Nicolai and Rasmus Hojgaard on the driving range at Panther National.
Darren Riehl
How do you tell the Højgaard twins apart?
That’s where I began, as I met the two young Danes, Nicolai and Rasmus, on the back of the driving range at Panther National, an enclave on the western edge of Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.
“What’s the secret?” I ask.
“The chubby one is Ras,” Nicolai says, twinkle in his eye.
“I was going to say that Nicolai is trying to grow somewhat of a beard at the moment. Trying to,” Rasmus counters.
They both laugh. It turns out to be an appropriate tone-setter for the hour that follows, our Warming Up interview, which largely becomes one twin ripping on the other interrupted by some occasional golf talk.
Luckily for me they’ve color-coded for the day: Nicolai is wearing a black hat while Rasmus’ hat is white, making it easy to keep track. And while they share a Florida rental home, a birthday and a set of DNA, by the end of the hour it’s easy to pick out differences between the two — in golf swings, in mindsets, in personalities. This is the first year that both Nicolai and Rasmus are playing the PGA Tour full-time. They’d love for the year to end with the two of them playing together for Team Europe at the Ryder Cup. In the meantime? Ribbing each other seems like a full-time sport.
“Ras has almost like a quarter-life crisis haircut,” Nicolai says with a grin.
Here are 10 things I learned from an hour with the top twins in golf.
You can also watch the interview on YouTube here or below.
1. They each start with wedges.
It’s always interesting to hear how different pros begin their warmups — particularly when those pros are identical.
Nicolai starts by grabbing his lob wedge and putting down his launch monitor to help dial in some specific yardages with half-wedge shots: 50, 55, 60, 65.
“Just trying to get a feel for, ‘today, what does 50 [meters] feel like?'” Nicolai says. He hits one 48 meters. That’s within his two-meter tolerance. “We’ll go up to 55,” he says. He hits one. I check the monitor. 55.
Rasmus has several 60-degree wedges in his bag; it’s an off-week, so there’s a lot of testing going on, he says as he selects one with which to begin his warmup. While he’s not trying to hit as many specific numbers with his half-wedges — “I’m not as systematic when it comes to that,” he says — he, too, is calibrating the day’s feels.
“I like to see what I would call a smooth one, which looks like about 75, and then what is a full one, and that will be different in the morning and afternoon,” he says. He works down the bag from there.
I wonder aloud if Nicolai is more the technician while Rasmus is the artist; Nicolai immediately seizes on that, while Rasmus hates it.
“Did he just call himself Rasmus the artist?” Nicolai asks with glee.
2. They’ve learned a lesson from their pilot father.
Their father Ole is a pilot, which may not seem particularly similar to golf until you consider the attention to detail, the commitment to a process and the need for a cool head under pressure required for each.
“There’s a checklist to go through to make sure that I do the right things that’ll help me,” Rasmus says. It’s a different checklist for driving, for short game, for putting. It’s a different checklist for him versus his brother. But it helps with accountability and preparation.
“When something is going wrong in the plane; say you get an engine fire, a loss of cabin pressure, whatever. You obviously have to react pretty quick,” Nicolai says. “But you have to do it the right way. The only thing you can’t do is stress. No panic.
“So then you pull out the checklist and you go through it bit by bit, you do it correctly, because you can’t make a mistake there. And the same thing in golf, sometimes you feel like you’re in the fire, you’re in the mix, everything’s happening pretty quick and you’re like, ‘what you you do?’ I like the picture of being a pilot and losing cabin pressure: you pull the mask down, you open the book and you go through it so that you don’t stress about the situation.
“When there’s a lot on the line, when it’s happening quick, you’ve got to calm down and just take it one step at a time.”
3. Just thinking about Tommy Fleetwood can help.
Searching for something in your swing? These guys know that feeling.
“I always like to think ‘Tommy Fleetwood’. I love the way he hits those shots to this finish,” Nicolai says, holding an abbreviated followthrough with perfect upright posture, Fleetwood-style.
“When I’m a little bit off in my game, we always work on the Tommy finish because that just feels like you’ve got to be connected. That’s a little shoutout to Tommy there.”
4. Competing with your twin isn’t always easy.
“When we were 10 years old we entered our first tournament, not knowing what the level of golf in Denmark was at that time. So we played this Danish championship for our age, under 12,” Rasmus remembers. “We turned up with these junior clubs and everybody turned up with their Titleist clubs, they all looked so good and we were like, ‘we don’t belong here.’ But then we ended up finishing 1-2.”
In what order? That’s the key to the story: Nicolai ended up four-putting 18, he admits ruefully, to lose to his twin brother.
“I was winning that one and then ended up making that double bogey on the last to lose,” he says.
How do you deal with that as a 10-year-old? He can’t remember. He blocked it out. But Rasmus knows it was a quiet ride home.
“We’ve learned to deal with it,” Nicolai says. “When we were younger we’d be fighting and couldn’t speak, sometimes for days.”
There were stakes attached to their finishes, too: Low bro of the day would get to sit in the front seat.
