PGA Tour winner Lucas Herbert opens up on how he overcame mental struggles to fulfill the enormous potential he knew he always had
It takes a village to raise a child, as the old proverb goes. Its central lesson is that an entire community – not just parents – must contribute to a child’s upbringing. But what does it take to raise a PGA Tour winner? That question is more complicated.
While Lucas Herbert doesn’t know the answer, he does know without the people of Bendigo – and fellow Australians working in professional golf’s major tours – simply playing professional golf wouldn’t have been possible. Especially during his toughest period yet – 2019 – when the mental struggles of golf were strong enough for him to consider quitting.
It’s why Bendigo is usually the first stop for Florida-based Herbert during his homecoming tours of Australia. A chicken parmigiana at the Tysons Reef Hotel might not be exactly healthy, but it is good for Herbert’s soul. The same benefits flow from a game of cricket for Sedgwick Cricket Club, or the annual Christmas Challenge at Bendigo Golf Club. The activities, and the people involved, are a way to recharge his mind.
“I think you get some of the best people in the country; because people still live by those old-school ethics and values,” Herbert tells Australian Golf Digest.
Herbert’s career has been filled with ups and downs. At times, he’s hated golf. But most of the time, he’s obsessed with the game and takes regular leaps forward. As he sits down with Australian Golf Digest, he’s in the middle of great stretch.
Herbert’s 2021 season made it impossible not to hand the 26-year-old star his debut cover on our magazine. Herbert arrives at the photo shoot – at renowned photographer Peter Tarasiuk’s studio in the ultra-cool Fitzroy area of Melbourne – in his beloved Nissan GTR (a “Nissan Skyline” for those whose car knowledge is as limited as this writer’s) ready to go with a coffee in hand.
Herbert was buoyed by the fact a couple of days before the shoot, he’d had a huge victory on the cricket pitch. The lads from Sedgwick Cricket Club in Bendigo asked Herbert if he was keen to play a Twenty20 match against rivals Marong because they were short on numbers. They weren’t expecting miracles from the man they nicknamed – ironically – ‘Run Machine’ because his batting average is as low as his scores on the PGA Tour.
But, as it turned out, Herbert was batting when Sedgwick needed four runs off the last ball to win. One beautiful pull shot later and Herbert found the boundary for four. Chaos followed in the celebrations at Malone Park.
“It’s probably the least humble I’ve ever been in my life,” says Herbert with a laugh, who faced 25 balls and finished 39 not out.
In 2021, Herbert won the Irish Open on the European Tour and made the transition to the PGA Tour after securing his card through the secondary Korn Ferry Tour finals. He then bagged his maiden PGA Tour victory within his first few months as a newly minted member, at the Bermuda Championship. But he seems prouder of his glory out in the middle than his incredible accomplishments on the golf course.
Herbert jokes that Australian Golf Digest ignored him as a cover star until now, and that the match-winning knock for Sedgwick is what landed him his debut on the newsstands this month. He even gives the cricket heroics a name that makes it sound like a golf tournament – the ‘Sedgwick Amateur’.Suffice to say, Herbert is a big hit right now, whichever way you look at it.
LOW POINT
Before Herbert’s breakthrough win at the 2020 Dubai Desert Classic, there was a tough period that made him, although it threatened to break him.
The struggles began with a rules violation at the 2019 edition of that event in Dubai. Herbert shared the 36-hole lead with Bryson DeChambeau, but in the third round Herbert used his wedge to move loose impediments, as well as some sand, from behind the ball. Rules 12.2a and 12.2b allow players to touch or move loose impediments and they are generally allowed to touch the ground or sand with a hand or club, but it is forbidden to improve a player’s lie or test the surface of the sand. Herbert was deemed to be in violation and accepted his two-shot penalty, which led to a third-round 72. He finished T-7.
Except for his only other top 10 of that year, at the European Masters in the Swiss Alps, 2019 was a struggle – plenty of travel, missed cuts and lacklustre results. By July, when the Open Championship headed to Northern Ireland’s famed Royal Portrush, Herbert had fallen out of love with golf.
“I flew home the week before that Open, right after the Scottish Open,” Herbert recalls. “I couldn’t even turn on my TV to watch The Open. I didn’t really know Shane [Lowry] had won until probably a week after he’d won, because I just couldn’t really look at any golf stuff at that time.
