By Daniel Rapaport
RIDGELAND, S.C. — Move over, Collin. You too, Viktor. Wolffie, Zalatoris, y’all need to clear some space. For we have yet another star of barely legal drinking age on the PGA Tour.

Garrick Higgo, a 22-year-old lefty from South Africa with a toothy smile and a killer instinct, won the Palmetto Championship on Sunday, albeit, it must be said, with some serious assistance from Chesson Hadley.

But details like Hadley’s six final-round bogeys, including each of the last three holes, will fade from memory. The enduring image from ruggedly beautiful Congaree Golf Club will be that of Higgo, erasing a six-shot deficit to win just his second career start on the PGA Tour. He’s the youngest South African to win on tour since Gary Player—who’s been a frequent sounding board for his countryman.

“I’ve spoken to him quite a lot actually,” Higgo said. “I spoke to him the whole week throughout Kiawah. He phoned me after every round. We spoke about the round, about all sorts of things about my swing, whatever, all that stuff. Then he phoned me this morning, actually, and he told me he’s done it before quite a few times, the way he’s won from six behind, seven behind. He just said don’t think too much about what the other guys are doing, just kind of do your thing and stay up there, and you never know what could happen.”

Despite Player’s plea, coming back from six down doesn’t happen often—it’s the largest comeback on the PGA Tour this season. But this is anything but a fluke. Those fond of waking up to watch European Tour action have known of Higgo for some time. He’s already a three-time winner on the Old World Circuit and won two of his last four starts across the pond, both on the Canary Islands, by a combined nine shots, which pushed him all the way inside the top 60 in the World Ranking. That got him into the PGA Championship, where he made the cut on the number then flashed his all-world potential in the final round, birdieing seven of his first 11 holes and looking remarkably calm while doing so. He hung around the low country after Kiawah, setting up a temporary base in Sea Island, Ga., a two hour straight-shot down I-95 from Congaree.

This, then, would be a pretty comfortable week. The area surrounding Congaree is not exactly a bustling metropolis; the fan turnout all week was what you’d expect at a Korn Ferry Tour event. Most of the top-ranked players opted to skip this event, it falling between Jack Nicklaus’ Memorial Tournament and that little gathering at Torrey Pines. The venue itself also played into his hands; it’s aesthetically similar to Frederica Golf Club, where Higgo has been practicing, and it’s the first time Congaree has hosted a tour event, which levels the playing field. And the last of those two wins was only a month ago. Still, he poured cold water on the idea that he was on some sort of heater coming into the week.

“I think I am bowling from scratch,” he said Wednesday. “I’m not going to say that I don’t have any momentum going into any week after that stretch, but I kind of just want to try to do the same things and see if that will work over here. I’m pretty sure it will, but obviously, the strength of fields are going to be a lot stronger. It’s going to be a much bigger challenge, but I’m looking forward to it.”

Back-to-back 68s put him on the edge of contention and booked a Saturday afternoon tee time with fellow South African Wilco Nienaber, a 21-year-old who might be longer than Bryson DeChambeau. He couldn’t have asked for a better pairing—the two have known each other since they were 10 years old and jockeyed for the No. 1 ranking in South African junior golf just a few years ago.

“It made it a lot easier,” Higgo said after a gritty 68 that left him six back heading into Sunday. “We could speak a bit of Afrikaans in between shots. My caddie was the only one that didn’t know what we were talking about, so that was great. Yeah.”

He busted out the blocks quickly on Sunday, birdieing Nos. 3 and 4 to get to 10 under but gave them back with bogeys on No. 6 and No. 9. It wasn’t until an eagle on the par-5 12th—364-yard drive, 183-yard approach to nine feet, a bucket from there—that he began to think I might be able to actually win this thing.

“I didn’t have to scoreboard watch—I knew already I was kind of up there or close enough. It was just whether Chesson was going to run away with it.”

