Five days after a one-minute lapse cost him a share of the first-round lead at the PGA Championship, Garrick Higgo has parted ways with his caddie. The South African will tee it up at this week’s CJ Cup Byron Nelson with a new bag-carrier — and a story that the rest of the PGA Tour will be talking about for a while.
What Happened At Aronimink
Higgo arrived at the first tee at Aronimink Golf Club roughly one minute past his scheduled 7:18 a.m. ET tee time on Thursday. Under the Rules of Golf, that one minute matters: arriving within five minutes of your tee time triggers a general penalty — two strokes — rather than disqualification. Anything beyond five minutes, and a player is out of the tournament before they swing a club.
Higgo opened with what would have been a stellar 3-under 67 in difficult conditions, a score that would have left him tied for the first-round lead. With the two-stroke penalty assessed on the opening hole, his scorecard turned into a 69. By Friday evening, when the cut line settled, he missed it by a single shot.
Speaking after his Thursday round, Higgo described a frantic scene at the practice area — his caddie, Austin Gaugert, shouting at him to get to the tee. The pair sprinted, but the clock had already run out on one of golf’s strictest, least-forgiving rules.
The Split
By Monday, Gaugert was off the bag. Higgo will work with veteran looper Nick Cavendish-Pell this week at the CJ Cup Byron Nelson at TPC Craig Ranch in McKinney, Texas — the same week that Aaron Rai’s win at Aronimink is still dominating the news cycle.
The 26-year-old South African, a two-time PGA Tour winner, hasn’t publicly assigned blame. He didn’t need to. The job description of a Tour caddie is unambiguous: get the player to the tee on time, with the right club, in the right frame of mind. When a tournament evaporates because the first box wasn’t ticked, a change is almost inevitable, however harsh that feels.
Why Tee-Time Penalties Cut So Deep
Tee-time penalties are rare at the elite level for a reason: most pros build a buffer of an hour or more between waking and walking to the tee. Stretching, putting, range work, food, mental rehearsal — the routine is engineered to absorb any delay. When the system breaks, it usually means several things went wrong at once: traffic, a missed shuttle, a misread tee sheet, or a warm-up that ran long.
Rule 5.3a is unforgiving on purpose. The PGA Tour’s daily schedule is a tightly packed grid of three-ball groups separated by 11-minute windows. Allow one player to slip by a minute and the entire afternoon waves shift. So the penalties stack quickly:
- Under five minutes late: two-stroke general penalty applied to your opening hole
- Over five minutes late: disqualification
- Within the starter’s grace window: no penalty, but rarely granted
That gap between “two strokes” and “DQ” is the difference between Higgo’s missed cut and a tournament that ended before it began. He should, in some sense, count himself lucky — but at a major, two strokes is the cut. He’ll wear this for a while.
What This Means For Higgo’s Season
The wider context isn’t kind. Higgo entered the PGA Championship sitting around the FedEx Cup bubble for the top 70 — the cutoff that determines who survives into the playoffs. A solid weekend at Aronimink would have padded his standing. Instead, he goes to the CJ Cup Byron Nelson trying to claw back ground at a course where Scottie Scheffler is defending and the field is stacked with players who skipped a brutal Aronimink test.
The caddie change adds another variable. New caddie-player partnerships at the highest level can take weeks to gel. Yardages, course reads, the rhythm between shots, the kind of conversation a player wants over a long bunker walk — none of that comes off the shelf. Cavendish-Pell is experienced, but Tuesday’s practice round will be his first time reading TPC Craig Ranch alongside Higgo.
What This Means For You
If you play in any structured competition — club championship, member-guest, local Tour qualifier — the same rule applies in spirit. Show up early, lay out your routine in time blocks, and assume something will go sideways. The professional version of this story is dramatic. The amateur version is quieter, and far more common: a player who hurried their warm-up loses the first three holes mentally before they ever lose them on the card.
Three habits worth borrowing from Tour routines:
- Arrive 90 minutes early, minimum. Putting first, then chipping, then full swings, with at least 10 minutes to walk to the tee.
- Carry your watch on the range, set to the tee time. Don’t rely on the starter to wave you over.
- Build in a 5-minute buffer at the tee. The opening hole is hard enough; you don’t want to start it out of breath.
Key Takeaways
- Garrick Higgo split with caddie Austin Gaugert after a one-minute late arrival at the PGA Championship cost him two strokes and ultimately the cut.
- Veteran looper Nick Cavendish-Pell will be on the bag at this week’s CJ Cup Byron Nelson.
- Under Rule 5.3a, late tee-time arrivals draw a two-stroke penalty within five minutes and disqualification beyond that.
- Higgo, at 26, has two PGA Tour wins (2021 Palmetto Championship, 2024 ISCO Championship) and is fighting for FedEx Cup playoff position with months to recover.
Sources: ESPN, Golf Channel, Golf Digest, SI Golf, PGA Tour.
