SI:AM | An American’s British Open Stunner

Plus, the USWNT’s breakout star.

Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. I can’t believe NFL training camps are opening already this week.

In today’s SI:AM:

🇬🇧 A major win decades in the making

🇺🇸 Sophia Smith’s breakthrough game

🏀 MJ out as owner

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Brian Harman’s big breakthrough

One of the shortest players on the PGA Tour towered over the competition at Royal Liverpool this weekend. The 5'7" Brian Harman, who at 36 had never won a major and hadn’t won any tournament in more than six years, was head and shoulders above the competition as he cruised to victory at the British Open.

Before this weekend, Harman’s PGA Tour career hadn’t been flashy. He had won two events (in 2014 and ’17) and won roughly $29 million in prize money over the course of 11 years on tour. He finished tied for second at the ’17 U.S. Open and tied for sixth at last year’s British Open, but missed the cut at the first two majors of this season.

But for four days at Hoylake, Harman was outstanding. An opening-round 67 put him one shot off the lead. Then shot 65 in the second round to take a five-shot lead over Tommy Fleetwood and never looked back. He bogeyed two of his first five holes in the final round, which let Jon Rahm get within three strokes, but Harman responded by making birdies on both of his next two holes. His lead was never really in jeopardy—and that was no accident, Bob Harig writes:

That it never got too close was a testament to his own abilities. Harman is certainly not the longest hitter, but he has all the shots, a solid short game and his putting was brilliant.

At one point Sunday, he had made 47 of 47 putts for the tournament from inside 10 feet. 

For the tournament, he led the field, hitting 42 of 56 fairways. He also hit 47 of 72 greens in regulation and led the field in strokes-gained total with a whopping 18.8 strokes gained on the field.

Harman made only six bogeys all week, three of them in tough weather conditions yesterday. After four of those bogeys, he bounced back immediately by birdieing his next hole. He was as unflappable as he was consistent.

Harman wasn’t anybody’s favorite at Royal Liverpool. All the oddsmakers had him at worse than 100-to-1 to win. The droves of fans that packed the course would have rather seen Brits Rory McIlroy (of Northern Ireland) or Fleetwood (from nearby Southport, England) win. One fan even yelled at Harman during his round Saturday, “Harman, you don’t have the stones for this,” which Harman said helped him regain his focus. But by the end, the fans embraced the unlikely champion. Thousands stuck around in the pouring rain to watch him receive the Claret Jug.

Though Harman isn’t a name synonymous with superstar status, people should be ready to start hearing it a lot more. His win at Hoylake moved him into third place in the U.S. Ryder Cup points standings. The top six players in the standings after the BMW Championship on Aug. 20 will automatically qualify for this year’s Ryder Cup team. With only four weeks left, there’s a good chance that Harman will be representing the U.S. in Rome in September.

The best of Sports Illustrated

Julieta Ferrario/ZUMA Wire/IMAGO

• Léon Marchand ushered in a new era in swimming by breaking Michael Phelps’s last individual world record, Pat Forde writes.
• After just one game, Stephanie Apstein believes the USWNT has already found its breakout star of the World Cup.
• Matt Verderame and Gilberto Manzano have a list of dark-horse candidates to win the NFL Offensive Player of the Year award this season.
• Before the Yankees swept the Royals this weekend, Tom Verducci wrote about how New York’s hitters are struggling against breaking pitches.
• Anthony Rizzo broke out of his recent slump in a major way yesterday with a four-hit game—after switching his walk-up music to Taylor Swift.
• The NBA’s board of governors has approved Michael Jordan’s sale of the Hornets.

The top five...

… things I saw yesterday (and this morning):

5. Alex Fitzpatrick’s 72-foot putt, the longest of this year’s British Open.

4. Adam Scott’s hole-out from a difficult bunker position.

3. Shohei Ohtani’s 36th home run of the season.

2. Brazil’s third goal against Panama.

1. Reds shortstop Matt McLain’s strong throw across his body. 

SIQ

True or false: Barry Bonds led his league in home runs as many times as Chris Davis. (Today is Bonds’s 59th birthday.)

Friday’s SIQ: On this day in 1975, Cardinals catcher Ted Simmons had a home run disallowed after being caught using a doctored bat. How was his bat altered?

• Corked
• Grooved
• Flattened
• Charred

Answer: Grooved. In the fourth inning of a game against the Padres, Simmons hit a solo homer, but San Diego manager John McNamara asked the umpires to inspect Simmons’s bat. It was determined that the bat had long grooves carved into it, violating a rule which states that bats must be smooth. Simmons was called out but was not ejected.

According to Derek Zumsteg’s 2007 book The Cheater’s Guide to Baseball, the benefit of grooving the bat is that it helps add backspin to the ball, which adds distance. That’s the theory at least. In practice, the grooves deform the ball upon impact, which hinder the flight of the ball more than the spin enhances it.

The Padres actually knew Simmons was using an illegal bat before he came to the plate in the fourth. During his first plate appearance of the game in the second inning, Simmons hit a foul ball into the San Diego bullpen, where bullpen coach ​​Whitey Wietelmann noticed the telltale marks on the horsehide. He called McNamara on the bullpen phone but told him to sit on the information until the right moment. After Simmons’s homer, McNamara blew the whistle. The ball that Wietelmann picked up in the bullpen was sold at auction last year for $252. The photos in the auction listing show the roughed-up cover.

Considering how much damage grooving a bat does to the ball, it’s hard to imagine how any player would believe they could get away with it. That didn’t stop Bill Buckner from trying it a month later, though. He had a go-ahead single erased Aug. 24 after being caught with a grooved bat as a pinch hitter.