“It helps a lot when you have arguably the best teacher telling you how good you are.”
So said Jimmy Walker a day after winning the Wanamaker Trophy as the 2016 PGA Champion.
Walker is a Butch Harmon project. He didn’t come to Butch with the resume of a Tiger Woods but he had the desire and Harmon saw something in him that he liked. “We gelled together,” Harmon said after Walker won his first major.
Ditto for Dustin Johnson. He was another “project.” Tons of talent but had the pronated left wrist at the top of his swing that many analysts regarded as a serious swing flaw.
Harmon let it be.
Harmon got enough polish on Johnson and got him interested in learning to play from 150-yards in and that paid dividends at the U.S. Open as Johnson won his first major championship.
Chalk up another one for Butch.
As Walker indicated, Harmon is arguably the best teacher in the game.
A good friend of DogLegNews who was once a Harmon student as an amateur, summed it up best:
“Butch was a player, so he understands that at the end of the day, you have to be able to put a number in a box on a card.”
And therein lies the essence of Butch Harmon. It’s not about analysis and more analysis, it’s about a player learning how to put a score on his card.
Low numbers in boxes. That is the essence of golf at the championship level.
Two more majors for Harmon’s students.
And yes, there is that former student, sitting around somewhere in Jupiter, probably wondering why he ever said adios to Butch.
