With Brian Harman sitting five strokes clear at the top of the leaderboard early Saturday morning, many UK golf fans were finally forced to learn who the hell Brian Harman is. He’s a lefty. He looks like a former Australian cricket captain.
He went to “university” in Georgia, whose mascot just so happens to be an English bulldog. All of this is quickly and easily established, but the Daily Mirror, in their great journalistic duty to the hardworking men and women of the United Kingdom, dug a little bit deeper. They peeled back the layers of the onion and turned every stone, and when fans shuffled out to their front stoops in their pyjamas, they found this all-time headline waiting for them:
Apparently this is what a journalism degree from Oxford gets you: AC/DC puns about a golfer’s hunting hobby. Sure, the English drive on the wrong side of the road and drink tea instead of coffee, but this is one thing they clearly got right.
In addition to being the best (only?) Brian Harman-related headline in sports history, it’s also a fascinating cultural nugget. Apparently hunting is seen as a strange, macabre hobby in a country that used to chase down and kill foxes with packs of dogs. Go figure.
Unfortunately for Harman, the headline did not prove indicative of his play on Saturday. Instead he found himself as the hunted not the hunter as the leaderboard tightened up. That’s good news for golf fans, who have a star-studded Sunday shaping up, but bad news for the headline writers back in London.
