LIV GOLF UNITED KINGDOM

July 24, 2026

Lucas Herbert

JCB Golf and Country Club

Ripper GC

Press Conference

THE MODERATOR: Lucas Herbert, 6-under 66 today. Currently 17-under with a four-shot lead entering into the weekend. An eventful front nine out there today, but things really seemed to click for you on the back nine.

LUCAS HERBERT: Yeah, I feel like I made probably a similar amount of birdies to yesterday. I just couldn't get the momentum going by making bogeys thrown in there. So very happy to finish with 6-under.

It was not my best stuff out there, but that back nine kind of hung around long enough to see my chance to take the lead again come to fruition.

Q. At the beginning of the day, it felt like the conditions may have been different, maybe some wind gusts. As it turned out, did that end up having any effect? Were the conditions any different from yesterday?

LUCAS HERBERT: I felt like I played similar to yesterday. Maybe a touch more wind, and everything is kind of baked out just a touch more as well. Yeah, a little trickier than yesterday. I haven't looked at the majority of the scoring, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's how it's reflected in there.

Yeah, it's playing nice at the moment. It's a lot of slopes and whatnot that you can use because of the firmness right now. It takes a bit of creativity, which is fun.

Q. When you're playing in a featured group -- last week obviously a lot of eyeballs on you. Yesterday you were grouped with Jon; today with Bryson -- do you feed off that extra energy and attention?

LUCAS HERBERT: A little bit. It was great playing with Bryson today. You kind of expect him to either hit a good shot or make every putt, and it kind of keeps you on your own game, just keeps you that little bit sharp on your own game, a little bit better.

I actually really enjoy it. I'm glad I'm playing with him again tomorrow. He's had some great support out there. There's a lot of fans out there watching our group, which was pretty awesome. It's a privilege to have him out here on the Tour because he's bringing a lot of eyeballs and a lot of fans, which we love doing around the world.

Q. Two rounds, two to go. What's your routine tonight as you get ready for the weekend?

LUCAS HERBERT: Trying to keep it pretty similar to what it's been. All the boys in Ripper -- the players, the caddies, the physios -- are all staying in one sort of big house. I'm sure we'll head in there and have some dinner together and have a few laughs.

The boys have been watching the darts the last couple nights, and then there was a very competitive carrot cutting competition last night, which sounds like we might be having again tonight. So enthralling stuff.

Q. Is that involved with preparing dinner, or is that just a separate competition of itself?

LUCAS HERBERT: I think Cameron's come up with it. I'm not exactly sure where it's come from, but the idea is to cut a carrot into two pieces and get them as close as you can weight-wise both pieces. The closest is the winner.

I don't know what he's got planned tonight, some sort of knockout round robin extravaganza. I'm sure that will entertain us and get our mind off the golf.

Q. I'm not sure how I'm going to follow that. Is that the kind of leadership skills you expect from a guy that's won at St Andrews, the carrot cutting contest?

LUCAS HERBERT: I think when you get all those kind of guys in a room together, like we'll come up with something, and you don't know what it's going to be.

It's kind of the fun thing about going away on a few of these, like to a few of these events all together. Especially if you get it like two in a row, the in jokes that end up, you know they're coming, but you don't know what they're going to be. It usually ends up on a wedge stamping half the time, but it's some -- yeah, it's good fun. One of the most enjoyable things about the team aspect is that sort of thing.

Q. Do you think that's actually beneficial, somebody in your position that has a lead, a four-shot lead, to be able to go back and kind of get away from thinking about the lead as opposed to like if you were out on your own and you'd have to sleep on a four-shot lead?

LUCAS HERBERT: Yeah, definitely. Being able to go home and hang out with the guys and, yeah, not think about golf too much, I'm looking forward to that for sure.

Overall, I would like to say we're all pretty neutral with like we could be at the bottom of the leaderboard or the top of the leaderboard as a team, and you wouldn't be able to tell while we're hanging around at nighttime.

Like I said, it's one of the funnest things about the team golf aspect. I think our team is one of the best. We have some of the best camaraderie with those sorts of things. Yeah, I feel pretty fortunate to be included in that.