“I remember I won an event and I go in the front seat and Ras goes in the back,” Nicolai remembers. “And he says to me, ‘Nico, don’t you think you’ve got the throne now?’ He was so pissed that I’d won in a playoff.”
5. Managing twins requires saintly parents.
“Our parents have been great,” Nicolai says. “It must have been very tough for them. I mean, we’ve never really spoken a lot with them about it … but they dealt with it very good.”
Rasmus points out the conundrum: “It’s a hard one, because who do you go up to: the guy who’s done well or the guy who’s not done well?”
I’m pretty sure I know the answer, but just to make sure I ask: Are you happy for each other when you’ve done well?
Rasmus ducks and swipes something from his face; Nicolai’s just hit him with a crosswind divot.
“That was on purpose, by the way,” Nicolai says.
6. They’ve never played their best at the same time.
“We’ve never really had situations where we’ve both played well at the same time,” Rasmus says. It’s remarkable looking at their results pages; it’s been clear at various points that one brother is playing better than the other — but then it flips.
“We’ve discussed it quite a bit. How can it be?” Rasmus says, referring to their intriguing push-pull.
“To be fair I think it’s been quite healthy for us. In a way that if one of us is doing quite well the other one is eager to come out and play well. And I think that’s been a good thing to get sharper when the other one is on his game. It’s frustrating when Nicolai’s on and I’m not. I’m happy that he’s playing well but I really want to play well as well. So it’s that balance, and I think that’s helping us.”
Jokes aside, they confirm they each other’s biggest fans. Take last fall at the Irish Open, when Nicolai and their friends were in the crowd — “literally the only ones celebrating,” he remembers — when Rasmus took down local favorite Rory McIlroy.
7. Play well enough for long enough and you make big-time friends.
Speaking of McIlroy: Nicolai finished second to McIlroy in the 2023 Race to Dubai rankings on the DP World Tour. Rasmus finished second to McIlroy in the Race to Dubai a year later. That’s fitting, of course. It’s a remarkable parallel. I’m also curious: Have they become friends with McIlroy as a result of good play and increased proximity?
They’re unwilling to go that far; perhaps it seems presumptuous. But they freely call him a hero.
“He’s been great to us,” Nicolai says. “There’s that saying that you’re not supposed to meet your heroes but we’ve been very lucky. He’s been absolutely great to us.”
The twins turned 23 during Players Championship week in 2024; Nicolai had lunch that day with Fleetwood, Justin Rose and McIlroy, his Ryder Cup teammates from 2023.
“Rory came over, tapped me on the shoulder,” he remembers. “‘Hey Nico, happy birthday! When I was 23 I was World No. 1 and I’d won two majors.’ I was like, alright, back to work. I loved that. It was pretty cool. It shows that you have a relationship for him to come and say that.”
8. Want to control your draw? Hit a bunch of fades.
One area Nicolai has been strong but has looked to improve is in his iron play, where he’s chasing neutral.
“I’d love to hit a little fade, but I always end up drawing the ball. When I’m under pressure, I always draw the ball,” Nicolai says. He’s been working on zeroing out his swing path on the range, knowing that force of habit on the golf course is a completely different animal. He talks about being able to get it “to the corners” of greens, which can be a challenge if you’re only hitting a draw. That’s why wants something more versatile.
“This year my approach game has been pretty solid so far and I feel like it’s because I’m working more to neutralizing the fight a little bit more and have more options,” he says.
The way he describes it, that battle is a necessity. Jack Nicklaus would hit draws on the driving range so that on the course he’d just hit a gentle fade, for instance. Otherwise, your natural tendencies can get exaggerated past playability.
“If I start hitting draws [on the range] all the time when I get to the course, it turns into bigger draws,” Nicolai says. “So it’s always that balance of how do we neutralize it before it goes to the golf course?”
A little at a time.
9. Patience is, unfortunately, the key to everything.
Seventy-two holes is a long time. A season is a long time. It’s important, Nicolai says, to keep that in mind.
“You can play poorly for a long time and then you got nine holes, you shoot five under and you’re in the tournament,” he says. “Or you shoot a 65 final day from nothing and you’re at the top. There’s so much golf to be played. You just have to stay patient all the time, which is a thing everyone says: ‘Stay patient’. But it’s true. It’s true. I mean, we haven’t done much in this game yet, but we still feel like we’ve tried quite a bit and it’s the same thing everyone says, stay patient, focus on yourself and your own craft and then it will come over time.”
10. …but so is a temper.
“You’ve gotta have a temper to be good,” Nicolai says. He runs a little hotter than his brother, he says. Golf is frustrating, particularly with high standards. You can hit a decent shot but it’s not quite good enough. You want to achieve perfection while knowing that you never, ever will. Still, he sees running hot as a serious asset. “You just have to control it.”
Good news: That’s only half the interview! Watch the full thing on YouTube here.
Dylan Dethier is a senior writer for GOLF Magazine/GOLF.com. The Williamstown, Mass. native joined GOLF in 2017 after two years scuffling on the mini-tours. Dethier is a graduate of Williams College, where he majored in English, and he’s the author of 18 in America, which details the year he spent as an 18-year-old living from his car and playing a round of golf in every state.
