I’ll have a head up in the competition

The speaker was confusing body parts, very common in the malaphor world. This is a congruent conflation of “a leg up” and “a head start”, both referring to an advantage in something over someone. “Heads up” (warning) might also be in the mix, as the word “up” might have led to the speaker choosing the wrong idiom. As I have noted before, the malaphor process is like someone putting his hand in a cookie jar, grabbing two cookies at once, and then, trying to pull them out of the jar, breaks both of them in two, creating a hybrid of two cookies. The mind is a cookie jar.

Kudos to Samuel N. Bederman for unintentionally saying this one, recognizing it as a malaphor, and sending it in.