U.S. Open: Harry Higgs forgot his pants. Don’t forget to root for him

SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. — How can you not love a guy who showed up to play in the U.S. Open without his pants? 

We’ll get to that story in a moment, but first, let’s introduce Harry Higgs. He looks a whole lot more like he belongs in the gallery crushing beers than inside the ropes crushing drives, and that’s most definitely a compliment. He plays with his shirt too unbuttoned, and maybe his psyche too. He’s 34 years old, he’s the 356th-ranked player in the world, he has exactly zero PGA Tour wins, and before this weekend, his record in the U.S. Open was one appearance, one missed cut.

Yet now, sitting at 1-under entering Round 3, in a tie with Justin Thomas for seventh, and a stroke ahead of Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler, Higgs is having his moment.

He’s maybe best known, virally speaking, for his take on the “Dreams Challenge” back in 2020 — you remember, cruising without a care in the world to the tune of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams”:

Turns out, though, Higgs was carrying a whole lot of pain, a whole lot of self-loathing. As talented as he was — he played college golf alongside Bryson DeChambeau at SMU — he’s tended to stomp on the sparks of his own game before it can even get started. 

“For a good portion of my career, if not the whole time, like, when I make a few bad swings or get a few bad breaks, I have allowed myself, again, for lack of a better term, to berate myself in a way or be demonstrative and waste energy that makes me feel that I put myself behind the 8-ball,” he said Friday evening. “I allow myself to feel, in a way, insignificant.”

He’s bounced back and forth between the PGA and Korn Ferry tours, his lone real national highlight a T4 finish at the PGA Championship at Kiawah Island. (Phil Mickelson’s victory that week kind of stole everyone else’s thunder, understandably so.) He won back-to-back Korn Ferry events in playoffs in May 2024, but his career has stalled since then. He hasn’t made a single cut in any PGA Tour start. He has one hell of a nickname — The Big Rig — but little else, professionally speaking. 

He played in a U.S. Open qualifier in North Carolina earlier this month, and for the first few holes at Gaston Country Club in Gastonia, his game proceeded exactly in the same depressing way it had for the last few years. He fumbled his way through the first six holes, missing short birdie putts. He was struggling so badly that he even took out his phone and booked a flight from Charlotte back home to Kansas City. 

“I’m just going to go home,” he told himself. “I don’t even know if I’m going to go to Amarillo and play 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 for me, people like me, so I think I can figure out something to do. I can spend some more time with my family, which is not a bad thing.”

And then, against all odds, the birdies began falling. Seven in the first 18-hole round of the day, six in the second. He missed out on a guaranteed spot in the Shinnecock field by a single stroke, but he was an alternate, which meant that he wasn’t quite out of the hunt yet. 

Then, six days ago, Higgs was playing in something called the OccuNet Classic presented by Amarillo National Bank. He finished T14 in the Korn Ferry Tour event, his best finish of the season to date, but he had something much bigger on his mind. When Bud Cauley won the RBG Canadian Open, he jumped from the alternate ranks directly into the field … and, with a series of other withdrawals and qualifications, that meant Higgs would be playing in the U.S. Open, the 156th man in the 156-man field. 

He ran past some kids seeking autographs — he’ll make it up to them at some point — and began the long route from Amarillo to Long Island, via Dallas, Charlotte and LaGuardia. Here’s how it went: he celebrated his official addition to the field with a cocktail on the flight to Charlotte, grabbed four hours of sleep at the airport thanks to flight delays, flew to New York, raced to Long Island, swung through Target and Whole Foods for diapers and formula for his 8-month-old, got to Shinnecock at about 4:00 p.m. Monday, stroked a few putts, and then went to sleep.  

Again: how can you not root for a dude like this? 

And here’s where the no-pants story comes into play. The chaos of the mad dash to Southampton finally caught up with Higgs — who, in a cruel twist, had the earliest tee time in the field Thursday at 6:35 a.m. (Still better than no tee time, right?) 

AP Photo/Seth Wenig

With his suitcase still unpacked, and groggy from the combination of his 8-month-old and a 3:30 a.m. wakeup call, he grabbed what he thought were his pants for the day to change in the club’s locker room. Turns out he grabbed a pair of shorts … and, well, decorum still reigns at the U.S. Open. He borrowed a pair of pants, which fit fine, but not nearly well enough. 

“I would have 100% ripped them” had he played an entire round in them, he said. “It would have been real funny trying to get a ball out of the hole and teeing it up.”

So he called his wife at 5:30 in the morning, and she raced to the course, somehow beating the traffic, and about 20 minutes before his tee time, Harry Higgs had his proper pants. 

His U.S. Open didn’t exactly start in promising style; he bogeyed his first and fourth holes. But he steadied himself, finishing Thursday at +1. And then he launched into orbit on Friday, beginning the day with three birdies in his first six holes. He gave a couple strokes back at the end of the round, but still headed to the weekend at -1 overall. 

“I’m doing all the right things. I’m doing the stuff that I know has helped me play the best golf for as long as I’ve done this, so why not believe in myself, right? Why not think that I can do well at this?” he said Friday night. “I think (Friday) was a byproduct of that. Man, I was cool. I was cool with bad shots. I was cool if things didn’t go my way. I was just going to have my shoulders back, my head up. Like, I was going to walk around like I owned this place. And boy, do I not. … But I’m coming to the realization that all these guys that do this consistently and win all these deals, I think they just make the choice to do that all the time. I think the results make it maybe a little easier, but only just a little. Those guys wake up and do the work and choose to act and believe that they are the best. I don’t really see why I can’t do that.”

Hell yes, Harry Higgs. 

After his round, he planned to spend the drive home thinking about the day, and what he would do on the weekend. And what did he come up with as far as a strategy?

“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. … For the first time in a while I truly thought that, like, yeah, I can do this,” he said. “I haven’t had that feeling in a while. I would love to recreate it over the next two days, and if I don’t, I’m just going to try my damnedest and see what happens.”

Harry Higgs, friends. Now that’s a guy you can root for this weekend.