Part-time Uber driver, Palm Desert's Berry Henson happy to drive a golf ball instead at U.S. Open
Berry Henson’s original plan was to play in a mixed-team golf event on the Trust Tour in Thailand this week. He won’t make that tee time.
“I think I have to pay a $100 fine, but this is well worth it,” said Henson, the former Palm Desert High School golfer and current Asian Tour member who will instead tee up in the U.S. Open at Los Angeles Country Club on Thursday.
Henson, a winner on the Asian Tour and its developmental tour as well, will be making his debut in the U.S. Open just two hours down the I-10 freeway from where he grew up and played high school golf. In practice rounds starting last weekend, the 43-year-old Henson is finding that the U.S. Open feels a bit like other events.
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“Yeah, it’s just another tournament, but on a grander scale and a super tougher scale I think as the course dries out over the week,” Henson said. “So far it is just kind of normal for me. But the media attention has been pretty big.”
That media attention started when Henson revealed after qualifying for the Open in a sectional event in New Jersey on June 5 that he still comes back to the Coachella Valley during down times in his schedule and is an Uber driver, something he has done for years. That side hustle has helped Henson develop fans who are coming back into his life this week.
“I have had some of my Uber riders reach out to me and say hey, we were in your car and we wish you the best of luck this week,” Henson said. “Usually, I tell my stories at times to my riders, and they find out I am a pro golfer and they end up following me on social media. I had a lot of them hit me up this week and say 'hey, we are rooting for you out there.' It’s pretty cool.”
Henson, ranked 444th in the Official World Golf Rankings but ranked 10th in the International Series Order of Merit this year with $196,685, secured his first major championship start with rounds of 64 and 71 for a second-place finish in the sectional at Canoe Brook Country Club in Summit, N.J. He chose that sectional because he thought it would benefit him more than the sectional in California at Hillcrest Country Club in Los Angeles. After five weeks of training in the desert and after dealing with his mother’s death in March, Henson’s New Jersey plan worked just as he had hoped.
A great day for 36 holes
“Everything leading up to it was good. I felt good and I had been targeting this northeast section for a while and it just worked in my schedule,” Henson said. “I got on course and I liked the course and I liked the setup and I felt like I was one of the better players in the field. The confidence level was pretty high.”
An opening double bogey didn’t slow Henson down in the morning when he shot 64, and he made key birdies late in the afternoon round to clinch the Open berth. That meant a return to Los Angeles Country Club for the first time in 10 years for Henson.
“I actually don’t remember that many holes because they have done so many renovations that it wasn’t very familiar to me,” Henson said. “The cool thing about L.A. Country Club is you are in the city of L.A., but when you are on the golf course you don’t feel like this is an L.A. golf course. It is all cut out of the river beds and natural and they took out a bunch of trees. It has a linksy feel to it.”
To help him in his first Open appearance, Henson is calling on friends who have strong U.S. Open histories. That included a practice round Tuesday with 2020 winner Bryson DeChambeau and some practice with a more familiar name last weekend.
“I played Saturday with Phil (Mickelson, a six-time Open runner-up) and I just had no clue what to do on lines and it is very difficult to play the first time around,” Henson said. “We played the next day and we had a little game and that got me to kind of seeing the lines a little clearer and picking the shots that I will be hitting this week.”
If Henson is feeling like an underdog this week in a field of the top players in the game, all he has to do is think back a month to another golfer he knows. Club professional Michael Block was the story of the PGA Championship, eventually finishing 15th but captivating galleries and television viewers.
“Why not me? I know Michael, and I watched that, and it definitely put a fire in my belly,” Henson said. “Even with my team, we talked about that as I was training and getting ready for the Open. It was, ‘this guy can do it, why not me?’”
This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: US Open: Berry Henson, part-time Uber driver, happy to drive a golf ball instead
