Tomorrow week, he'll travel out to Majorca for his final tournament of the season with his European Tour card on the line. The Ryder Cup swept in, but not every boat has been left bobbing on the tide.

The shadow land of the tour is a world, and hundreds of thousands of euro, away from the K Club, yet for the players who now find themselves on the brink, the difference is more like just a few shots over the space a year. It's that fine line between making a big cheque and missing the cut, between nerve and nerves, between the privileged caravan of tournament golf and the real world beyond.

Higgins has crunched the numbers a few times already. He is currently 130th in the Order of Merit with earnings of 170,000, but only the top 115 retain their cards, so he needs at least 30,000 to get himself across the line. Anything worse than a top-12 finish in Majorca, and he'll be considering his options.

Again.

So far, his timing hasn't been great.

He performed reasonably well at tournaments in Vienna and Madrid, but they were the smaller money events.

The top-seven finish and the 23,000 he earned from the Indonesia Open would have been worth over 100,000 at the European Open. Timing.

"The whole card situation brings a lot of pressure with it. Okay, you don't think about it much at the beginning of the year, but later it's in the back of your mind, and then when you don't have enough money made, it's there all the time.

"You need one or two big weeks, and then your card is virtually taken care of, but I never really played well enough in the bigger tournaments. So, I have to go to Majorca and play it as just another event. If right from the start I'm thinking about where I have to finish, then I won't have any chance."

Around the Ryder Cup, he took some time out and went salmon fishing on the Butler's Pool close to home in Waterville. If he lost his card, he could go back to the Tour School . . . his eighth pilgrimage since he turned pro late in 1994 . . . and if that failed, his ranking would still get him into about 15 events next year. This setback wouldn't be the end.

"Not being more consistent can get you down a bit. Still, if I didn't believe I could play well enough to succeed out there, I'd stop straight away. I know I could've played better this year, I'm looking for things that will help me perform to the best of my ability, and I haven't got there yet."

Coming up to his 34th birthday in December, David Higgins' ambition still simmers. Bit of a surprise really when you consider the accumulation of scar tissue during a career which has had considerably more troughs than peaks.

Back in '94, he won the Irish Close and the South of Ireland beating Padraig Harrington in both finals, but the greater things didn't quite materialise as he oscillated between a full schedule and scraping a living.

He shot a 64 in a rain-affected BMW International Open in Munich in his first full season and finished in a tie for third, and he once led the Madrid Open after a second round 62. He could play, but he found it hard to play consistently. Then in 2000, he finished runnerup in the Challenge Tour money list to Henrik Stenson. He knows the question's coming: how come Harrington and Stensonf and you didn't?

"Harrington and Stenson move on, become top players, and I don't. Why?

I wish I knew the answer to that. There are probably 500 other guys you could put the same question to." Now he's thinking about the three victories he had on the Challenge Tour that year, and what they did to his confidence.

"I'm sure I doubt myself more than those guys, and I haven't put myself in enough situations when I could win.

In 2000, the first time I won on the Challenge Tour, that was the normal sort of progress that I'd be expecting, but after that when I went to a tournament, the cut was never in my mind.

I can honestly say I was going there to win, that was all I was thinking about.

"So, I suppose, if you take away all the pressures that come when you're trying to retain your card, and trying to make cuts, you just go out and play.

Natural talent comes out, suddenly you're in contention, and you get comfortable in that position. I've never got there on the European Tour, and that's still the goal."

There was a sort of turning point, realisation, watershed, Rubicon, or whatever, four years ago. The 2002 season on both the European and the Challenge tours had been a miserable catalogue of 19 events, four pay days and just over 7,000 in the bank. "I was kind of lost in my head to be honest, " Higgins remembers, "I didn't know what I was doing. So, it was a case of let's hang on a second, think about things a bit. I really had to ask myself, what am I doing here, and where am I going?"

This time, the rehab wouldn't include the Tour School. It had to be an altogether more gentle path, and he wound up playing on the PGA Irish Region circuit in 2003 for a couple of grand here and there. With a family steeped in the game . . . his father Liam and brother Brian are both professionals at Waterville where his mother Noreen operates the club shop, while his uncle Ted is also a professional . . . he knew he had a parachute.

"Of course there are other things I could do in the golf business, but I think it's the same for me and a lot of other players on the tour, none of us really want to go into other areas of the game.

It's not that it's admitting failure, it's more that there's something inside fellas who play golf for a living. You just have this belief that you know you can do it. When I moved away from the European Tour, I realised the opportunity I had, I realised that was where I wanted to be.

"When the fire in your belly goes, that's it. You know you've had enough.

I took a step away from it all, found that the desire was still there, and I'm slowly coming back."

Last year, he secured his European Tour card following a solid series of performances on the Challenge Tour, and here he is once again caught between a reprieve and uncertainty.

He had hoped to get into the Dunhill Links field, but that didn't materialise, and while he's anticipating good news, he has yet to be confirmed as a starter for Majorca.

"I should be okay because not all of the top guys will be playing, but in truth, I shouldn't be in this position. It's probably cost me about 75,000 to play the tour, so taking in sponsorship deals, my head's above water financially, but I seem to keep finishing in 30th or 40th place, and that's a shot a round too many."

Higgins has never won on the European Tour, but that doesn't matter as the last throw of the season looms.

Keeping his card this time would be a different sort of victory.

Another last chance.