After finishing tied for 14th at the Masters last April, Harry Higgs has seen the walls of competitive golf close in a little tighter, much of the fun of a game he grew up adoring squeezed dry.
He does what he’s supposed to, hitting the range for hours on end, and following with a thorough routine of putting and chipping drills, often at his home club of Trinity Forest near Dallas.
But even Higgs, known for his gregarious personality and insightful one-liners, admits that some of the fun has been sucked out while competing at the game’s highest level. He missed five straight cuts after leaving Augusta and lost his Tour card after a disappointing year that saw him finish just once inside the top 10.
So when he saw a second appearance at the Tito’s Shorties Classic pop up on his schedule, the affable Higgs was eager to let loose and have a little fun.
The event, held at Butler Pitch and Putt in downtown Austin, Texas, is a four-person skins game on a postage stamp in the heart of one of the most vibrant cities in the country. Drinks in hand. Trash talk flying. Dogs and PGA Tour pros walking together. And in the end, perhaps just the potion Higgs needed after a rough stretch.
The event took place in November but will air on Golf Channel on Jan. 11, 2023, at 7 p.m. ET, with Amanda Renner and the Bob Does Sports crew handling commentary. Tito’s donated to the charity each was playing for, with a total donation of $290,000.
“I went on a guys trip with four guys from my club, and I’ve done a few other things for fun here or there, but every time I do something like this, I think and say aloud to basically anybody that will listen, and obviously knowing me that turns into everybody, that holy s—, it is so nice to be reminded of it, but this is supposed to be fun, right?” Higgs said.
“One of the things that surprised me the most in, now, this is now my fourth year, how quickly this turned into a job, which I probably knew was coming, but maybe not as quick as it did.”
The Shorties Classic doesn’t feel like a job, even though he got paid for the event, along with returning player Joel Dahmen and newbies Keith Mitchell and Beau Hossler.
Higgs and Dahmen will forever be linked through their half-naked escapade at the WM Phoenix Open last year and Mitchell is an old friend who Higgs often lived with while playing on the PGA Tour Latinoamérica. Hossler is a University of Texas grad and the player Higgs called “the smartest guy in the foursome, although he thinks he’s even smarter than he is.”
And according to Higgs, this year’s version of the event lives up to the debut, which featured Pat Perez getting shutout and Harold Varner III winning the top prize for charity by sinking a 15-footer on the final hole with one hand on his putter and the other wrapped around a beach ball.
“This is why we got into the game or anybody got into the game was to hang out with their friends. You know, to be outside and maybe travel to some fancy places. But you don’t travel around. You just go to a place like Butler, because, you know, you might just live just down the street. That’s why we all got into the game, was to have fun with our friends,” Higgs said. “Obviously, enjoy some competition here and there. But like, oh s—, just go have fun with your friends. That’s exactly what this was.”
Higgs is known for fun. And he hopes his game is trending in the right direction after making the cut in his last two events, both sponsor’s exemptions. The SMU product shot a second-round 62 at Mayakoba en route to a T-31 and then followed with a T-21 at the RSM Classic.
And while he can’t reveal how he played at Butler, it fits that he might have shown off the skills that helped him to 13 top-25 finishes in his first two seasons on Tour.
Most important, he thinks the foursome kept it clean enough to give Golf Channel a healthy 22 minutes of programming, something he worried about last year.
“I think we did a pretty decent job at entertaining folks this year, certainly in person and I would imagine it’ll come across on TV as somewhat entertaining,” Higgs said. “Last year I couldn’t believe they found 30 minutes without curse words based on how we had gone. I was shocked when I saw it, I was like holy cow, they didn’t have us cursing at all, because we cursed the entire time.”
As for the venue, Higgs followed comments by Dahmen a year ago about how the urban golf setting is something every metropolis could use.
“I’d heard some stories about Butler before I agreed to play here last year but I’d never been. I had some friends in Austin, or here in Dallas who got wind that we were going there and basically gave me a heads up,” he said. “But every major city, or not so major city, needs something like this. Butler kind of makes the event, right? There were probably, I would say, close to a thousand people in there, kind of walking around and hanging out, and to a man or woman, they were either saying it out loud or you can see it expressed on their face, how proud they were that we were there at their local pitch ‘n putt.
“I do not believe that PGA Tour pros should necessarily be in the business of growing the game. That gets talked about a lot and I’ve always been a little like, eh, you shouldn’t listen to us. But if you ask me, we need more courses more things like Butler. And you know, maybe having us come and highlight those courses for the area, and obviously for a good cause like we did, that will certainly help grow the game.”
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