U.S. Open 2026: Harry Higgs forgot his pants. He almost quit golf 10 days ago. He's contending at Shinnecock
· Yahoo Sports
SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. — Harry Higgs was not supposed to be there. Nobody is supposed to be behind the 11th green at Shinnecock Hills. Those who end up there are simply trying to make one of those scrappy bogeys this championship occasionally hands out. Instead, from 30 yards out, Higgs reached for a putter, sent his ball climbing up the mowed slope to the putting surface, let it ride the green's spine, watched it break toward the hole and tuck into the left side of the cup for 2. It was highlight fodder and a metaphor for everything Higgs represents at the U.S. Open. A player who by every reasonable measure has no business doing that at a tournament like this.
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Yet the beloved underdog finds himself planted in a sea of giants, a Friday 68 earning the 34-year-old journeyman a late Saturday tee time.
"I don't know that I've had enough time to wrap my head around it after the finish," Higgs said, "but there's going to be a quiet reflection on the drive home. Hopefully there's not a whole lot of traffic, which I'm sure there will be.
“Do more of what I did today. Make the choice to be simply just, like, confident and believe in yourself no matter what happens. I need to do that in every aspect, every golf tournament. I don't know why it came. Maybe this is just so hard that I could shrug off all the bad things that happened to me a little easier, but man, for the first time in a while I truly thought that, like, yeah, I can do this.”
You know Higgs. The unbuttoned shirts. The guy who stripped one off at TPC Scottsdale and waved it like a Terrible Towel, because why not. The guy known as Big Rig who makes no secret of his affinity for a Tito's and soda. The guy we think we'd be if we were out there. The guy golf keeps saying it wants more of and then forgets to make room for.
But golf has made very little room for Higgs lately. He lost his tour card in two of the last three seasons. This year hasn't been better: missed cuts in all six PGA Tour starts, outside the top 100 on the Korn Ferry, his name drifting down leaderboards he wasn't on long enough to matter. He entered the week 354th in the World Ranking, a few spots ahead of Adam Wallin on the Hotel Planner Tour, which is the kind of detail that sounds like a punchline until you remember it's a man's livelihood. He missed qualifying outright by a shot at Golf's Longest Day in Gastonia, N.C.
The week itself didn't start clean. Higgs packed shorts on Thursday morning instead of pants, a fact that did not reveal itself until he was already at the course.
"Still wild how many people know this," Higgs said Friday afternoon. "God love my wife. I called her at 5:30 in the morning and she got up fast, grabbed me a pair of pants, grabbed me two, just in case, trying to make me look good. By 6:15 before my 6:35 tee time, I had my own pair of pants."
Funny, yes. But what Higgs said next mattered more than the story itself.
He has a tendency to spiral inward when things go wrong. Bad swing, bad break, bad thought and then another, the whole round collapsing into itself. He's been trying to reverse the direction of that spiral, to stay level when the pull is downward, to choose belief when the evidence argues against it. It is harder than it sounds when the game is your career. But Higgs has arrived at something close to a conviction, that the path back to where he wants to go runs through happiness. Not the happiness that follows good results, but the kind that has to come first.
"For the rest of this week I'm going to say yes," Higgs said. "I'm doing all the right things. I'm doing the stuff I know has helped me play the best golf of my career, so why not believe in myself? Why not think I can do well at this?"
He has not always been able to answer that question. As Higgs put it, his bad thoughts nearly swallowed him whole at the qualifier. He was on the front nine of a scheduled 36, playing poorly, when he pulled out his phone and booked a flight home.
He was ready to quit golf for good.
"I'm going to walk off after the ninth hole," Higgs said, recounting his thinking. "I'm just going to go home. I don't even know if I'm going to go to Amarillo for the Korn Ferry, and I don't know that I'm going to keep doing this.
"It's OK if I don't, right? I think I'll be OK. Fortunately, people like me, so I think I can figure out something else. I can spend more time with my family. That's not a bad thing."
Instead, for reasons he still can't explain, he kept playing. Made a boatload of birdies over the next 27 holes. Not enough to earn the exemption outright, but enough to secure the alternate spot, and the alternate spot got him here. Somewhere in those 27 holes, something settled.
He carried it, whatever "it" is, to Shinnecock. A one-over 71 on Thursday, three birdies on the front nine Friday to get red, the birdie at 11 briefly moving him to second. Two bogeys down the stretch pulled him back, but he's still in the top 10 entering Saturday. Six back, alive in a major, crediting all of it to something he spent years trying to locate inside himself.
"I think today was a byproduct of that," Higgs said. "Man, I was cool. I was cool with bad shots. I was cool when things didn't go my way. I was going to keep my shoulders back, my head up. I was going to walk around like I owned this place. And boy, do I not."
He knows his name looks different from the others near the top of the board. But a man who has been his own harshest critic, who has relitigated mistakes long after the round was over, has earned the right to feel what he's feeling right now.
"I love it. I love it to death," he said. "And I'm looking forward to trying to do that again tomorrow. It's going to be harder, and if I have another day like today, it'll be even harder on Sunday.
"But I'm coming to the realization that all these guys who do this consistently and win … I think they just make the choice to do that all the time. The results make it maybe a little easier, but only a little. Those guys wake up and do the work and choose to believe they are the best.
"I don't really see why I can't do that."
The beautiful thing about the U.S. Open is that it's genuinely, structurally, philosophically open. Open to a mini-tour player who can show up at Shinnecock Hills with the wrong pants and the right mindset, and find himself in the mix on a Friday night with the whole thing still in front of him. You might look at the leaderboard and think Harry Higgs doesn't belong. Higgs has spent enough of his career thinking the same thing.
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