SAN ANTONIO, Tx. — When Brian Harman got to the range Sunday, the scene looked more like a ski resort than a golf tournament.
Players wore stocking caps. Caddies wore hoods. Layered-up spectators at the Valero Texas Open wore knit gloves and grim smiles and flushed cheeks. It was barely 50 degrees. (Feels-like temperature: 42.) It was howling like a snowblower.
“Harman!” a fan shouted as the leader walked to the first tee, hands in pockets. “Texas loves ya!”
It was the tough kind of day. It was also the kind that’s true.
Harman won his fourth career PGA TOUR title on a black-diamond afternoon at TPC San Antonio and his first since 2023 at The Open Championship, a tournament known for its merciless conditions. As he did then at Royal Liverpool, Harman accepted the vagaries of playing golf in chapping winds and other climatic influences beyond his control.
He called score “a relative thing” and described the final round as a “game of attrition” that he managed to survive.
“The conditions just wouldn’t allow for a super low score,” Harman said.
He didn’t need super low. He needed solid. Above all, he needed to maintain a clear head in the chaos to claim 500 FedExCup points and some good memories to take to the Masters. The 38-year-old Georgian, ranked No. 49 in the world before his win, shot a gritty 3-over 75, the highest final-round score this season for a winner, nudging the 73 by Harris English at the Farmers Insurance Open. Between Harman, Andrew Novak and Tom Hoge, the final grouping at the Valero was 11-over par.
Harman beat runner-up Ryan Gerard by three shots to finish at 9-under 279 with rounds of 66-66-72-75. The first two days were that easy. The second two were that hard. Sunday was the worst. The average score soared to 74.8. Only nine players broke par. Two players, Patrick Fishburn and Thorbjørn Olesen, somehow shot 4-under 68. Both of them finished with a share of fifth.
Harman said Saturday that he knew the chasers would chase.
“They’re hungry,” he said. “They’re coming.”
And there they were, bundled up on the practice tee, as the last starting time approached. After a brisk warmup that included five drivers from the turf, Harman eased into his round with a par on the 454-yard first, a par-4 hole that played more than half a stroke over par, even with the aid of the wind. Harman birdied the par-5 second. He was making it look easy, even through the daunting par-3 third that played downwind, entirely over water. He made another par there.
Then easy became hard. Harman first encountered distress on the par-4 fourth hole, where he made bogey after missing one of eight greens in regulation Sunday. His three-shot lead shriveled to two. Two became one when Novak birdied the fifth. Both players made bogey on the sixth. By then, the day had warmed to a tropical 57 degrees. The sun was bright.
Playing back into the wind, Harman and Novak hit their second shots on the par-5 eighth left and into the native area, Novak perilously near a lovely specimen of the succulent Opuntia, which Texans know bluntly, and descriptively, as the prickly pear cactus. Harman drew a good lie in the rough after a bounce on a cart path. He put his third on the green, 36 feet from the hole, a safe two-putt for a valued par. Novak made bogey. The lead was back to two.
Then, more distress. Harman double-bogeyed the par-4 ninth, one of the hardest holes over the weekend at the Valero. Hard became harder. Where was the love?
It was not in the place he expected to find it. In fact, Harman said that double bogey on the ninth was one of the biggest moments of the tournament, because it could’ve been so much worse. He pulled his drive – all 249 yards of it – into the scrub right of the fairway. He took an unplayable lie to get his ball out of rocks. His fourth shot landed 32 feet from the hole. He got it up and in.
“It kept me from having a total disaster,” Harman said.
He took a one-shot lead into the back nine. He stretched it to two again with a 15-foot birdie putt on the par-4 12th, one of three he would make Sunday.
Up ahead, upstart Ryan Gerard, wearing a puffy hoodie and quietly building into a solo-second finish, was 4-under through 14 holes.
“I was just trying to be scrappy out there,” said Gerard, making his 34th career PGA TOUR start. (He was. He shot 69. His only bogey came on the last hole, into the wind, of course.)
How influential was the wind? Players chose mid-irons for the 250-yard par-3 13th – for some, the same club they used on the 169-yard 16th. They swung fairway metals from the tee on the 335-yard par-4 17th, where driver was too much, as Novak would discover. The average drive on the 444-yard ninth hole, playing headlong into the wind, was 261 yards. On the par-5 14th, riding the steady 15-mph breezes, it was 329. Harman hit his 345. He made birdie there, too.
“Been playing some really good golf,” Harman said. “My scores haven’t showed it, but I’ve been feeling like it was right there. To have it pop this week and be in good form for some big stuff coming up is really awesome.”
Harman admitted that contending takes a different level of energy than it used to.
“I’m 38,” he said. “I’m not 25 anymore. I know that I’m, you know, getting a little grayer.”
Harman’s 1,266th round on TOUR was a test with no easy answers. Conditions summoned 1960, when Arnold Palmer won the first of his three consecutive Valeros at nearby Fort Sam Houston (and the last PGA TOUR tournament played at an active-duty military installation). Sub-freezing temperatures froze the greens solid that year, which wasn’t as bad as 1958, when the thermometer registered 22 degrees. In 1941, winner Lawson Little benefitted from winter rules because it was so cold at Willow Springs, a local municipal course where Ben Hogan was the Valero runner-up twice.
Harman had a three-shot shot lead with three holes to play. A bogey on the par-3 16th made it two. Novak bounded over the green on the 17th with his tee shot and was thinking birdie. His first chip failed to reach the green. The second rolled well past the hole. Bogey was not what Novak was thinking, but it was what he made.
“I just didn’t execute,” Novak said.
Three pars later, Harman was talking to TV and radio media about how he got it done on a difficult day in the Hill Country.
For the week, Harman finished second in Strokes Gained: Approach the Green (6.15), fifth in SG: Tee to Green (7.6) and sixth in SG: Putting (5.3), which he accomplished with a new zero-torque TaylorMade Spider 5K-ZT center-shafted putter that he put into play Tuesday. Harman didn’t have a single three-putt with it. He was 18-of-28 in scrambling.
It was never, ever comfortable.
“A nightmare,” Harman told PGA TOUR Radio after his round.
Or was it a dream?
Harman loved winning in Texas. The fist bump when he finished proved it. And Texas, in its own rugged way, loved him right back.