In life and in death, Jack Lumpkin guided Brian Harman to major triumph

Editor's note: This article originally ran on Aug. 21, 2023.

Brian Harman had done his best to keep sentimentality at bay for the past two days at Royal Liverpool Golf Club. Even with a large lead, the course was too tough, the field too good, the weather too fickle and the finish line too far for such indulgences.

But it was now late Sunday and Harman had proven that the only thing tougher than the elements was Harman himself. When his 40-foot birdie putt at No. 14 went down – giving him a five-shot lead with four holes remaining in The Open Championship – Harman allowed himself the briefest of leniencies. He thought about the man who guided him towards this moment, who had given him his first golf lesson and been his instructor for more than two decades. The man who he considered a second father and shaped far more than his swing. The man whom he had eulogized a year earlier.

“I thought about him right then,” Harman said weeks later. “Man, I know he’s watching. I know he sees this. But I sure wish I could share it with him.”

Brian Harman was 11 years old when he took his first golf lesson from Jack Lumpkin. He’d recently begun playing and immediately became transfixed by the sport. He read every golf magazine and book he could find, and quickly learned that the man who taught the great Davis Love III was giving lessons in Sea Island, Georgia, just 90 miles south of Harman’s hometown of Savannah. Harman begged his parents for that first lesson, and when they finally relented, he swung nervously in front of a man he called “golf royalty.”

Harman skipped football practice to make that first trip to Sea Island. He had to run laps the next day as punishment. It was a small price to pay because Lumpkin became the foundation for Harman’s future success.

Harman’s parents had no experience in the game, and so it was Lumpkin who helped him become the best amateur in the world and then guided him through the inevitable hardships, from failed Q-School attempts to winless seasons and disappointing finishes. Lumpkin helped Harman endure the pressure of unmet expectations, and that patience was rewarded at Royal Liverpool.

“I think a lot of my resiliency and grit comes from him, just knowing that he was always first to say, ‘Don't let these bigger guys get to you. Don't let them intimidate you. You need to be mean. You need to be fierce. And you can't ever quit,’" the 5-foot-6 Harman said. “I always took that to heart.”

Harman surprised the golf world with his performance at The Open Championship this year. A man with two wins in a decade on TOUR – and just two top-10s in majors -- never wavered, even when he was heckled while playing alongside local favorite Tommy Fleetwood, or when the likes of Jon Rahm, Rory McIlroy and Jason Day appeared on the leaderboard.

Harman proved steadfast. He led by five after both the second and third rounds and won by six. The former teen phenom, who made his first PGA TOUR cut while still in high school, finally had his long-awaited major at age 36. And it was a testament to the tutelage of his genteel mentor. It was Lumpkin who showed the fiery Harman the importance of not letting emotions override sound decision-making.

“It was something he always tried to instill in me, something I was never very good at,” Harman said. “Maybe he was right there with me. … I felt like I did a really good job of that (at The Open).”

Now, after finishing T5 at last week’s BMW Championship, Harman returns to his native state to cap off the best season of his career with the TOUR Championship at Atlanta’s East Lake Golf Club. Harman arrives ranked eighth in the FedExCup, with his first Ryder Cup appearance just weeks away.

Lumpkin was the rare pro who competed against Ben Hogan and taught with a TrackMan. In addition to a long and distinguished teaching career, he played in three U.S. Opens and one PGA Championship.

Lumpkin was an assistant at Winged Foot Golf Club under the legendary Claude Harmon, the winner of the 1948 Masters who was buddies with Hogan and spawned another generation of successful pros, both from his own sons (including Claude Jr., better known as Butch) and his former assistants. Lumpkin became the head professional at Oak Hill Country Club in Rochester, New York, serving as the host pro for the 1968 U.S. Open, before returning to the Southeast. He became part of Golf Digest’s staff in 1979.

“No matter what I find him doing, he always is at peace with himself,” the longtime Atlanta golf writer Furman Bisher wrote about Lumpkin before the ’68 Open.

