NOTRE DAME, INDIANA | To this point in his soon-to-be 70-year life, Billy Harmon has yet to find a dead-end road.
It’s been nearly 27 years – Aug. 26, 1992 to be exact – since three acquaintances confronted Harmon in the apartment he occupied above the clubhouse of Newport (R.I.) Country Club, where he was head golf professional, and forced him to answer for his drug and alcohol addictions that had long ago unspooled his potentially brilliant playing career.
One of Masters champion and longtime Winged Foot pro Claude Harmon’s four sons, Billy lived a large life until it took him down.
Harmon gave it up that evening – the drinking and the drugs – and, nearly 7,000 recovery meetings later, he preaches the message of a once-broken man grateful for a second chance.
Then came the cancer.
Almost exactly three years ago, Harmon found himself confined to the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, his throat cancer so severe doctors could not operate on it and the treatments so painful that Harmon often sipped liquid novocaine in order to swallow a drink of water.
Harmon lost 50 pounds and his hair but, having already survived a life-and-death battle with addiction, he knew how to win another potentially unwinnable war. By the grace of God and modern medicine, along with the magic of the human spirit, Harmon came out the other side again.
Smiling. Caddying for his buddy Jay Haas again. Reveling in the joy of days he might never have had.
“Two and a half years ago I couldn’t walk 10 yards to the bathroom and back without having to go back to bed. To think I’m out caddying now … ,” Harmon says, sitting outside a coffee shop on the campus of Notre Dame University, site of the recent U.S. Senior Open, his cancer gone.
“I didn’t kick cancer’s ass. I’ll never say that because I saw people a lot tougher than me lose this battle. It had nothing to do with being tough. I got lucky.”
And maybe he made some of his own luck along the way.
Through all of Billy Harmon’s journey, there has been golf.
It helps explain the sun-weathered skin on his face and arms, evidence of the light that has found him despite stretches of personal darkness.
Born seven years to the day after his more famous brother Butch, Billy – along with brothers Craig and Dick – became part of the game by birthright, born into royalty.
Claude Harmon was a giant both as a competitor and as a true professional. He was taught the fundamentals of the game by Craig Wood at Winged Foot but it was Ben Hogan who taught Harmon how to truly play, leading to a victory in the 1948 Masters. For 33 years, Claude was head pro at Winged Foot, one of the game’s most exclusive enclaves just beyond the shadows of Manhattan’s skyscrapers, laying a stern foundation that drew all four of his sons to follow his lead, though with their own personal touches.
As a teenager, Billy was a virtual prodigy, winning the Winged Foot club championship as a 16-year-old. He would go to San Jose State to play golf but life’s temptations intervened.
“He was an unbelievable junior who won about everything you could win,” Butch says. “Then he went to San Jose State and lost it when he got wrapped up in alcohol and drugs.”
The four Harmon brothers had their own styles. Craig and Dick were more like their father. Billy and Butch were not.
“Craig and Dick (who died in 2006) were the goody good boys, we were the rebels of the family,” Butch says. “Dad taught us not to be afraid to look outside the box, to dare to be different. Billy and I, we took it to the extreme.”
Billy needed help pulling himself back from the dark edge. He should have been fired, he says, from his job at the blue-blood Newport Country Club but two members of the club’s board of directors were in recovery and decided to give Harmon a chance to save himself.
“How about that for a break?” Billy says, eyes twinkling.
“If I make it to August – I always say if because I have to make it through today first – it will be 27 years, more than 7,000 recovery meetings. I dedicated my life to being clean and sober.”
With his wife, Robin, they started the Harmon Recovery Foundation that works with people fighting their own demons. Like the game he teaches, it has become a part of his life’s calling. Since the intervention in 1992, Harmon says he has not had a drink nor touched a drug. He embraced his second chance, never imagining it would help him through his cancer fight three years ago.
“To this day I don’t know if the intervention was done a day before or a day after if I would have been the same but at that very moment I was ready to change,” Harmon says.
The game never left him. Harmon has taught at some of the country’s top clubs, building a reputation befitting the Harmon name. He has worked with tour players and he caddied for Haas for 10 years full time on the PGA Tour. He still caddies from time to time but he spends the bulk of his time teaching the game at Toscana Country Club near Palm Springs, Calif.
“When you can get somebody to hit a shot they’ve never hit before and you can see the mojo, it absolutely feeds the soul.”
– Billy Harmon
He is a disciple of the game, an ambassador of its charms and challenges, a monument to where golf can take a person.