“It was causing me quite a bit of pain and anxiety to be thinking about it. And I just didn’t have a good relationship with golf at the time. And then just being away from home a lot, too. I think I had one foot on the plane, ready to go home, the entire time I was away.
“I obviously wasn’t enjoying it, and, to me, it was like, ‘As soon as I get my tour card sorted for next year [and] I don’t have to worry about that, I’m on the next plane home.’ It wasn’t a healthy way to look at [pro golf].”
Then, the penny dropped.
“It ended up coming to a conversation that I had with myself, where it was like, ‘How long do you want to do this for? You’re going to be doing this for the next 20 years if you’re a golfer, so you’ve got the decision: you can either keep one foot on the plane for the rest of your career and hate it, or you can try to address the root problem, and make it fun again, so that you can go out and enjoy being on the road. It’s obviously a grind. Everyone hates being away from home, but everyone deals with it better or worse than others. I thought that it would be to my advantage, for my career, to deal with it.”
WHAT FRIENDS ARE FOR
So how did Herbert, now ranked 41st and officially the highest-ranked ‘Lucas’ in the world, turn it all around? How did he make golf fun again?
“I restructured the way I travel,” he says. “I used to have my team coming out with me a lot in that 2019 season. I don’t think they personally put any pressure on me, but I definitely felt the pressure of that. If I wasn’t working hard enough, or performing, I felt I was letting them down. That’s probably an unhealthy way to think.
“I think I should’ve been looking at it as: I’m playing golf for me, and I’m going to work as hard as I want to work, not how hard someone else wants me to work.”
Herbert also made more an effort to connect with fellow Australians on the European Tour, such as highly respected commentator and former pro golfer Alison Whitaker. Whitaker is one of the main voices of the European Tour’s beloved television coverage.
“I built better friendships with some people around. Simone, my physio at the time, she was great. We would hang out a lot. Alison Whitaker as well. The three of us hung out quite a lot.
“We might share an Airbnb for a week, or we’d go to dinner often. We started travelling with board games, so that at night we’d just go and hang out and play games… there was all sorts of board games, like Balderdash and Cluedo and all sorts of stuff. That probably made travelling a lot more fun again.”
Whitaker, who naturally feels some pressure being an essential part of the European Tour’s broadcasts, tells Australian Golf Digest she got as much out of that downtime on the road as Herbert did.
“The thing about Lucas and I hanging out on the road is that it’s just as important for me as it is for him,” she says. “We’re each other’s biggest fans but we’re also quite naturally different people; and it’s because of that he brings such an interesting viewpoint into my life that I don’t get from anyone else.
“But at the heart of it all… it’s just about making sure you balance the pressure of both of our jobs with fun. Lucas is such a lodestone of talent and part of that comes from the way his mind works. I’ve seen firsthand that not everything in his life has to be perfect for him to play well. His game and his mind have an incredible resilience now. He’s like the male version of [LPGA Tour winner] Bronte Law, I just don’t see him crumbling under the magnifying glass.”
Herbert says his resurgence required a step backwards in order to move forward.
“Taking a lot of expectations off myself helped,” he says. “Everyone had told me basically what my potential was for so long, and I just felt like I wasn’t living up to it. So I guess I tried to lower those expectations. But with [Herbert’s mind coach Jamie Glazier] I changed the way I looked at scores and results. You can have a bad round but take out the positives knowing that if you turn around one part of your game, you could be days away from playing really well.
“My goal for the 2020 Dubai Desert Classic was just to finish in the top 40 and build from there. And, funnily enough, as soon as I did that, I was able to enjoy it. The first week I did it was the week I won in Dubai.”
PGA TOUR ROOKIE
In April, Herbert will make his first trip down Magnolia Lane and play in his debut Masters at Augusta National – courtesy of winning the Bermuda Championship in November. He’ll play the Open Championship at St Andrews. He’ll also debut at TPC Sawgrass for the Players Championship. “I haven’t really set any goals yet,” he says. “But I’m just really looking forward to playing all these tournaments you watch on TV, thinking, Oh, I wish I could play that. I can’t wait to play that tournament. Whether it be the Masters, or The Open at St Andrews or regular events out on tour, like Bay Hill [Arnold Palmer Invitational], or Riviera [Genesis Invitational]… it’s going to be so cool to actually be there and hit the shots.”
