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Fittingly, Harry Higgs is probably best known to casual golf fans for exposing his chest at the 2022 Phoenix Open, because, well, the guy is kind of an open book.
He spoke freely of his affection for Tito and of “rooting” his opponents to make the ghost. He has He revealed that he had been harassed Teen to carry a few extra pounds. He has admitted to being “angry at the world” when he abuses his swing. In sunglasses and his signature open polo, he looks less like a pro than one of your weekend golf buddies. There’s a correlation between everyone – not just in how Higgs presents himself (yes, that’s the Dude Wipes logo on his shirt), but also in the way he plays, because the game hasn’t always been and doesn’t come easy to him.
After playing golf in college at Southern Methodist University and turning pro in 2014, Higgs blasted into the wilds of the mini-tours, playing two seasons on the PGA Latin American Tour before earning Korn Ferry status in 2019. A year later, he was on the PGA Tour , where a pair of top-10 finishes in his rookie season helped him place in the top 60 on the FedEx points list. But it couldn’t build on that success, at least in terms of its FedEx rating. In 2020-21, he fell to No. 66 and a year later to No. 147. This season, playing with conditional status, Higgs has missed half the cuts in his 16 starts with his only top-ten finish at the Puerto Rico Open. He said he was trying to scramble through his “C, C-minus” game.
This week, Higgs was in dreamy Puerto Valerta for the Mexican Open. He stayed on site at the host resort, Vidanta (“too nice for me” Higgs joked), and enjoyed a discounted room rate. “If I had a family, which I don’t have, it would definitely be a great family week,” he said. (We’re using the past tense because Higgs shot 70-75 to miss the cut by five Fridays and we don’t know if he’s still in the property.) Higgs liked the course too, Greg Norman’s design called Vallarta. “The best turf conditions I’ve seen in this now my fourth year on tour,” he said.
Higgs knows the golf scene around these parts from his days on the Latin American circuit. Earlier this week, he shared fond memories of trying to navigate culture, language, and food Salted loin (fried beef) after winning in Peru and carrying wads of cash to replace the local assholes who carried his bag to tournaments. “The caddies were almost on the scoreline more than I was,” he said. “Sometimes you gotta calm down man it’s only Thursday we’ll be fine. I didn’t get off to a good start but trust me I’m good at this I’ll show you here hopefully in the next few days.”
When asked on Wednesday what advice he would give to Latin American professionals trying to find their way, Higgs said: “You have to bet on yourself, you have to invest in yourself. You have to spend money on comfort and convenience. Playing at that level, which I have done, is not There’s a lot of disposable income to spend on comfort and convenience, but when you can, do it.Then I had the most success in year two when you found joy and pleasure in adversity, just random things that might happen that might drive other guys away but you find a way to deal with them. Oh, heck, I just shrugged it off, didn’t I? It’s hard, it’s very hard. It happens everywhere again in every profession, but those who are going to be the most successful will find ways to cope and kind of work through that adversity.”
Higgs shouldn’t have given such a deep answer, but that’s how it rolls. He is a talker, a talker. He is naturally generous with ideas, stories and opinions. It conveys an air of carelessness and the life of the party but, really, it’s there We are worries. Like many of his fellow pros, Higgs is fighting to make cuts, cover his costs, and stay relevant — all while resisting the urge to get big on the Tour.
And it’s on that last point that the Higgs reflections got really interesting this week.
And really honest, even by his blunt standards.
“It was more fun, more romantic, the chase, right?” Higgs said of his days trying to make ends meet on small tours. “Oh, man, I have to get better and work my way up. Opportunities are hard to come by especially at this level, you have to earn them, give them, and then when you have them, you have to take them. From here [on the PGA Tour] You really get used to the courtesy cars, the fancy hotels, and the player dining is great.
“Now, I can find ways to offset complaints against playing PGA Tour Latinoamerica – we’ve rarely had any players to eat and if we did we’d have to pay for it. We didn’t have courtesy cars, we’d stuff three or four guys and three or four golf bags into cars.” Small little sedan and we drive an hour from the airport to the golf course, the hotel we were staying at, but it was kind of there – it was fun.It was miserable, but it was fun.
“It’s something I think about a lot. It’s different now and it’s going to be different forever, but I need to find a way to have that enjoyment that I once had in chasing and trying to get here and not get– you know, don’t want to get– oh my gosh, kind of It’s dodgy from the word, but you don’t want to get it satisfied. Don’t want to get out of here and [think] Oh, wow, that’s fun.”
You probably can’t relate to the Higgs puzzle, but maybe you can. You may also have reached a point in your career where things feel comfortable, where the pressure to perform and prove yourself subsides. Golf is no different than any other profession. When things get easy — when you have a choice of ball brands in range, when leagues hire you, when you can make close to half a million dollars for a T13 finish — you can lose your burn, your edge. It’s a roadblock that many professionals certainly face, though few are willing to admit it publicly.
It was so much funnier, more romantic, the chase, right?
None of this is to say that Higgs isn’t striving to excel on tour – he just feels sad about his former life. It’s emotional. He misses the grind, and how he drove it.
None of this means that Higgs isn’t enjoying his time in the big leagues. It is, tremendously. He sometimes needs to grab the collar and remind himself of how good he is.
Higgs has his younger brother, Alex, in the bag. Every now and then he would sit across from Alex in the middle of a round and say something like, “Holy cow, I’m on the PGA Tour, that’s really cool.”
Those moments are intentional.
“I made a point to say it out loud to him and now his response is, yeah, man, you’ve been here for a while now, too, right?” Higgs said. “Just to find a little pleasure in return for it [when] I was thrilled to be doing a 72-hole golf course that I played when we were playing PGA Tour Latinoamerica, because in and between playing those developmental tours, you try to qualify on Mondays and do all that stuff. And this is not tournament golf, it is gambling organized in some way.
“Yeah, I always try to find fun playing here. It’s not that I don’t enjoy it because I definitely do. I’m very happy to have the opportunity to beat the best players in the world every week I’m in the tournament, but it’s just those little things all day long that I need.” To keep looking for ways to enjoy it more.”
Good advice for all of us. The smell of roses.