Nick Watney shot rounds of 82-77 at the Memorial Tournament and his swing coach Butch Harmon took notice.
In fact, he tweeted about it (it has since been deleted) in the screen grab above. For posterity, he wrote: “Wow N Watney +15, didn’t see this coming. Must be having some personal problems.”
Now, we’ve discussed this in the media center at Muirfield Village Golf Club and for the life of us, we’re not sure what prompted Harmon to take the “personal problems” route.
This didn’t go over well with Harmon’s followers and he tried to backtrack:
“Or some physical problems he can’t shoot that high”
“Don’t mean to upset all the Watney fans was just thinking out (loud) .Nick is like a son to me I love him .He will be fine by the US Open .”
Golfweek’s Alex Miceli tracked down Watney leaving the exercise facility and showed him the tweet.
“Interesting,” Watney said. “No comment.”
Harmon clearly made a mistake, but we all say dumb things we later regret. He could have just said, “Something must be wrong,” but when you go down the “personal problems” route, the implications of the comment turn it into a “controversy.”
Since then, Harmon has deleted all tweets relating to Watney and the last update he posted reads:
Thank you to all of you who have chosen to follow me, but after a big mistake today I’m off twitter best to all . By By
— Butch Harmon (@43BH) May 31, 2013
Well, first of all, I think he meant “Bye Bye,” but anyway, that’s too bad. Hope he changes his mind once this blows over. As I’ve said, we speak before we think sometimes, and someone else will tweet something controversial and we’ll forget very quickly that Butch ever implied Watney was having personal problems.”
Oh, if Watney changes swing coaches in the next month or so, we might have an idea why.