Mike Ehrmann
Garrick Higgo reacts after saving par on the 17th hole during the final round at the Palmetto Championship at Congaree.

He did nothing of the sort. Simply put, Hadley had no idea where the ball was going when it mattered most. He’d hook one and then he’d over-compensate with a block-fade. The 33-year-old, who was chasing his first PGA Tour win in more than seven years, stopped short of using the c-word to describe his brutal ball-striking day—he lost 4.6 shots with his approach play—but you’d do well to find a more fitting descriptor.

Hadley fanned a drive well right on 16, only to inquire about, and be denied, relief from an ant hill. Punch out, bogey. On 17, he pull-hooked an approach from the fairway and sent a relatively standard bunker shot racing through the green. Bogey, and a good one at that. At 18, from 163 yards in the fairway and needing a par for a playoff, he missed his target with an 8-iron by a good 20 yards. He gave himself a nine-footer for par that might as well have been 90 feet, and it limped by on the low side.

“It sucks, right?” he said. “I can only imagine what it looked like on TV because it looked freakin’ awful from my view. I mean, I could barely keep it on the planet. That 8-iron from the fairway on that last hole is inexcusable.”

Higgo played his last six holes in one under par—nothing spectacular, but precisely what he needed on an afternoon when no one seemed particularly keen to close the deal. Bo Van Pelt, who nearly quit the game in 2018 and didn’t have a top-10 on tour since 2015, bogeyed 16 and 18 to finish one back. World No. 1 Dustin Johnson briefly reached 11 under before a triple bogey at 16 promptly shifted his focus to Torrey. Harris English shared the lead early but shot 40 on his back nine. All these veterans, and the only guy who played mistake-free coming in was the youngin’.

Higgo now moves inside the top 40 of the World Ranking after being 728th on June 1, 2019, and will ride a wave of confidence all the way to California. He gets full PGA Tour status, a spot in the Masters, all that jazz. And yet, in every star player’s career, there comes a point where he progresses past the “Getting into this tournament” stage and enters “He can win anywhere” territory.

“I’ve just gone to another level now. So I’ll just see what my game can do. I enjoy playing and seeing what my game does and where it takes me. I’m going to continue with that.”

Those paying attention knew it was a matter of time until Higgo made that leap. It just happened a little sooner than expected.

The post Garrick Higgo wins the Palmetto Championship with a little luck and a whole lot of talent appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By Daniel Rapaport
RIDGELAND, S.C.—Not all 190 mph ball speeds are created equal. Bryson DeChambeau can get there, but it requires a truckload of effort—starting with a whole-body transformation fueled by protein shakes, weight training and living-room speed sessions. Blasting ACDC also helps the cause.

Then comes the actual golf shot. When The Big Golfer decides he wants to properly unload on one, his mannerisms turn body builder-esque. He hastens his breathing. Starts to twitch. He whispers sweet nothings to himself as he pulsates his driver up and down. Prepare for liftoff. He then brings the club back past parallel, loads up on his right foot, brings his left off the ground, unloads every ounce of force he has into that poor golf ball, spins out with his lower body, grunts, and needs some impromptu footwork to retain his balance as he admires his work.

It is impressive, for sure, but also laboured. Which makes watching Wilco Nienaber, born April 2000, downright jaw-dropping.

The 21-year-old from South Africa, who is playing in this week’s Palmetto Championship at Congaree, first made headlines during last November’s Joburg Open when he smashed a 439-yard drive that didn’t hit a cart path. There was no funny business involved, no noise, no wobbly-legs finish—just a hyper-athletic, super-wide golf swing from a 6-foot-2 young man with gangly arms, rapid hips and a preternatural gift for speed. His arms appear unburdened by whatever syrupy matter hinders the movement of other tour pros. They’re simply moving faster. And it’s all natural.

“It’s not something I’ve worked on, at all,” Nienaber said. “I can definitely get longer.”