Herbert is a PGA Tour winner now, but he knows certain facets of his game need to improve if he is to compete week in, week out with the best 150 or so players in the world.
“The fields are really, really strong. The guys are so good. The courses are tough. I’m not really expecting to just go out there and dominate on the PGA Tour straight away. I could potentially do that – I’m not going to rule that out – but I’m just not expecting to do that instantly.”
“If you look at the starts, my driving this year is nowhere near where it needs to be,” Herbert continues. His stats are incomplete given he wasn’t a PGA Tour member last season and he’s only into the beginning of his first full season, 2021-2022. However, in 32 measured rounds last season, Herbert hit just 49.6 per cent of fairways, which was near the bottom of the 200 or so players on tour. “You’re going to get a lot of courses on the PGA Tour where you get punished pretty hard for missing fairways,” Herbert says.
With plenty of power, a natural ball-striking ability and a great putting stroke, Herbert knows the sky is the limit if he improves his weaknesses. More importantly, he feels 2020 and 2021 is when he truly learned the art of winning.
Herbert led after 54 holes at the Irish Open last July and went on to convert the victory, while he also made a
valiant run at fellow Australian Min
Woo Lee at the Scottish Open, finishing
a shot outside a playoff that Lee eventually won.
Herbert then finished tied for fourth in the first event of the Korn Ferry Tour Finals to lock up a promotion to the PGA Tour. The confidence to pull off all three came from his clutch playoff win over Christiaan Bezuidenhout at the 2020 Dubai Desert Classic.
“I’d won a couple of junior events, but I’d never really won as an amateur in any big event,” Herbert says. “So, I’d never really learned how to win, and I felt like I’d probably thrown some tournaments away. Dubai in 2020, it gave me so much self-belief because it just felt like I learned how to close out. All of a sudden, I could trust in myself; when I had to hit a big shot to win the tournament, I could do it. I drew on that experience a lot [last] year, with Ireland and making a run in Scotland. I knew I could win.”
HOME SWEET HOME
Since Herbert came into Australian golf’s spotlight in 2014 as an amateur when he contended in the Australian Open and Australian Masters, he has been proudly referred to as the ‘Boy from Bendigo’. (He also has a base on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, where he is a club ambassador at Peregian Springs). Bendigo, 150 kilometres north-west of Melbourne, has produced some great athletes, like AFL star Joel Selwood, but Herbert is the first PGA Tour player from the area.
But what does the boy from Bendigo mean? What about Herbert is stereotypically Bendigo?
“Well, I love a parma (chicken parmigiana) from the Tysons Reef Hotel. That’s pretty stereotypical of Bendigo,” Herbert says with a laugh. “There’s just something about that country lifestyle. I really like it. In the country, you pretty much know everyone from that town and you feel like there’s probably more a sense of family there.”
Herbert honed his skills at Neangar Park Golf Club, just north of Bendigo. The club proudly shows the association in the hopes of not just finding another Herbert, but growing the popularity of golf in a town mad about Aussie rules and cricket.
“My local club, Neangar Park, really want to embrace the fact that I’m from there. It’s so supportive; they’re trying to get more people to play golf.
“The amount of messages on my phone from Neangar Park members, when I do win or play well, is pretty astounding and it’s cool. But it’s also cool that when I come back at Christmas, it doesn’t matter what I’ve done or how much money I’ve made, they’re the first ones to humble me or give me crap about something.”
Only 10 minutes east of Neangar Park sits Bendigo Golf Club. Each year, they have a Christmas Challenge. Crowds of locals walk with beers in hand, right beside Herbert as he plays a round of golf answering any and all of their questions. It’s Herbert’s way of thanking the village that helped raise him into a top-50 golfer on the world ranking.
“It’s on one of the Saturdays in December. It’s just informal. They have a decent gathering after with a big raffle where they auction items. It is a big event for the town. I try to get back to play it every year, because I remember when I was a kid, watching live sport was so cool when you’d seen that person on TV. And I want to feel like if I go back to Bendigo, people can actually come out and watch me play. Everyone tries to play golf in the morning, and then walk with a few beers in the afternoon, watching me and a few others play.
“There are no ropes up, so they can come up and talk to me whenever they like. Everyone comes up, and says well done on my year. They’ll ask me a thing or two here and there about what it’s like on tour. It’s just really cool.”
Photographs by Peter Tarasiuk