He is a fierce defender of what’s good about the game. Tell him an 11-handicap shot 73 in a club tournament and he doesn’t hesitate. “That person is cheater. Pure and simple,” Harmon says.
As Harmon talks about teaching the game, what he learned from his father and what he has seen from brother Butch working with Tiger Woods, Greg Norman and others at the top of the world, it’s like a professor with the classroom in the palm of his hand.
“I work in a profession where I can maybe make somebody’s day better,” he says. “Golf is the only game where the amateur can feel what the professional feels. It might not go as far but it’s the same feeling.
“When you can get somebody to hit a shot they’ve never hit before and you can see the mojo, it absolutely feeds the soul.”
Harmon believes, and rightly so, that Butch has been the game’s best teacher for decades, calling it a mismatch to compare anyone to what his brother has accomplished. What Billy likes best is that the Harmons don’t believe there is one way to swing a club, a lesson passed down from their father.
TrackMan and video screens with their lines and angles have their uses but in the Harmon way, it starts and ends with the player himself. It’s the teacher’s responsibility to enhance the player.
“My dad’s theory was when you see a talented player, don’t think about what’s wrong with their swing. Figure out why it works. They’re already good,” Billy says. “Elite players are just more gifted. Don’t coach the gift out of them. Butch doesn’t do that. Neither does his son (Claude III).
“It’s not all the swing. It’s the person. It’s the individual. If you can’t learn to swing when you’re nervous and scared all that stuff means nothing, zero, zilch. It’s the person that eventually wins the championships.
“My dad used to say the Hall of Fame is filled with funny swings.”
Harmon and his brother occupy a unique place in the game, famous individually and collectively. Spend time with them and it crackles with humor, with stories and with insight.
“Billy is a helluva teacher and one funny SOB,” Butch says.
Harmon possesses the bluntness that runs through the family. Once described by a friend as a nice package wrapped in barbed wire, Harmon chuckles at the description.
“Sounds about right,” he says. When you’ve conquered addiction and cancer, facing the truth can be easy.
“He’s a hard guy,” says Billy Andrade, a four-time PGA Tour winner and longtime friend. “He’s not a lovey-dovey person. He’s not going to tell you want you want to hear. He’s going to tell you the truth.”
Being a Harmon came with its burdens. Play well and people weren’t necessarily impressed. They’re Harmons, they should be good. Play poorly and people would shake their heads at how that could happen.
In 2006 when Dick Harmon passed away at 58, it jolted the family and the game.
“I think it really hurt Billy because he said, ‘Why him, why not me?’ ” said Curtis Strange, a friend of the Harmons since the ’70s. “Billy was like, ‘I was the black cat for a long time. Why was my brother, who was so good, so caring and so nice, why did it happen to him?’ ”
That’s Billy.
“I’m not a ‘Why me?’ guy, I’m ‘Why not me?’ ” Harmon says.
“I wanted to be the most like my brother Dick, the least famous of all of us. He was the best husband, the best father, the best son, the best friend, the best of all of that stuff.
“Probably the reason I drank and drugged to excess – this is on me and it’s not an excuse – is I never really felt I was adding up to this thing called the Harmons. Alcohol and drugs became anesthesia to me. I never got physically addicted to them. All right, if I get a little high, I don’t have to think about it. Then you get up the next morning and you’re one step further away.”
Until you’re not. Until you come out the other side.
When his cancer diagnosis arrived in 2016, Harmon faced a grim prognosis.
There was a reasonable chance the cancer would kill him. If he were to survive the cancer, he would have to survive the brutal four-month regimen of radiation and chemotherapy that would almost destroy him before bringing him back.
It meant packing up and moving to the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston for four months.
Those were the easy parts.
“When the cancer thing happened, I was prepared to deal with it because I’d already dealt with something. What I wasn’t prepared for early on was the fear and the terror when they told me what the treatment was going to do,” Harmon says, sitting outside on a soft summer morning that he calls a gift.
“Once they radiate your throat, it’s game on. You are kind of living this thing – ‘Do I have what it takes?’ – As the butt-kicking starts, you wonder what it’s going to be like two weeks from now.”
In the quiet moments, Harmon relied on what had gotten him to where he found himself. He thought of living day to day as a recovering alcoholic and drug addict, how he had accepted the challenge and committed himself to accepting what is required of him.
Don’t fight it, he told himself. Accept it. Surrender to the fight.
