Beginner Gardening: Pruning enormous fig tree, 1 by cinemike

cinemike wrote:
Hi,
I have an enormous fig tree in my garden - well two in fact, but one is just too big - 35ft in diameter and about 20 ft high.
It is a purple fig that produces untold amount of fruit that is mainly shared between the birds and the worms. I pull about 50-100lbs of figs off each year, and give most away, in spite of loving figs.
I make jam, but mainly with the green/white figs in my back garden - that tree is about half the size and manageable.
So I want to reclaim the some of the large chunk of garden that has been acquired by Fig Tree Incorporated.
My inclination is to cut back the five or six major branches that radiate at the bottom level and which perform an elongated sine wave shape, rising up to about 3' above the ground before decending to the ground and then branching into fruiting spurs. I feel that cutting these back where they start to descend for the first time might be the best approach.
I am not bothered about loosing a year or tao's fruit... as I said.
Can anyone tell me is this is the right method.
Picture appended.