gary lemke COLUMN
Power of
ONE
Garrick Higgo reckoned he was one second late. Officials timed it closer to one minute. What we do know is that it was after his 7:18am tee-off slot for the first round of the PGA Championship at an Aronimink golf course which was hard enough to tame without having to incur any unnecessary penalties.
Under Rule 5.3a the officials had no option but to issue Higgo with a two-shot penalty, which he duly marked down after the first hole, which meant his par became a double bogey six. Those two shots meant he submitted a 69, and had he arrived that one second, or one minute, earlier to the teebox, he hypothetically would have been sharing the lead of the Major with Aldrich Potgieter on 67 after the first 18 holes.
I say hypothetically because golf doesn't work like that, there's no magic formula to say that one could hole out and go back to the same tee and play the hole exactly the same with the same result. One second there's a gust of wind, the next second there's none.
The following day, Higgo arrived extra early but by now he had cruelly become the subject of memes and social media ridicule, and broadcasters ESPN even displayed a Higgo countdown clock on their screens. How they laughed. The rhetorical question is whether they would have applied the same treatment to one of their beloved, like Bryson De Chambeau.
'I always cut it pretty fine. There's a lot of us who do. I was there on time, but the rule is, if you're one second late, you're late,' Higgo said after his opening round. 'So if you think about it, I was there on time, if you know what I mean. We don't want to get to the tee 10 minutes early and be cold. We have to hit it far and straight. It's our job to do that. I don't really think it's my job to be 10 minutes early.'
It's the one shot that he missed the cut by which kept the tongues wagging. Had he arrived on the tee less than a minute before he did, he would have made the cut (hypothetically) and who knows where he might have finished from there. Yes, it was a costly error – he and his caddie parted ways shortly afterwards – but nothing in this game of golf suggests that the two-shot penalty actually cost him making the cut.
It did, but it didn't, if you know what I mean, perhaps a similar line to Higgo's protestations that he 'was there on time but the rule is if you're one second late you're late.'
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While the two-shot penalty points to the 27-year-old ultimately being the reason he missed the cut by one shot, that's the easy explanation. As I say, golf doesn't work like that.
Rory McIlroy was regularly smashing drives of over 340 yards (310m) off the Aronimink tees. They all counted for one shot. It's the same number as a ball that hangs on a lip but doesn't drop into a hole and needs a ceremonial tap-in. It's one shot, whether it's 340m or 1mm. In Higgo's second round 76, he was actually two off the cutline before closing with a birdie. He bogeyed six of eight holes during a mid-round horror stretch.
We could find one shot there and he would have made the cut. Again though, that's all hypothetical. Golf really is a game when the next shot is the one that counts most.
Louis Oosthuizen won the 2010 Open Championship, but he has also a career Grand Slam of seconds – six in total. At the 2015 and 2021 US Opens he lost by one shot to Jordan Spieth and Jon Rahm. At the 2012 Masters he went into a playoff with Bubba Watson, when one shot fewer during the regulation 72 holes would have earned him the Green Jacket. At the 2015 Open he also went into a playoff, when one shot fewer during the regulation 72 would have earned him a second Claret Jug.
One shot during each of the 1113 he played in those near misses was the difference between Oosthuizen being a one-time Major champion and a potential five-time Major champion. I once asked him whether he had replayed those one-shot Major 'defeats' and found a shot which might have changed his destiny.
'If I had to do that I'd also have to balance the times I got lucky on the golf course. Golf evens itself out. You make some putts that you might miss nine times out of 10 and miss putts that you'd make nine times out of 10,' he said. Plus there's the bounce of the ball and good/bad lies.
In 2016 at Augusta he even made an albatross two on the 2nd hole, which, when isolated, earned him a playoff spot. A mere eagle and he would have missed out, hypothetically.
The world needs to cut Garrick Higgo some slack. He made a mistake, he paid for it, and yet he handled himself with dignity. In a world of AI, fake news and faceless keyboard trolls, he showed himself to be human. And that itself makes him a winner.
