In this Golf Channel video feature, contestants Christian Heavens and Carolin Pinegger sit down with Kelly Tilghman to discuss the upcoming series Big Break Myrtle Beach – premiering Tuesday, Oct. 7 on Golf Channel, and showcasing Barefoot Resort &amp; Golf and Pawleys Plantation Golf &amp; Country Club.
Kelly Tilghman:  Well exciting news.  Big Break Myrtle Beach is coming up.  October 7th is the debut.  You can catch it at 9 p.m. Eastern time.  All new cast:  6 men, 6 women, 12 players doing battle at Myrtle Beach&#8217;s Barefoot Resort. Three beautiful golf courses, and a lot of feistiness, and of course, as you&#8217;ve come to know and love, dramatic twists and turns, as only the Big Break can provide.  You&#8217;re looking at 12 contestants, and we are lucky enough to have 2 of them in studio with us right now.  Carolin Pinegger from Austria, and Christian Heavens, who hails from East St. Louis, Missouri.  Welcome to the show, guys.
Christian Heavens:  Hey, how are you doing?
Carolin Pinegger:  Well thanks for having us.
Kelly Tilghman: Good.  How are you guys doing?  This is exciting times in your life.
C. Pinegger:  Yes it is.
C. Heavens:  Yeah.  I&#8217;m very excited.  It&#8217;s been a long wait, but it&#8217;s finally here. Ready to see what comes from opportunities.
Kelly Tilghman:  Let&#8217;s start with the show first and then we&#8217;ll dive a little bit more into your personal backgrounds.  What can we expect on this show, Christian?
C. Heavens:  Drama.  A lot of drama.  I&#8217;ve watched the show and I&#8217;m a big fan of the show.  I&#8217;ve been watching it for a long time and every year there&#8217;s drama, and this year we&#8217;ve got the same amount of drama it&#8217;s going to be pretty exciting.  There&#8217;s a lot of good shots, too.
Kelly Tilghman:  Just the same amount because we want more.
C. Heavens:  I think we might have it.  There&#8217;s been a lot going on and of course we didn&#8217;t see everything that happened, but there&#8217;s been rumors and speculation just on words that were said between players.  It&#8217;s going to be interesting.  I&#8217;m interested to see it myself, so.
Kelly Tilghman:  Were you one of these players, Carolin?
C. Heavens:  Drama has a way of finding me whether I start it or not, so at some point I&#8217;ll wind up in it, I&#8217;m sure. This show also shows a lot of very good golf, so I&#8217;m really excited to see what the reactions are and how people react to it. 
Kelly Tilghman:  You seem so sweet, I can&#8217;t believe drama just finds you out of nowhere. Christian, I would love to start with you.  Your background is fascinating.  Hailing from East St. Louis, tough streets, I understand.
C. Heavens:  Yeah.  It&#8217;s in the St. Louis metropolitan area and from Ferguson being in the news quite a bit lately, the negativity and the tension&#8217;s been building up, and I&#8217;ve witnessed it, and it&#8217;s just a lot of trouble to get into.  It&#8217;s very easy to get into trouble.  I&#8217;ve been to countless funerals of cousins, several have been to jail, but I found a way to avoid it.  Golf has really helped me out with it.  My grandfather got me into the game of golf at an early age and I just fell in love with it and it kept me out of that trouble.  So it kept me out of the streets and along with the First Tee program coming along as well.  So golf, definitely you could say, saved my life or kind of got me in a direction away from all the negativity and trouble that it&#8217;s pretty easy to find in my area.
Kelly Tilghman:  I&#8217;m sure your friends probably gave you a hard time about playing golf too.  How did you stand up to that?
C. Heavens:  Yeah, I loved it.  I used to kind of be shy about it. I&#8217;d have golf practice, and I&#8217;d go change and kind of hide from the crowd wearing golf clothes because it wasn&#8217;t cool.  It&#8217;s not that cool, but I just love the game. You can&#8217;t take me away from it, so it&#8217;s just something I always had.
Kelly Tilghman:  You&#8217;re from Austria?
C. Pinegger:  Yes.
Kelly Tilghman:  Beautiful country.  Are you a skier, by the way?
C. Pinegger:  Yes.
Kelly Tilghman:  You&#8217;d have to be, right?
C. Pinegger:  When I was 2 and lived on the slope.
Kelly Tilghman:  Now did you speak English when you came to America?  Did you understand the language, were you fluent?
C. Pinegger:  No.  I thought I did much better than it turned out to be.  It&#8217;s like you&#8217;ve taken German for 3 years in school and then moving to Germany and having to do school, read books, write essays, and it was nothing like I thought it was going to be. It was definitely a very hard transition, language-wise, and especially if you&#8217;re in a completely new environment, you don&#8217;t know anybody; you don&#8217;t know how to talk to them because you simply just don&#8217;t speak their language.  It would be hard enough already if you just would know the person, but &#8230;
Kelly Tilghman:  What brought you to the states?  You attended UCF?
C. Pinegger:  I went to IMG Academy first in Bradenton, Florida because I was looking for a boarding school where I could pursue my dream to become a pro golfer because in Austria, as you know, there is too much snow and it&#8217;s cold more than 6 months a year.  You just don&#8217;t have the time and the amount of practice that you need to get that good. Me and my mother started looking around for some schools and we found IMG, and that&#8217;s why I moved to boarding school and made that change.
Kelly Tilghman:  Beautiful, beautiful.  Where are you now in your professional career? We&#8217;re looking forward to watching you and your skill set on Big Break, see what kind of drama finds you. Where are you now with your game? Where are you competing and what is your dream?
C. Pinegger:  Right now I am playing on the Symetra Tour, I turned professional last year, and right after college as I wanted to, and it&#8217;s been good so far.  It&#8217;s been really great.  The season has been &#8230; It seems short but it has been long and I&#8217;ve learned so much from it.  Honestly, I can look back on it and say my results might not always match what I was aspiring, but what I take from it into next year is going to be a lot of experience and I&#8217;ve really enjoyed it. It&#8217;s a great tour.
Kelly Tilghman:  How about you, Christian?
C. Heavens:  Yeah, I&#8217;m on that mini tour grind.  You tell a lot of people that you know, you&#8217;re a professional golfer and their eyes lit up, but you have to stop them, like I&#8217;m not on the PGA Tour yet.  It&#8217;s tough on the mini tours traveling low budget and playing like the Florida golf tour now.  I&#8217;m just working my way up, getting ready for Q school, and that&#8217;s about it right now.  Just getting ready, just playing in tournaments whenever I can and just trying to stay on the road.
Kelly Tilghman:  I&#8217;ve been there.  It&#8217;s been a while, but I&#8217;ve been there.  It&#8217;s a tough time as a golfer, but it&#8217;s such a great time in your life if you can embrace each and every opportunity that comes your way, and Big Break was obviously a huge one for you guys.  We&#8217;re excited to see what you&#8217;ve got.

Big Break Myrtle Beach Spotlight: Meet Christian Heavens & Carolin Pinegger

Courses in this Article

Pawleys Plantation Golf & Country Club

Barefoot Resort - Dye Course

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