With three holes to play in the 2026 Charles Schwab Challenge at Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, Texas, Russell Henley was tied for seventh, three shots off Eric Cole’s lead. 

A couple midrange birdie putts later, he was just a shot off Cole’s lead with one hole to play. He holed yet another birdie on 18, securing a place at the top of the leaderboard and forcing Cole into a playoff. As Henley marched off the green, there might have been a wisp of smoke coming off the 37-year-old’s putter.

Henley found another fairway as he and Cole replayed 18, and then he worked a wedge to five feet. One putt later, Henley had completed a four-birdie finish to leapfrog Cole and claim his sixth victory on the PGA Tour. “Just unbelievable resilience,” said an admiring Trevor Immelman on the CBS broadcast. 

Henley does not attract a trail of cameras at tournaments like Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy do. He is not yet a major champion the way Matt Fitzpatrick, Justin Rose, and Jon Rahm are. He is not a YouTuber like Bryson DeChambeau. But after his comeback at Colonial, on the last day of May, Henley was ranked fifth in the world, proving what everyone around him already knew: This Georgia Bulldog is hard to shake off. 

“It means so much to me to be able to compete out there, at the highest level I can, and to be able to try to win a tournament,” says Henley, speaking to Kingdom during a week off at the beach with his family, to recharge before the U.S. Open at Shinnecock Hills. “When you do get it over the finish line, it is just the best feeling, and I am trying to enjoy that.” 

An intense competitor, Henley grew up in Macon, Georgia, playing golf at Idle Hour Golf & Country Club, as well as basketball at Stratford Academy, where he was an all-state point guard. “I had a lot of energy, but I didn’t play with very much control,” says a self-deprecating Henley about his prowess on the court. “I would play very fast, and I was a little bit too excited, aged 15 or 16, and I think if I could have slowed down a little bit, it would have helped me.” 

Henley enjoyed plenty of success in basketball, as his high school team “won a decent amount” of games. But it became clear that his future was on the course, not the court. “I would have loved to play college basketball, but I just didn’t have the athletic ability,” he recalls. “I couldn’t jump high enough, I couldn’t run fast enough, and I was not big enough.”

Golf, on the other hand, was a passion that grew. “I just fell in love with the game,” says Henley. “There was kind of a snowball effect with golf, and the more I played, the more I fell in love with the clubs, the grip, the shots, and the different ways to do it. I just loved all of it.”

He also became quite good. Henley would eventually set a course record of 61, nine under par, at Idle Hour’s tree-lined Donald Ross golf course (which reached its centenary two years ago). PGA professional Bobby Hix coached Henley from the age of 12 at Idle Hour, until the star pupil earned his PGA Tour card in 2013. “He always struck the ball very well, and he was always a good putter,” says Hix, who still teaches at Idle Hour, where Henley’s Walker Cup golf bag from 2011 takes pride of place in the clubhouse. 

“We’ve got a little six-hole par-3 course with eight bunkers, and on many a Saturday afternoon, Russ would be out there by himself, and he would throw a ball over his back into a bunker, and he would hit it out and putt it,” recalls Hix. “If he couldn’t get that ball up and down, he would throw it back and do it again. He wouldn’t leave until he had got his ball up and down out of every bunker. That was a game to him. Russ liked the challenge, and he loved being out there.” 

Macon is about 120 miles from Augusta, and Henley and friends would try to make an annual day trip to the Masters. They would follow the lead of Payne Stewart and wear WWJD (“What Would Jesus Do?”) wristbands, and follow Stewart, Davis Love III, and, of course, Tiger Woods. Henley was there the day Mike Weir won the green jacket in 2003.

“Outside the ropes, we would reach down and touch the grass with our hands; we thought it was carpet,” recalls Henley, who made his Masters debut as a player in his rookie season on the PGA Tour in 2013. “I hoped then that I could play in the Masters one day, but I don’t remember being like, I am definitely doing this. Augusta National seemed surreal.”

By the time Henley was in his junior year of high school, he was the top player at Idle Hour, and the club took pride knowing he was going to the University of Georgia, where he played four seasons, from 2007 to 2011. His celebrity status at the club went meteoric when, in 2008 at age 19, he won the Georgia Amateur Championship on his home course. (The championship dates to 1916, when the first player to lift the trophy was a 14-year-old Bobby Jones.) Henley won the state title again in 2009, but he kept his feet on the ground.

“All the kids knew Russ and looked up to him,” says Hix, “but it would be nothing for Russ to walk across the putting green and have a putting contest with one of the kids, just out of the blue. That is just the kind of guy he is.”

Henley won on the developmental Nationwide Tour (now the Korn Ferry Tour) when he was still a senior at Georgia, in 2011, after which he received one of Arnold Palmer’s famous letters of congratulations. Palmer died in 2016, but it is safe to assume he would have been delighted when Henley claimed the Arnold Palmer Invitational at Bay Hill in 2025, pipping Collin Morikawa by a shot.

“It is so different to win than it is to have just a good finish, like a fifth place or a third place,” reflects Henley. “It is so adrenaline packed. In golf, we lose most of the time, perhaps more than in any other sport, so I try to remind myself how hard it is, and when I do win, I try to be thankful, for sure.”

Henley might have found a new equilibrium on tour this season: confidence stoked by success yet tempered by calm. He may have more of those winning feelings to come.