It’s hard to be consistent in any sport, regardless of the level that you perform. It’s especially true in professional golf. While the greats are normally at the top of their game for extended years, not everyone is named Jack, Tiger, Arnie or Phil. During 2020 Collin Morakawa and Matthew Wolff graduated from college golf to major championship golf in just one year. Will this mark the start of something big or is it merely the repeat of the story that is currently playing out with Jordan Spieth and Rickie Fowler? It can be easy to fall off the pedestal and yet sometimes golfers are able to regain their past form and return to the top of their profession.
Current American Ryder Cup captain Steve Stricker is the poster boy for having it, losing it and regaining it. Stricker made it onto the PGA Tour in 1994 and by 1996 he was the fourth-leading money winner. He won the World Golf Match Play in 2001 and added the $1 million first-place check to his ever-growing bank account. Steve Stricker was a top-10 golfer in the era of Tiger, Phil, Vijay, Ernie and Padraig.
And then it went sideways, most notably his ball striking. Two years after the Match Play win, he was ranked 188th on tour. He was 151st in 2004 and 162nd in 2005. Stricker worked hard, went back to the basics and was the Comeback Player of the Year in 2006, finishing 34th on the money list. The 2007 season was even better as he was fourth on the money list and finished second in the Fed Ex Cup playoffs to Tiger. He won nine times during the course of the next five seasons. He was a Ryder Cup and Presidents Cup regular. He was the calm guy who was the amiable partner alongside Tiger Woods. Yes, Steve Stricker came back from the abyss.
They played the Tournament of Champions last week at the beautiful Kapalua Resort and the modern day version of Steve Stricker was a prominent member of the field. Harris English was there in Hawaii because he finished 12th in the Fed Ex Cup standings in 2020. He is very much under the radar although he had stellar amateur and collegiate careers, found immediate success on the PGA Tour, lost his game, and has climbed back onto center stage. Thank goodness for that final-hole birdie putt at Greensboro in August of 2019.
If there was ever a “can’t-miss” golfer of the last decade or so, it was Harris English. The 31-year-old English was born in Valdosta, Georgia, and took up the game at a young age. He started playing in regional junior tournaments throughout the southeastern portion of the United States. While he had loads of ability, he was also known for his bad temper on the course. As a 13-year-old, he actually forbade his parents from watching him play golf in those junior events. His parents had a sit-down talk with him shortly thereafter. They made demands regarding his on-course demeanor and went to the extent of having him watch videos of Davis Love III and Freddie Couples to demonstrate how to act and react on the course.
His parents also made the decision for Harris to attend Baylor High School in Chattanooga, a school noted for its top-notch golf program. His mom would set up a second home with him and dad would visit on weekends. Baylor would win four Tennessee state titles during his time there and Harris would win the individual state title once in 2005. He received a scholarship offer to play at the University of Georgia, a top-five college golf program. Upon his high school graduation, the family relocated back to Valdosta.
English was an impact player for Georgia, won the Georgia State Amateur in 2007, and captured the prestigious Southern Amateur in 2011. During his senior year of 2011, English would find himself in the final match against Augusta State’s Patrick Reed for a winner-take-all team title in the NCAA Championships. He lost that match to Reed and Georgia finished second in the NCAAs that year. Knowing that he would be on the 2011 Walker Cup team alongside Jordan Spieth, Patrick Cantlay, Russell Henley and Patrick Rodgers among others, Harris played a few Nationwide Tour events that summer and shocked the golfing world by winning the tourney in Columbus, Ohio. He turned pro late in 2011 and got his PGA Tour card in 2012.
English’s rookie season was a success as he made 22 of 27 cuts and had three top 10s. He won the Memphis St. Jude in the summer of 2013 and followed it up with a win at Mayacoba at the start of the 2013-14 wraparound season that autumn. And then the slow demise began.
In 2016, Harris was ranked 47th on tour. In 2017. he fell to 118th. In 2018, he was the last exempt golfer on tour. He finished 125th in Fed Ex Cup points. He played in the final regular tour event in 2019 at Greensboro. He went into Greensboro ranked 156th, played decently, and birdied the final hole on Sunday to end up 149th on tour. He was no longer exempt, but he could get into secondary tournaments because he was ranked within the top 150.
In the fall of 2019, English played in six tourneys and finished in the top 10 on four different occasions. He was able to get into more events and kept gathering momentum. He played well in the Fed Ex Cup playoffs and ended up in 12th place last September in the final Fed Ex Cup rankings. He had gone from needing to make a birdie putt at Greensboro to just survive to punching his ticket for the majors and the World Golf Championships. He finished fourth in the 2020 U.S. Open at Winged Foot. The final icing on the cake occurred this weekend when Harris spent four days atop the leader board at the Tournament of Champions at Kapalua, won a sudden-death playoff with a birdie, and won his first tour event in seven seasons.
The key to Harris English’s resurgence has been his work with instructor Justin Parsons of St. Simons Island, Georgia. Parsons got English to focus upon “going back to what you did well.” His main game improvement was with his iron play. His strokes gained on approach shots went from 168th in 2018 and from 171st in 2019 to 20th last year. He was hitting more greens as well as hitting those shots closer to the flagstick. Indicative of his renewed play was his final iron shot in regulation Sunday that set up a two-putt birdie for English to get into the playoff.
I’m not telling you anything new when I say golf is a tough game. Sometimes you get lost and it goes away. Fortunately for Harris English, he has found his way back among the game’s elite.
