman’s prowess with a bow and arrow drew the following question from a reporter on Friday: I take it the sheep and the cows are safe around here at the moment, are they?
“Sheep don’t taste as good as the turkeys do, I would imagine,” he said.
Harman, 36, is hunting for one thing and one thing only this week – a Claret Jug, the prize awarded to the Champion Golfer of the Year – and through 36 holes, the Georgia grad is doing it better than anyone else. On a sunny Friday with the wind blowing gently off the Dee Estuary, Harman carded four straight birdies starting at the second hole and capped off his 6-under 65 at Royal Liverpool with a 15-foot eagle at the last. It gave him a five-stroke lead over England’s Tommy Fleetwood, who shot 71. Harman improved to 10-under 132, matching the lowest 36-hole score in British Open history, a mark previously set by Tiger Woods in 2006 and tied by Rory McIlroy in 2014. Both of those 36-hole leaders posted their record-low figure at Royal Liverpool, too, and went on to victory.
Open Championship 2023: Leaderboard, tee times, hole-by-hole
“I’ve had a hot putter the last couple days so try to ride it through the weekend,” said Harman, who used his short stick just 49 times. “Thirty-six holes to go, so try to rest up and get ready.”
Harman made his British Open debut here in 2014, qualifying at the 11th hour by winning his first PGA Tour title at the John Deere Classic the Sunday before the championship.
“Had the 4:45 tee time on Friday, finished at 10:15, made the cut, loved the golf,” he said.
But then he packed his bags early in his next four trips across the pond for the major and couldn’t figure out why his game didn’t translate here. He finished T-19 in 2021 but after a slow start last year, he wondered, “Golly, I love coming over here but I’m getting my teeth kicked in.” He rallied to finish T-6 at St. Andrews and that gave him confidence. He played well the rest of the season, just missing a spot on the U.S. Presidents Cup and had two runner-up finishes in the fall.
“Then I just hit this odd sort of wall at the beginning of the year and I couldn’t claw my way out of it. Just kind of doubled down on my process and started playing some really good golf here of late,” said Harman, who also noted that his putter spent some time on double-secret probation. “There was a time middle of this year to where we were seriously thinking about going to the bullpen and pulling out something different. It’s been a good putter, but she’s been misbehaving a lot this year. Last few weeks I found a little something on the greens that I felt like gave me a little better roll.”
Prodigious.
Brian Harman signs off with an eagle for a superb 65.
He leads by five shots. pic.twitter.com/a3u2j36SGn
— The Open (@TheOpen) July 21, 2023
Harman, who plays left-handed but does everything else right-handed, has been a top-10 machine – 29 since the start of the 2017-18 PGA Tour season, the most of any player without a win in that span – but hasn’t won since the 2017 Wells Fargo Championship. Asked why he hasn’t won more, Harman said he wasn’t sure.
“I think about it a lot, obviously. I’m around the lead a bunch. It’s been hard to stay patient,” he said. “I felt that after I won the tournament and had the really good chance at the U.S. Open in 2017 that I would probably pop a few more off, and it just hasn’t happened. I’ve been right there, and it just hasn’t happened. I don’t know. I don’t know why it hasn’t happened, but I’m not going to quit.”
His caddie, Scott Tway, the brother of major winner Bob Tway, echoed that sentiment.
“That’s a good question,” he said. “I don’t know. Maybe that is going to change.”
Harman had one good chance to win a major, holding the 54-hole lead at Erin Hills in 2017. Brooks Koepka vaulted by him to claim that title and Tway called it “a heartbreaker” for Harman, but said if he learned anything it was that he can do it.
“When I held the 54-hole lead at the U.S. Open, I just probably thought about it too much,” Harman said. “Just didn’t focus on getting sleep and eating right. So that would be my focus this weekend.”
Harman’s eagle at the last lifted his lead to five over Fleetwood, six over Austria’s Sepp Straka (67) and seven over a trio of players including former major winner Jason Day.
“I made probably my two best swings of the day,” Harman said of his driver-5-iron to 15 feet.
That lifted him to double digits and the largest lead lead at the British Open since Louis Oosthuizen in 2010. Harman became the ninth player in the last 40 years to hold a 36-hole lead of five strokes or more in a major championship; each of the previous eight went on to win. But Harman is winless the five previous times he’d held the 36-hole lead or co-lead on Tour.
“This could be a serious moment for him,” said three-time British Open champion Nick Faldo, who was commentating on Peacock. “He’s got to live with that. Suddenly, that big of a lead? It puts a lot of expectations on your shoulders.”
And it means the hunter is going to be the hunted. For someone who loves the strategy involved in hunting, Harman likely knows that over the weekend his biggest challenge may not be the forecasted wet weather but rather to stay in the present.
“I have a very active mind,” Harman said. “It’s hard for me. I’ve always struggled with trying to predict the future and trying to forecast what’s going to happen. I’ve just tried to get really comfortable just not knowing.”