The resulting ball flight is a different, too. Whereas DeChambeau plays a high draw—and Cameron Champ, another 190-pluser with easy speed, hits a low, spinny ball-—Nienaber games a mid-height cut that hardly seems to be spinning at all. If DeChambeau’s distance comes largely from carry, and Champ’s from roll, Nienaber’s gets both. It flies miles, it lands and then it rolls, and it rolls some more, once all the way to 439 yards.

Nienaber finished solo second that week in Joburg, his best-ever result as a pro until he won the Dimension Data Pro-Am last month. That victory propelled him to the top of the Sunshine Tour’s money list, good for a berth into next week’s U.S. Open.

Mike Ehrmann
Garrick Higgo and Wilco Nienaber walk from the 11th green during the third round of the Palmetto Championship.

Upon learning Nienaber had secured a tee time at Torrey Pines, Johann Rupert sprang into action. The South African billionaire, a golf fanatic who, according to The Scotsman, is the “driving force” behind the European Tour’s Alfred Dunhill Links Championship, has supported both Nienaber and his playing partner Saturday, 22-year-old Garrick Higgo, since they were juniors. Rupert phoned his friend and fellow billionaire Dan Friedkin, co-founder of Congaree, and helped get both young players a sponsor’s invite into the Palmetto Championship.

Playing in his first-ever event on the PGA Tour, Nienaber posted back-to-back 68s to earn a Saturday afternoon tee time with HIggo, who he jockeyed with for the No. 1 junior ranking in South African junior golf not long ago.

“I don’t even watch where he hits it,” Higgo said after a 68 that has him inside the top five heading into Sunday. “I’m used to it.”

Asked if he ever hits it by his taller countryman, Higgo didn’t hesitate: “Maybe if he hits it off the hosel or something.”

Nienaber’s easy power also caught the eye of his fellow players who, unlike Higgo, were not familiar with Nienaber’s game. On Thursday, tour pro Roberto Castro took to Twitter to express his amazement.

“I played in front of this dude today,” he wrote, posting a screenshot of Nienaber’s 354-yard drive on the 11th hole. “This drive rolled 15 yards. No wind. I saw it land, had to get my yardage book out to see how far it flew. 340. Shotlink confirmed.”

And that was a short one. Relatively speaking, of course, but Nienaber averaged 361.1 yards over the first two days at Congaree, which had him on pace to challenge DeChambeau’s record for the longest average driving distance in a single event (363.1, during the Shriners Hospitals for Children Open.) He hit five drives of 360 or longer on Friday alone.

On Saturday, perhaps feeling the nerves of being in semi-contention on the Big Tour for the first time, Nienaber was a bit of a foul-ball machine in shooting 74. Especially early. On the first, he smothered a quick hook into a waste bunker left. At No. 2, a block-fade into the water hazard down the right. He’s a 21-year-old kid ranked No. 143 in the world; this is far from a finished product.

It’s what he did at the next hole that’ll send a shiver down the spine of those clamouring for an equipment rollback.

The third hole at Congaree is a par 4 that measures 367 yards. With the South Carolina heat and Congaree’s firm turf, it’s been drivable all week. Nienaber opted for driver and unleashed a three-yard cut—that’s his stock shot—that landed just short of the front edge and bounded through, a good 20 yards over the green. ShotLink pegged it at 385 yards.

It was a breathtaking display of power, and, short of any rule changes, a glimpse into the future of the professional game.

Nienaber first hit balls on a launch monitor at the 2018 British Amateur. “The rep could not believe what he saw,” Nienaber said. “I had no idea what good numbers were. From that day, I learned a bit more.” Today’s 13-year-olds know what good numbers are, for launch monitors have been an ever-present prop in their golfing journeys. They also have more statistics and data available to them than ever before, course management systems that help them choose mathematically optimized targets and clubs. The influx of information tells a very clear story: Distance is king. The closer to the hole, the better. It’s why Bryson bulked up.

