‘It’s so cool!’ – Harry Higgs recalls viral celebration at last year’s WM Phoenix Open and hints at more to come

PGA Tour star Harry Higgs might not have won the 2022 WM Phoenix Open but he was the name on everyone’s lips – and social media feeds – after a headline-grabbing celebration alongside playing partner Joel Dahmen.

Fan-favourite Harry Higgs has recalled his shirt-flipping antics at last year’s WM Phoenix Open that sent the crowds into a beer-throwing frenzy and went viral on social media.

Higgs’ hopes of securing a first PGA Tour title were long gone when he teed it up alongside Joel Dahmen in the final round of last year’s event but he would end up over-shadowing eventual winner Scottie Scheffler.

On the eve of this year’s tournament, the 31-year-old has lifted the lid on the events that led up to his unforgettable post-putt celebration on the world-famous 16th hole at TPC Scottsdale.

“There’s kind of a long story which I’ll give to you,” Higgs told the Discovery Golf Show. “I got paired with Keith Mitchell, who’s a great friend of mine, on Saturday. Apparently, Keith was saying that he was convinced that he could get me to take my shirt off on the hole and his bribe, if you will, was that they would raise a bunch of money to pay whatever my fine would be.

“And I told him, absolutely not. I have no interest in doing that. That’s taking it way too far. I even said aloud, ‘if I wind up winning the Masters, no one’s going to remember that, they’re still just going to remember me as the guy that took my shirt off!’ So fast forward, I’m having a horrible day on Saturday playing, you know, four or five over.

“I fell pretty far down the leaderboard and got paired on Sunday with my other great friend, Joel Damon. Very unfortunately, Joel tweeted out the night before, ‘If this gets enough retweets, Harry will take his shirt off on 16’.

The stage was now set for a memorable day and while Higgs was hoping to go unnoticed, the fans who had once again flocked to the course had other ideas.

“Fast forward to our 12:00 tee time, off the back nine, and it’s just me and Joel,” recalled Higgs. “I was giving him **** all morning about like, ‘Dude, why would you do that? I do not want to do this. I do not want to do this’.

“He’s like, ‘Well, no one even noticed and I didn’t put a number to it. Like it wasn’t like a thousand retweets or whatever’. It was just no one was going to even notice.

“I teed off and it was, ‘Did you get enough retweets? Are you going to do it? Are you going to take your shirt off?’ And it was like that every fairway and every green leading up to 16.

“So obviously, we get to the 16th hole. I believe I went first and hit it over the green one. You get booed. Joel hit a great shot to like 12ft. So we’re walking up to the green and all hell breaks loose right? ‘Take your shirt off! Show some skin!’, everybody’s chanting and Joel is walking right next to me, you know, getting them to do it louder.

“And I don’t know that there’s actual video of this, but I was going the whole time, like looking up to everybody. ‘I’m not doing it. I’m not doing it!’. I go back behind the green, I putt it, I had a bad lie, I didn’t want to chunk a chip in front of these people and get booed again.

“I ran it like 10 feet by on the same line as his putt. I get over my ball and they are obviously not going to be quiet as I’m about to hit, which is totally fine. The tough part was as soon as I hit the putt, I knew it was in the hole and I swear to you, it took three minutes for it to go into the hole.

“So in my mind, I’m going, Are you going to do it? Are you actually going to do it? No, I’m not going to do it. That’s too much. I’d never. You shouldn’t do that. No, no, no. Maybe I’ll do it now. Maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll do it. Maybe I won’t.

“Obviously, the ball drops in the hole and people forget that I didn’t actually take my shirt off. I just lifted mine and all hell breaks loose. And the good man that Joel is, as I go up, he’s behind me the whole time, I go up and grab my ball out of the hole and as I turn around I see him. He had his top fully off and he’s doing the helicopter and everything. Yeah, peer pressure and two great friends got me to lift my shirt up in front of 30,000 and millions watching at home.”

Reflecting on the daunting challenge of teeing it up in such a cauldron, Higgs added, “You dread it until you’re there…you’re just so anxious about it coming, but then in the moment, it’s just so cool. It’s a chance for us to react and respond in a way that, you know, a ton of people are going to love.

“The moment when you’re in there, you can’t hear a thing. Your caddy’s telling you how far you got and you’re like, ‘How much did you say? How far do I have?’ And then it’s a very difficult hole because of all the adrenaline, I seemed to sail it over the green three times last year. You pull on a nine iron and next thing you know, you hit a nine iron and 175 yards in the air!”

He added, “So you try to plan your best for that, but that’s really hard to plan for. So you’re kind of looking at the middle of the green so you don’t get booed when you miss it and then the fun really begins. Like, all right, I’m ready to drop a 25-footer and celebrate maybe a little with all these folks.”

Higgs has previously revealed that his crowd-pleasing turn earned him a word of warning from PGA Tour officials but that doesn’t necessarily mean there will not be an encore this week.

“So there is an idea which I cannot fully disclose,” Higgs teased. “It is a fully clothed idea, but it is something like an homage.

“We probably took it a step too far. We’re not going to do that again, but we’re still going to show you that we’re the same kind of fun-loving idiots that we were last year this year.

“But if I’m in the field and I’m paired with Joel and one of us makes a hole in one, the promise that we made to the tour about keeping our clothes on could very well be broken.”