Lumpkin became Sea Island’s director of instruction after Love’s father, Davis Love Jr., died in a November 1988 plane crash. Lumpkin stayed at Sea Island for more than three decades, earning the 1995 PGA National Teacher of the Year Award and annually being named a top-50 teacher in America. He coached Love III to his lone major victory at the 1997 PGA Championship. Harman started taking lessons from Lumpkin a year later.

Lumpkin passed away on Feb. 11, 2022. He was still teaching golf on his last day.

When it came time to remember his longtime instructor, Harman displayed a mettle similar to what a wider audience observed at Royal Liverpool.

“You’re a hell of a lot tougher than me,” Love recalls telling Harman about stepping to the podium for Lumpkin’s funeral at St. Simons United Methodist Church.

Harman was the first to deliver a eulogy at the service, after the familiar hymns “Amazing Grace” and “How Great Thou Art” were sung, along with a reading of Psalm 23 (“The Lord is my Shepherd”).

“His care, his love for Jack was clearly evident that day,” said Justin Parsons, who has coached Harman since 2019 (alongside Lumpkin until his passing).

Harman said delivering that speech was one of the most difficult things he’s ever done, but he made the crowd laugh by telling of Lumpkin’s affinity for gadgets (like the high-tech binoculars Lumpkin used to watch Harman at his first Masters) and doing an impression of Lumpkin’s high-pitched drawl.

To illustrate Lumpkin’s loyalty, Harman read a supportive text his coach had sent after a recent missed cut (“Let’s keep after it,” the message concluded). The words mostly came unencumbered. Harman shook his head briskly from side to side – or brought his fist to his mouth – only a couple times to keep his emotions from spilling out.

Harman had to wipe away a tear, however, when he discussed his final years alongside his beloved teacher, after Lumpkin survived a health scare in 2014. Harman and Love rushed to the hospital, thinking they would be saying goodbye. But, as Harman retold, when Lumpkin opened his eyes and saw two of his students at his bedside, he immediately started discussing the golf grip. Lumpkin survived, and he was alongside Harman at his Masters debut months later.

“I got to tell Jack all the things I thought I would never get to say,” Harman said in his eulogy. “Jack, I love you. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your patience. Your lessons made me a better golfer. More importantly, knowing you made me a better person and a better father.

“I will never take for granted the time we spent together. You are the purest form of the word ‘professional.’ I owe you so much.”

Harman and Lumpkin only met a couple times per year in the beginning. Lumpkin didn’t want the young pupil to become too reliant on an instructor. Harman believes it was a test, as well. Lumpkin wanted to see that Harman would put in the work between lessons.

He quickly recognized Harman’s potential. Craig Allan had just begun working at Sea Island Resort when Lumpkin called Allan into his office. On the screen was a tiny 11-year-old, draped in an oversized cotton polo.

“I want to show you one of the most talented players I’ve ever seen,” Allan, now the director of Sea Island’s Golf Performance Center, recalls Lumpkin saying.

Even after Harman’s first lesson, Lumpkin began telling people that Harman had the potential to play the PGA TOUR.

“Jack was always talking about Brian,” said Love.

Six years after picking up the game, Harman won the 2003 U.S. Junior Amateur. A year later, he was the tournament’s medalist by eight shots. He was the American Junior Golf Association’s Player of the Year in 2003 and 2004. The only players to win that award multiple times in the prior 20 years were Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson.

Harman was 17 when he made the cut at the 2004 Travelers Championship, young enough that he referred to his playing partners as “mister.” He was the No. 1-ranked amateur in the world, and in 2005 he became the youngest player to ever represent the United States in the Walker Cup.

Lumpkin was the first person that Harman called after he committed to the University of Georgia. Lumpkin, the son of a former Georgia football captain and coach, starred for the Bulldogs a half-century earlier. He was co-captain on the Georgia team that won the 1957 SEC Golf Championship.

“Brian wanted it really bad, and a coach always wants somebody who wants it as bad as you want it for them,” said Lumpkin’s daughter, Sandy LaBauve, a top-100 teacher in her own right. The Lumpkins were the National Golf Foundation’s Golf Family of the Year in 2000. Jack’s son, Jay, won the 1987 PGA Professional National Championship.

