Brian Harman skipped football practice one day when he was 11 years old. His mother, Nancy, drove him from their home in Savannah, Georgia, to Sea Island, where he took an hour-long lesson from Jack Lumpkin, a fixture on every list of top golf instructors. Growing up on a golf course, Harman had picked up the game on his own, but he wanted to find out what one of the best teachers thought of his ability.
“He didn’t tell me to get lost,” Harman said. “He told me I was doing well and come back in a few months and he’d check me again. For me, that was like a rite of passage. I started going once every six months, and our relationship just grew from there.”
That initial lesson was equally as meaningful for Lumpkin, who knew talent when he’d seen it and from Harman’s very first swing knew he’d seen something special.
“There was no doubt in my mind that he was going to be a Tour player if he was inclined to do that,” Lumpkin remembered. “After that first lesson, I couldn’t wait to see him again. I used to wait to see his name in my lesson book because I just knew how good he was going to be.”
All these years later, Harman, 32, and Lumpkin, 84, are still together. Their hard work has made Harman a two-time PGA Tour winner, most recently at the 2017 Wells Fargo Championship.
“Jack is Brian’s safety net,” said World Golf Hall of Fame member Davis Love III, a fellow Lumpkin student. “He’s like ordering your favorite comfort food at a restaurant.”
Lumpkin played on the PGA Tour in 1958-59, but he was married and had two young kids to think about and accepted a position as an assistant golf professional. He learned the ropes under Masters champion Claude Harmon, father of Butch, at Winged Foot, and was head professional in 1968 at Oak Hill Country Club when it hosted the U.S. Open.
Lumpkin moved back to his native Georgia and, in 1976, joined the Golf Digest Schools with the likes of Jim Flick, Davis Love Jr. and Bob Toski. He came to Sea Island Resort as its director of instruction on Jan. 1, 1989, seven weeks after Love Jr., his best friend, died in a plane crash.
Lumpkin, the PGA Professional of the Year in 1995, is the type of pro who has forgotten more than most instructors know. Harman describes him as “old-school,” while embracing the latest technology such as V1 Golf, a swing analysis tool, Swing Catalyst, and TrackMan launch monitors for dialing in performance, but never as a crutch.
When Harman won his first PGA Tour title at the 2014 John Deere Classic, Lumpkin was one of the first people he thanked. Their work together has a certain rhythm that Lumpkin calls “guided discovery.” Rather than spoon-feeding a swing fix to Harman, Lumpkin has a habit of subtly mentioning how he likes a move made by a certain player. That player’s swing may just so happen to be on the screen in Lumpkin’s office for them to review.
“Then he lets me figure it out until it becomes second nature and I own it,” Harman said.
Driver salute
Harman is among the most accurate drivers on the PGA Tour. One of his go-to drills is to tee up 28 balls in a straight line 6 inches apart and grip it and rip it machine-gun style until he’s hit them all. Why 28 balls?
“You only hit at most 14 drives in 18 holes,” Lumpkin said. “I make him play 36 holes.”
For Harman, the benefit of this drill is simple.
“I’ve gotten more technical as I’ve gotten older. I used to be all athletic and natural and swing like there were no consequences,” Harman said. “This drill gets me back into that mindset. It’s more about getting into a rhythm and see how many in a row we can hit into the fairway.”
Sometimes, they take this drill to the next level and Lumpkin has Harman run 150 yards to another tee where 36 balls are waiting for him to hit second shots at various targets. Lumpkin will call out a scenario: “It’s a par 5, you’ve got 260 to the green, the flag’s on the left over there, keep it to the right. Let me see you get there.”
“In less than 20 minutes, we have played the equivalent of all the shots he’d play in 36 holes,” Lumpkin said. “It’s been very helpful to him because you have to be repetitive. The purpose of the drill is to get him so comfortable with his driving that he doesn’t even have to think about it.”
Dialing in the wedges
Harman has placed an emphasis on improving his wedge game after noticing he struggled from 50 to 125 yards. He’s ranked outside the top 100 in the category for several years, including No. 146 last season and No. 180 from that distance out of the rough.
“Wedges are about feel, and mine wasn’t good,” Harman said. “It was just due to a lack of work and a lack of a plan. We put a better plan in place. It’s definitely helping.”
To work on Harman’s distance control with partial wedges, Lumpkin has his student hit three shots with the same club (sand wedge, for instance) to three different distances (80, 90, 100 yards). Then he hits three shots from the same distance (90 yards) with three different clubs: lob wedge, sand wedge and gap wedge.
“If he can control the trajectory, the distance and the spin on the practice tee, he can do it on the course,” Lumpkin said. “I also will call out for him to leave it short of the hole or to the right or left of the hole. When you’re playing a wedge from 90 yards, you ought to be thinking about the putt you want to knock in.”
These days Harman checks the distance with TrackMan, but Lumpkin used to lay out towels at 10-yard increments starting at 90 yards – a low-tech version that still works – and make Harman announce which towel he was going to land his shot on before he hit. So far, so good this season but still room for improvement – Harman ranks No. 67 in approaches from 50-125 yards and No. 146 from the rough (as of March 2).
Under-the-wire trajectory drill
Lumpkin likes to have inexperienced players chip over a wire or rope to understand how to use the loft and bounce of a wedge. For a player of Harman’s talents, he sets up two stakes and a rope at various heights to create a mental image and asks him to hit under and over it to work on his trajectory.
“I want him to picture a window and try to hit it through the different slots in the window, high and low,” Lumpkin said.
To hit it lower, Harman creeps the ball back in his stance and tries to hit down at a slightly steeper angle.
“I’m not trying to stick it into the ground. I just want to cover it with the whole face,” he said. “If I want to hit it higher, I’ll move the ball forward and try to clip the grass and my divot will be shallower.”
Lumpkin’s real test is to see if Harman can hit the rope on the fly. After he did it three times in a row, Lumpkin gushed, “It’s amazing how he can do it every dang time. That tells me he can hit it the trajectory he wants to on command. This drill is another example of how everything we do is geared towards playing golf – unless he has a problem with his swing and then we work on it.”
The quarter putting drill
Harman has used variations of similar drills almost since the day he took his first lesson from Lumpkin. One of those putting drills is to drop a quarter at the high point of the break for a given putt.
“It gives me something to focus on,” Harman said. “I’m always trying to reinvent things on the putting green because I’m either missing short or missing low, so I’ll try to make a drill to tailor it to what I’m doing. Lately I’ve been missing low, and the coin helps me look at the upper end of the line so I play more break.”
Harman also likes to place a tee at the spot where he wants the ball to enter the cup and see if he can hit it. This drill helps him develop laser-focus on hitting a pinpoint spot. Even if he doesn’t hit the tee every time, he finds he makes more putts in the process.