Courses have had to respond. Congaree was in a better position than most, seeing as it opened just three years ago. Tom Fazio designed the place with today’s distances in mind. As such, it measures 7,600 yards and is a par-71 this week … and it’s not playing long for these guys, at all. Just around five years ago, 120-mph clubhead speed and 180-mph ball speed stood as the unofficial benchmark for “long” on the PGA Tour. Nienaber cruises above those with his 5-wood, which he comfortably flies 305 yards. He doesn’t carry a 3-wood because, well, it would go too far. On Saturday, he touched 132-mph clubhead speed and topped out at 199-mph ball speed

And he’s only getting longer. His body’s still developing, and he’s entrusted his physical conditioning to Dr. Steve McGregor, who worked with Rory McIlroy for years and still sees Lee Westwood, who’s doing just fine as 48. Nienaber’s sinewy build is an interesting contrast with Bryson’s bulk, and DeChambeau frequently cites his lack of height as the main roadblock to adding even more speed. Taller men mean longer arms, which serve as longer levers to generate whip.

“I think as time goes on, there’s not much more to gain from the technology side of golf club manufacturing, building,” DeChambeau said ahead of the Masters. “There are little things we can do, but where the massive gains will be is in athletes. Once you get somebody out here that’s a 7-foot-tall human being and they are able to swing a golf club at 145 miles an hour effortlessly, that’s when things get a little interesting.”

Golf statistician Lou Stagner posted a fascinating graph to Twitter recently that showed the percentage of starts on the PGA Tour by players 6-foot-2 or taller. Back in the early 2000s, the number hovered just under 20 percent; there’s been a huge uptick over the last two years, and 29.1 percent of starts on tour this season have come from players Nienaber’s height or taller.

As the money at stake keeps increasing—hello, PGL and SGL—more top-level tall athletes will gravitate toward golf. Back in April, 6-foot-8 Jordan Hahn became the tallest player to ever tee it up in a PGA Tour event. Tommy Morrison, a junior committed to playing at Texas, stands 6-foot-9. Nienaber may well be the longest player in next week’s U.S. Open, but the 30,000-foot view suggests he’s but the next in a long line of taller and longer players. Hate it or love it, it’s the truth.

The post Why 21-year-old bomber Wilco Nienaber is a glimpse into golf’s future appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

Mr & Mrs H ? pic.twitter.com/PcofLGbWEv

— Tyrrell Hatton (@TyrrellHatton) May 28, 2021

Turns out, it was a semi-disastrous day, at least from the start, as Hatton explained on Wednesday at Congaree Golf Club ahead of the Palmetto Championship.

“It was a cool day, a little bit different than how we initially planned it, but with COVID and everything, it was just me and Emily,” Hatton said. “It was funny, like we — the day wasn’t very smooth. Our driver turned up an hour late, so that meant we arrived half an hour late for our ceremony, and then, because we wanted it in the Blue Ridge Parkway and we wanted to hike up and have some nice pictures.”

To quickly recap, they were a half hour late for their own wedding, which sounds wild, but since it was just them at the ceremony it was likely a lot less stressful. But things got worse from there, as Hatton and Mrs. H went to take photos and Mother nature intervened. 

“Unfortunately, after finishing the ceremony, it absolutely pissed down with rain, and we then had to drive like two miles down the road, pulled over in a lay by, and we had our wedding pictures on the side of the road.

“So, yeah, not quite as magical as you’d plan it, I guess, but it was still pretty special.”

Well, if that whole rain on your wedding day = good luck thing is true, then Hatton could make some of our expert handicappers very rich this week in South Carolina. Then again, it sounds like he’s not quite at his physical peak after the celebration. 

“I certainly drunk my body weight in beer up in Asheville. I need to get back in the gym and sort myself out.” 

Sounds like a pretty good wedding day to us.

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