The family patriarch didn’t just teach mechanics but also on-course strategy and tournament preparation.

“It wasn’t just ‘build a better golf swing,’” LaBauve said. “It was ‘build a better player.’”

Harman and Lumpkin had contrasting personalities – “I’d like to think a little bit of his grace might have rubbed off on me,” Harman says now – but shared a love for the game and an old-school “dig it out of the dirt” mentality. Harman arrived at Sea Island’s driving range one day to find 40 balls teed up in a line. He had been struggling, and his instructor had concocted a potential remedy (or punishment).

Harman had to hit each ball as fast as he could, then run to the other side of the range, from where he needed to hit shots with his 4-iron. Harman remembers Lumpkin “laughing like a hyena” as he trailed in a golf cart. The drill was intended to simulate stressful situations, to teach Harman to hit shots with a racing heart.

This wasn’t one of their early lessons, when Harman was just a boy. This happened a few years ago, after Harman had already won on TOUR and earned millions of dollars. He still hears about it from his fellow pros at Sea Island.

“Jack thought it might work,” Harman said, “so I tried it.”

The weekend before his first PGA TOUR victory, at the 2014 John Deere Classic, Harman made the 10-hour drive from The Greenbrier in West Virginia back to Sea Island. He’d just missed his second consecutive cut, shooting 7 over in those four rounds, and needed to see Lumpkin.

The fix was rather simple, just a tweak to his alignment, but it was all he needed.

“It looked really good on camera, … and just gave me a little bit of confidence,” Harman said in his press conference after shooting 63-68-65-66 to win by one over local favorite Zach Johnson, who’d won the tournament two years earlier and finished runner-up the next.

Harman still finds scraps of paper with Lumpkin’s notes and doodles on them. Lumpkin used anecdotes about the game’s legends to emphasize his lessons. He told Harman about the time Hogan slowly disassembled a disobedient putter in the privacy of a locker room, reserving his anger for after the round instead of in front of the gallery (“Now Brian, that was premeditated murder,” Harman remembers Lumpkin saying).

Lumpkin was constantly devising homemade training aids, like the helmet with a stick attached so he could guide students’ heads without getting hit by the club.

“He’d have brooms and baseball bats and doorstops for you to stand on,” said Love. “All kinds of ways to get you to feel what he wanted you to feel without tearing down your golf swing or getting too mechanical.”

Allan uses the words “humble” and “legend” to describe Lumpkin, wishing that he was mentioned more often among golf’s greatest teachers. Lumpkin knew Harman’s swing so well that he could describe what Harman’s club was doing at impact before someone could read off the launch monitor’s numbers.

“Brian’s very confident and headstrong,” Love said, “but … he held Jack in such high regard that Jack could tell him what to do and Brian would do it.”

That regard remained unwavering, even when Harman’s pro career didn’t begin the way they anticipated or the wins didn’t come as often as expected.

Harman failed to get out of Q-School’s first stage in each of his first two attempts, consigned to the mini-tours for two years. He drove a 10-year-old Ford F150 around the Southeast, eating turkey sandwiches for breakfast and Wendy’s for dinner. He made it through the 2011 Q-School to get his TOUR card for the following season.

He has kept his card every year since but has also endured years between his three wins: the 2014 John Deere Classic, 2017 Wells Fargo Championship and this year’s Open Championship.

“He always tried to lead me to believe in myself a little bit more,” Harman said of Lumpkin.

Harman said he misses his old instructor all the time, but especially during difficult times like when he missed the cut in seven of 10 stroke-play starts earlier this year.

“I wonder what he would have said,” Harman said, “or try to envision what his advice would be, because he always seemed to have a way of putting stuff in perspective.”

In his eulogy, Harman talked about one situation where he would have sought Lumpkin’s counsel. He needed help naming his third child, a son, who was due to be born later that year. He envisioned Lumpkin telling him to name the boy after someone he respected, someone he wanted his son to emulate.

Like at The Open, Harman authored a perfect ending. He told the crowd that his third child was going to be named Jack. And what will he tell his son when he asks about the origin of his name?

“He’s got a lot to live up to,” Harman said.