It’s fitting that Harry Higgs is probably best known to casual golf fans for exposing his chest at the 2022 WM Phoenix Open, because, well, the guy is kind of an open book.
He has spoken freely about his affection for Tito’s and of “rooting” for his opponents to make bogeys. He has revealed that he was teased as a teen for carrying a few extra pounds. He has confessed to being “angry at the world” when his swing misbehaves. In sunglasses and his signature splayed-open polos, he looks less like a Tour pro than one of your weekend golf buddies. There’s an everyman relatability there — not only in how Higgs presents himself (yes, that’s a Dude Wipes logo on his shirt), but also in how he plays, because the game has not and does not always come easily to him.
After playing college golf at Southern Methodist University and turning professional in 2014, Higgs kicked around the wilds of the mini tours, playing two seasons on the PGA Tour Latinoamerica before earning Korn Ferry status in 2019. A year later, he was on the PGA Tour, where in his rookie season a pair of top-10 finishes helped land him in the top 60 on the FedEx points list. But he has been unable to build on that success, at least in terms of his FedEx rank. In 2020-21, he dropped to 66th and a year later to 147th. This season, playing with conditional status, Higgs has missed half of the cuts in his 16 starts with his sole top-10 finish coming at the opposite-field Puerto Rico Open. He’s been trying to scrape by with his “C, C-minus game,” he said.
This week, Higgs was in dreamy Puerto Vallerta for the Mexico Open. He stayed on site at the host resort, Vidanta (“entirely too nice for me,” Higgs joked), and enjoyed a discounted room rate. “If I had a family, which I do not, it would be definitely a great family week,” he said. (We’re employing the past tense because Higgs shot 70-75 to miss the cut by five Friday and we don’t know if he’s still on property.) Higgs loved the course, too, a Greg Norman design called Vallarta. “The best turf conditions that 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 Latinoamerica circuit. Earlier this week he shared fond memories of trying to navigate the culture and language, of feasting on lomo saltado (beef stir fry) after winning in Peru and of carrying around wads of cash to compensate the local loopers who carried his bag in tournaments. “The caddies were almost more into the result than I was,” he said. “Sometimes you’d have to, Hey, man, calm down, it’s just Thursday, we’re going to be OK. I got off to not a great start but trust me, I am good at this, I’ll show you here hopefully in the next few days.”
When asked Wednesday what advice he’d give to Latinoamerica pros who are 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’ve done, there is not a whole 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 out there when I almost found joy and pleasure in the adversity, just the random things that may happen that might throw other guys off but you find a way to deal with it. Oh, heck, just shrug it off, right? It’s hard, it’s very difficult. It happens everywhere again in every profession, but those that are going to be the most successful will find ways to deal and kind of work through that adversity.”
‘Spiral upwards’: Struggling pro explains mindset that helped him shoot 62
Higgs didn’t have to provide such a thoughtful answer, but that’s how he rolls. He’s a talker, a schmoozer. He’s naturally generous with insights, stories, opinions. He conveys a no-worries, life-of-the-party vibe but, in truth, there are worries. Like so many of his fellow pros, Higgs is fighting to make cuts and cover his costs and stay relevant — all while fighting the urge to get too comfortable on Tour.
And it’s on that last point where Higgs’ reflections this week got really interesting.
And really honest, even by his candid standards.
“It was almost in a way more enjoyable, more romantic, the chase, right?” Higgs said of his days of trying to make ends meet on the mini tours. “Oh, man, I’ve just got to get better and work my way. Opportunities are hard to come by especially at that level, you’ve got to earn them, be given them and then when you have them, you have to take them. Out here [on the PGA Tour] you get real used to courtesy cars, the fancy hotels, player dining is just fantastic.
“Now, I can find ways to make up complaints versus playing the PGA Tour Latinoamerica — we hardly ever had player dining and if we did we had to pay for it. We didn’t have courtesy cars, we were stuffing three or four guys and three or four golf bags into little tiny sedans and driving an hour from the airport out to the golf course, the hotel we were staying at, but there was kind of — it was fun. It was miserable, but it was fun.
“It’s something that I think about quite often. It’s different now and it will forever be different, but I need to find a way to have that enjoyment that I had before in the chase and trying to get here and not get — you know, you don’t want to get — gosh, the word’s kind of eluding me, but you don’t want to get complacent. You don’t want to get out here and [think] Oh, wow, this is enjoyable.”
Maybe you can’t relate to Higgs’ conundrum, but maybe you can. Maybe you, too, have arrived at a point in your career where things feel comfortable, where the pressure to perform and prove yourself relents. Golf is no different than any other profession. When things get easy — when you have your pick of ball brands on the range, when tournaments charter jets for you, when you can make nearly half-a-million dollars for a T13 finish — you can lose your burn, your edge. It’s a barrier surely many pros knock up against, though few would be willing to publicly admit it.
It was almost in a way more enjoyable, more romantic, the chase, right?
None of this is to say that Higgs isn’t striving to excel on Tour — he just feels a sense of wistfulness about his former life. He’s sentimental. He misses the grind, and how it drove him.
None of this is to say that Higgs isn’t enjoying himself in the big leagues. He is, immensely. It’s just that sometimes he needs to grab himself by the collar and remind himself of how good he has it.
Higgs’ has his younger brother, Alex, on the bag. Every so often he’ll saddle up to Alex in the middle of a round and say something like, “Holy cow, I’m on the PGA Tour, this is really cool.”
Those moments are intentional.
“I’m making it a point to say it aloud to him and now his response is like, yeah, man, you’ve been out here for a while now, too, right?” Higgs said. “Just to find that little bit of enjoyment versus [when] I was just thrilled to have a 72-hole golf tournament that I was playing when we were playing the PGA Tour Latinoamerica, because in and amongst playing those more developmental tours, you’re trying to Monday qualify and do all that stuff. And that’s not really tournament golf, that’s just organized gambling in a way.
“Yeah, I’m trying to always continue to find the enjoyment in playing out here. It’s not that I do not enjoy it because I certainly do. I take great pleasure in the opportunity to beat the best players in the world every week that I get into a tournament, but just those little things throughout a day I need to continue to find ways to enjoy them more.”
Good advice for us all. Smell the roses.