“What you find out is when all your options are taken away the human spirit kicks in,” Harmon says. “I’m one of the four Harmon brothers. I’ve had a pretty good life. It’s about time for me to pay the price here somewhere along the line.
“I saw so many people who were grinding it out. That’s what it is. You grind this thing out.”
“I didn’t kick cancer’s ass. I’ll never say that because I saw people a lot tougher than me lose this battle. It had nothing to do with being tough. I got lucky.”
– Billy Harmon
Every doctor’s appointment, every radiation session, every chemo treatment was a necessary part of getting through the cancer, Harmon told himself. Every day, no matter the discomfort, was taking him another day closer to being healthy again.
“It takes lot of luck and the man upstairs saying it’s not your time,” Butch says.
Harmon knew it was different than overcoming his addiction. Conquering cancer doesn’t offer the option of attending a 30-minute recovery meeting six days a week. Cancer is involuntary and it comes with no promises.
“I’d love to tell you it was an enchanted forest the whole time. It wasn’t,” Harmon says.
He went through several weeks of chemotherapy and radiation, receiving one five- to six-hour chemo treatment every three weeks in Houston. Why only one every three weeks? Harmon asked.
“They gave me two weeks off to get ready for the next one. You’re thinking, ‘What does that mean?’ ” Harmon says.
Through the combination of chemo and radiation treatments, Harmon lost 50 pounds. “I remember one day looking into the mirror and not recognizing the person I was looking at,” he recalls.
One of Harmon’s sons asked if he feared dying.
No, Harmon said.
“Why not,” his son asked.
“Because I’ve had a great life, a helluva life,” Harmon told him.
The fear, Harmon said, was what kind of life he would have if he survived.
“When you go for radiation in the head/neck division you can see people’s cancer. If someone has pancreatic cancer, you can’t see it,” Harmon says.
“I’m sitting in a room with people who have their jawbone taken out. It’s red and charred from radiation. No noses. Half a mouth. No ears. ‘You’re thinking what if mine spreads? What am I going to look like? Am I going to be in a wheelchair with pipes going into my throat and a generator to keep me breathing?’
“I didn’t fear dying because I truly believe I’ve had a great life. Sobriety and recovery is a great mulligan.”
When Harmon returned to Palm Springs after his treatments, he went back to his recovery meeting. He hadn’t told anyone he was coming and, at first, people who had seen him nearly every day for 25 years didn’t recognize him.
“I said, ‘It’s all right, I don’t recognize me either,’ ” Harmon says.
Eventually, Harmon’s hair returned and much of the weight he lost returned. One day led to the next and soon he was back teaching and playing the game that has been so much of his life.
“To come out on the other side, to beat what he did then all of a sudden come down with cancer that was really severe and beat it, that’s pretty impressive,” Butch says.
“He’s turned his whole life around a few times.”
When Billy Harmon was asked once to put the priorities in his life on paper, he listed his sobriety, his wife and kids and dog, his brothers and sisters and his friends.
Golf didn’t make the list.
It will forever be a big part of him but Harmon chooses not to let it define him. He long ago got beyond trying to compare himself to his brothers or his father or anyone else.
Having grown up around some of the wealthiest and most powerful people at several of the most prominent golf clubs in the country, Harmon says his two closest friends now are convicted felons who attend the same recovery meeting he does.
They took wasted lives, Harmon says, and turned themselves into happy, productive people.
Billy Harmon has lived a 360-degree life and even when his man Jay Haas was barking about having made four consecutive bogeys during one round of the U.S. Senior Open at Notre Dame’s Warren Golf Course, Harmon let it sink in with his sweat on a sticky afternoon. His head covered by a floppy white hat and a black bag slung over his shoulder, Harmon was still walking his uncommon path.
A few minutes later, Harmon found himself sitting at a table with Haas when Tom Watson sat down. Harmon and Watson have been acquaintances through the years but not close enough to call each other friends.
When Harmon was sick, Watson sent him a long, thoughtful e-mail. At Notre Dame, the two men talked about how Watson’s wife, Hilary, is fighting pancreatic cancer.
“We talked about how we learn to suppress our fears,” Harmon says.
A day or two later, Harmon found himself with Watson again when Jack Nicklaus joined them at the table. Harmon thought to himself about how many people would like to be sitting where he was then.
For all the good and the bad, he thought of where he’s been and where he was.
“Someone said to me recently, what’s it like being a Harmon?” Billy says, leaning into his story.
“I said do you really want to know? The guy said, ‘Yeah.’
“Well, it’s really cool.”
Billy Harmon’s road just might go on forever.