Q. I wanted to ask you about the mental challenge of bouncing back from those kind of three short misses there on the front nine and the mental fortitude to basically turn the entire round around on the back nine. What was that like in terms of like trying to just get that out of your mind, those three short misses?

LUCAS HERBERT: Yeah, two of them are misreads, so it's kind of easy to get rid of. The one on 3, I just had a brain fart there. It was almost freeing in a way because that was like your first one to get out of the way.

I felt like yesterday was pretty damn close to perfect golf. There's not really any shots that I want back. You were almost on too good a run. To just hit one bad shot, you're like, okay, cool, I got one of those out of the way now. I can go back to business.

Look, some days I dwell and you hang on and I think about them a lot and they carry with you, and some days you kind of let them go. Today was a day where I was kind of let them go pretty quick.

Q. Are you able to handle that more now at this stage of your career than when you first started out? Would they have impacted you a little bit more early on?

LUCAS HERBERT: Absolutely. I think everyone matures as they get further into their career. I probably understand how much each of those putts doesn't actually mean. The older you get, the more you realize you should be judged over a much larger body of work, not the short ones you miss.

Yeah, I think age is on my side there with maturing a bit and letting those ones go a little easier.

Q. Last question from me. I wanted to ask you, we're coming up on the eighth anniversary of Jarrod's passing. Obviously he means a lot to you. You wear his pins. You carry his head cover in your bag whenever you play. Can you just talk about the impact that he had on you, and why did he have such an impact on you?

LUCAS HERBERT: I think I just resonated so much with Jarrod. He's from a country town in Australia -- not the same town as me, but there's a lot of similarities, Shepparton and Bendigo. They're not one-horse towns, but they're smaller country towns where people have the same kind of values. We played at the same club growing up, Commonwealth Golf Club. So I felt like there was a lot of parallels across our journey.

Then he was someone who was great to me coming through. I was just turning pro around that time. He was back in Australia playing a bit of golf. He was sort of in between his bouts of chemotherapy. Yeah, just someone that I guess I admired a lot about his outlook on life despite how bad a hand he'd been built.

Yeah, it was pretty tragic to sort of have him go the way he did, and he fought very, very hard. I guess at the time I felt like Jarrod was -- they obviously had the Challenge foundation that had helped him quite a lot, helped a lot of kids in similar positions quite a lot, but that was something they'd supported a lot.

I think you get someone like Jarrod passing in that kind of situation, the charity gets some love for a couple of months, and then it kind of fades away and everyone forgets about it. I sort of made a bit of a point at the time that I didn't want it to be like that. I wanted to carry on.

You know, I'd never had -- I haven't had a real deep personal impact by like a sibling or someone getting really, really sick and really wanting to support a charity for that reason per se. So that was kind of the closest I'd had of someone that was close in my life, and I wanted to just make a difference going forward. Whether it's other kids that have the same conditions or similar conditions, if we can help them out, or if some kid gets a lot of excitement about coming out to play golf with me or just meeting me, like that's so easy for me to do.

I just wanted it to carry on a little bit further than a couple of months. It's been great to carry it on for nearly eight years now. It's something I'm pretty proud of, and I want to continue carrying it on forward. It's become sort of kind of part of my character to have something yellow, whether it's the head cover or the pin on the hat. That's what everyone kind of knows me as, so I want to keep continuing that on. Continuing his legacy and trying to build the Challenge foundation up as much as we can.

Q. We see his presence out there. Are there times you feel his presence out there?

LUCAS HERBERT: Yeah, different moments like it comes to you. There was one in 2021 when I got my PGA Tour card. I remember the putt on the last green. It was probably always high, and it kind of lipped in from a spot that you'd probably given up on it a little bit, and it lipped in. I couldn't help but thinking maybe Jarrod had kicked that one a little bit for me.

So, yeah, I'm not a big sort of faith believer or anything like that, but there's something up there we can't explain. Yeah, there's been a couple times where -- I had a friend pass from suicide earlier this year. Kind of the last couple weeks, I've kind of felt -- my mind's been drawn to his name and his character in little tricky spots, being like, come on, knock this one in for me.

It's funny how it works like that. Yeah, you definitely do feel their presence out there.