Still chasing his first major and mired in an extended slump, Rickie Fowler finished under par on day one of the PGA Championship to validate his special invite.
KIAWAH ISLAND, S.C. – Adam Scott is a former Masters champion and Tyrell Hatton is No. 8 in the Official World Golf Ranking, and Thursday they spent 18 holes of a major championship listening to fans cheer for the 128th-ranked player in the world.
A lot of people adore Rickie Fowler, which is why a lot of people do not. Almost anyone in golf will say Fowler is as nice a person as there is in the game, prone to small acts of kindness, perpetually aware that other people have feelings, too. And yet there is grumbling that he is a marketing creation—a player with just five PGA Tour wins and seemingly 10 times that many endorsements. Regular PGA Tour viewers are accustomed to Fowler being in a “featured group” for TV, whether they want to see him or not, and commercial breaks only bring another onslaught of Fowler. There is resentment that he became a star by wearing bright clothes, having a handsome face and (these days) sporting a mustache that he looks like he grew just to show he could make it look good.
There is some truth to that, but it also undersells how well Fowler has played. He has won the Players Championship and contended in every major. He arrived here this week in an awful slump, so bad that when he was asked about struggling for the last few months, he smiled and said, “Well, it's definitely been more than a few months.”
It has. Fowler was not invited to the Masters and needed a special invite to this week’s PGA Championship. He has leaned on some famous friends during his swoon; he watched part of the Masters with Tiger Woods, and he has played a lot of golf with Michael Jordan at Jordan’s new course, The Grove XXIII. Fowler said playing with Jordan is a great way to prepare, because he has to give Jordan 10 strokes that Jordan is too good to deserve, there is always money on the line, and it’s a challenge to play well with MJ chirping in your ear.
“He isn’t quiet,” Fowler said.
The best way for Fowler to get critics on his side would be to win majors. But the second-best, bizarrely, might be to do what he has done: play like a fringe PGA Tour player for a while. It erases the perception that he just cruises toward third-place finishes. Golf fans generally appreciate when players battle and succeed. If Fowler regains his form, he might go from overpackaged to charming underdog.
He looked to be on his way back Thursday, finishing at 1-under on a brutal Ocean Course. But even Fowler understands this was just one round.
His fall has been bewildering. “Where stuff started setting in was once I got outside the top 50 in the world, wasn't going to be in Augusta,” he said. “I've had to deal with that for a few months.” He has only recently started, in his words, to play golf instead of playing “golf swing”—strategizing and executing shots instead of thinking about the mechanics.
He has also been putting as poorly as he has in years. This is bewildering, too, but it is also fairly normal. Players who are working so hard to fix their swing tend to lose their sharpness on the greens. It happened to Jordan Spieth in recent years. Fowler said he spent “three or four hours” on the practice greens this week, separate from his on-course prep, to get his putting feel back.
Once Fowler finds his game again, he can resume the challenge that preceded his decline: Finishing a major. It is possible that, as critics say, he has been too consumed by chasing endorsements. But it’s just as likely that his sensitivity and tendency to empathize with others makes it harder to develop a Jordan-like mentality.
Maybe he doesn’t need that mentality. He arrived here determined to take advantage of his special invite—not just by playing well, but by appreciating it.
“In a way, it's just putting things into perspective and understanding that I get to do this for a living,” he said. “And that's awesome. I've had a great run so far out here. I definitely want more. But at the end of the day, we get to play an amazing game for a living … we have it pretty darn good out here, and we have fun. Go play golf.”
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