SANDERSON FARMS CHAMPIONSHIP

October 6, 2023

Harry Higgs

Country Club of Jackson

Quick Quotes

Q. Harry, setting aside these next two days of golf, I know there's a lot of golf left to be played, missed five cuts in a row. What are the emotions right now based on what you've achieved over the last two days and knowing you are playing a weekend?

HARRY HIGGS: Sure, relief, yeah. I get a chance to better my position for four days. You can't move up if you don't play for four days.

Certainly relieved, and then I guess satisfied. I had, what, two weeks off after Napa, and I was pretty close in Napa.

But I put a lot of work in over two weeks. I missed going to see mom and dad, had to put my head down, did a lot of early -- no booze, early to bed, a lot of the stuff that sometimes is not that much fun to do, I did to try to get myself into this position.

So it's lovely that it happened just the first week after I started playing again.

Q. You mentioned that you've been working a lot on your mental game. What does that look like? What does that mean?

HARRY HIGGS: It should look like calm, positive optimism.

I don't know what happened or where it went, but I used to always be the eternal optimist. I think it was still in there, but it wasn't at the forefront. When I started to struggle, it made the struggles worst.

Just trying to get back to being optimistic; whether or not I think I'm swinging it well, swinging it poorly, I know it'll come around; whether I'm playing well or not playing well, it'll come around. On the golf course, hey, I'm going to hit the next shot better.

Then yeah, I've been doing some meditation, which I guess is just a fancy way to say breathing in a quiet room. I do it every day, and I've felt like it's helped. I'm going to continue to do it.

I've got to take a couple deep breaths while out there and feel that I get pulled -- we call it the circle, I get pulled back into the circle, and the circle just exists, the things that I can control, which in this lovely game are almost next to nothing.

Yeah, stay in the circle. Attitude, effort, stay calm and be optimistic.

Q. What was your analysis of the round of golf that got you to this position?

HARRY HIGGS: Sure. I did things good enough, right. I still would like to kind of feel something a little different in my swing. I'm not all the way there yet, and who knows, maybe I won't ever get all the way to what I want it to be. I certainly can do it a little easier on the range.

But it was good enough. The ball was staying within a tighter window, and then pick and choose when I wanted to be aggressive and when not.

I just built momentum throughout the day, and next thing you know you hole a couple bonus putts at the end, and you move further and further up the leaderboard. I've done this before. I haven't done it in a while, but I've played rounds like that before. So it's nice to do it again, and hopefully roll that into tomorrow, same thing, and then I'm going to be optimistic tonight and tomorrow that I'm going to swing it even better tomorrow than I did today, which was pretty good.

I could always nit-pick and want more. We all could. But I'm going to be optimistic that tomorrow is going to be even better and Sunday is going to be even better than that.