Bad guys don’t hug. Would a villain go out of his way to comfort a distraught teen while she watched her mother fade away? Would one of the PGA’s so-called scoundrels, his schedule crammed like weekend traffic on I-70, willingly offer up a free shoulder to cry on?
“He’s been great, just super-gracious,” Jeff Higgins told me by phone Monday from DIA before he headed out on a business trip. “The support they gave us, ‘How are the girls doing?’ Offering to come and talk for a while with us … his actions, to us, were way more compassionate than any of these narratives that were out there about him.”
Higgins doesn’t know the Wyndham Clark that seemingly half the golf-dude accounts on Xwitter despise. Or the one who spent last weekend getting razzed by the yahoos at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club in New York, only to win the 2026 U.S. Open, anyway.
“It’s not right watching Wyndham take some of the beatings that he’s taken on social media,” Higgins continued. “How he handled the whole situation, I thought, was really cool.”
The Wyndham Clark that Jeff knows is a cool guy carrying around this big, broken heart. Two years ago, the U.S. Open champ reached out to his daughter Brenna, then a senior and a superb golfer at Valor Christian, his alma mater. Brenna’s mom, Kim, had been diagnosed with cancer in 2023. The doctors initially gave her three months. She fought for 15 more, anyway, iron to the last. Kim eventually succumbed in November 2024, at the too-young age of 55.
Brenna was a senior in high school by then, and Clark knew those scars, lived that weight. He’d lost his mother to breast cancer in 2013. Lise was 55. He was 19.
The parallels were uncanny. Brenna led Valor’s girls to the program’s first state title, just as Wyndham had done with the boys a few years earlier. She won multiple individual CHSAA crowns, same as him. Jeff knew Randall, Wyndham’s dad.
“If there’s anything we can do,” the elder Clark had told him when Kim was diagnosed, “we’re happy to do it.”
As Kim’s fight headed into extra holes — a 3-hole aggregate became six, then nine, then 12, playing from clinic to clinic, treatment to treatment, through darkness and light — Jeff leaned on Randall about husband stuff, dad stuff.
Brenna and sister Elle, meanwhile, were more … subtle. At The Phoenix Open in ’23 or ’24, Brenna spotted Clark on the putting green and hollered at him. He agreed to pose for a quick picture.
“Brenna,” Jeff asked later, “did you tell Wyndham who you were?”
“No,” Brenna replied.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Dad said, shaking his head.
He sent Valor assistant athletic director Justen Byler, Wyndham’s old basketball coach with the Eagles, a screenshot of Brenna and Wyndham together. Eventually, Byler passed it along to Clark. Needless to say, Brenna can’t sneak up on the two-time U.S. Open champ anymore.
Kim also loved Wyndham, even before her diagnosis. She’d lost her mom to cancer when she was in college, too. The family had watched Clark, in person, during his ’23 U.S. Open win at Los Angeles Country Club. And yet, even from a distance, Sunday’s title, and all the noise, felt a little sweeter.
“I thought he handled it really awesomely (Sunday),” Jeff said. “‘New Yorkers don’t like me, but I still love them,’ that was a great comment.”
Clark paid for the lockers he’d allegedly wrecked at Oakmont Country Club last year, didn’t he? A young man lost his head. He admitted it. He went to counseling. He apologized, privately and publicly. What more do you want? In the age of social media, where cameras are never off and toxicity turns fools into kings, when did “sorry” cease to suffice?
“The crowd (there) was pretty wild,” Spencer Sheets, one of Clark’s oldest pals and a former Valor teammate, told me on Monday on his way back from Shinnecock Hills. “I’ve never seen something like that … the crowd was pretty brutal.
“I definitely had to bite my tongue several times, and some of the stuff people were saying. But I get that part of it.”
GET IN THE BUNKER!
DON’T CHOKE!
“Every single shot, someone was yelling something,” Sheets recounted. His tongue-biting continued, unabated. “The last thing you want to do is create any kind of scene or cause any kind of distraction. (As a friend), you just have to pretend like you don’t hear it. They were pretty rowdy.”
GO OVER!
GET SHORT!
“He was the visiting Nuggets playing in Knicks territory, is what it seemed like,” CU great Steve Jones, the 1996 U.S. Open champ, reflected with a chuckle. “I’ll bet it was a little bit worse than what we could hear (on TV) is what I’m guessing.”
Hale Irwin, the Buffs icon and Boulder native, remains the gold standard for men’s golfers coming out of Colorado. But the consensus No. 2, Jones, a native of Yuma, says Clark just bumped him down a slot on the list after Sunday’s performance.
“Well, he’s over me,” Jones said Monday. “(It’s impressive) to win two majors, two U.S. Opens, when both courses were playing really tough.”
Not as tough as the galleries, mind you.
“(Clark) changed a lot in his life — he looks like he’s been playing better,” Jones noted. “And his attitude — sometimes, that’s what you need.
“If you’re a kid, if you just keep getting away with these things and nobody says anything, that’s terrible for guys growing up. But he got called out on a few things. He had to look down and say, ‘I’ve got to change.’ It looks like he changed a lot of stuff. He’s reaped the benefits. Not a lot of guys want to change like that.”
Clark did. Even New Yorkers, at least the ones that didn’t get kicked out beforehand, were compelled to applaud a good American comeback story at the end.
“He won some fans back,” Sheets said. “They were cheering him on by the time he was done with his (acceptance) speech.”
None of which shocked Byler, by the way. The Valor administrator regaled me with tales of the way a young Wyndham played defense and hustled his backside off as a freshman. The way Clark got under people’s noses, the way he competed, Byler didn’t dare keep the kid off the floor.
“He’s incredibly tenacious, incredibly resilient,” Byler recalled. “He actually took those (slights) as a challenge. And he’s been that way since Day 1.”
That’s the Wyndham he knows. The guy your uncle in Jersey loves to hate once volunteered to caddy for Byler’s son Logan for 18 holes at a junior tournament in 2018. Just because. Two years ago, at the BMW Championship pro-am down at Castle Pines, Logan returned the favor.
“Sometimes we forget that these athletes are human,” Justen said. “They really are ordinary people doing extraordinary things.”
The best ones prefer to do it away from the cameras, away from the smartphones and judgy thumbs.
Higgins says the girls have texted Clark and his father since, even sending messages via Instagram. Bad guys lose your number. Miscreants block you. Knaves ignore you.
“Show him some grace,” Jeff said of the Wyndham haters. “He’s trying. I’ve seen some tremendous, positive changes in him. And I’m happy for him. He’s been through a lot in his life. And as much as he was there to support us, I’ll be there to support him.”
