LOS ANGELES — More than any championship in golf, the U.S. Open makes competitors acutely aware of how little separates yesterday’s pigeon from today’s statue. Witness Brooks Koepka. He won the PGA Championship last month, but was bruised in the early going Thursday at Los Angeles Country Club. He didn’t lack for company on skid row; expected contenders Patrick Cantlay and Justin Thomas were also among those struggling.
Perhaps more than any player in the 156-man field, Rickie Fowler understands how capricious golf’s cycles can be, and not just at the U.S. Open.
On Thursday, Fowler posted an near-flawless 62, the lowest round in the Open’s 123-year history and tying the lowest ever in any major. By the time he pulled out of the parking lot, he was tied with Xander Schauffele atop the leaderboard, the record-setting duo a handful clear of the competition.
Rewind 364 days. Fowler pulled out of The Country Club on opening day of the U.S. Open in an altogether less glamorous position. He was the first alternate but a call to the tee never came — an undignified exit for one with his undeniable star power. But the attitude he displayed that day in Boston goes some way to explaining the position in which he now finds himself in L.A.
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“I enjoyed being around and playing with the guys and getting in some good work on the range,” he said 12 months ago. “So there is a lot of good stuff to take away from not being able to play.”
Commercialism has made Fowler an easy target for criticism. He has far outpaced peers in being the face of blue-chip brands while trailing them in victories, the kind of jarring imbalance that is catnip for the Socratic analysis prevalent on social media. On the other hand, attitude – not so much on good days like today, but on lousy days like in Boston – make him an easy guy to root for.
There have been plenty of disappointing days in recent years. The last of his five PGA Tour wins was more than four years ago, around the time he began working with John Tillery on swing changes that never quite took. He went 29 consecutive events without recording a single top-10 finish, a run of poor form that saw his world ranking – once as high as No. 4 – plummet to 185th, rendering him ineligible for most major championships. Prior to his record-setting showing at L.A. Country Club, he last played a U.S. Open in 2020 in New York.
The struggles were granular too. Where once he led the PGA Tour in putting, he dropped outside the top 160 in ‘22, and his once-vaunted ball-striking didn’t crack the top 100. He was still a familiar presence on weekend broadcasts, but that owed more to his ubiquitous commercial presence than to on-course performance, a fact that detractors were not shy in pointing out.
It was a confluence of miseries of the type that would have many of his peers making fools of themselves—club-throwing tantrums, snapping at a luckless caddie, blanking fans, stiff-arming media and generally adopting a ‘woe is me’ disposition more befitting a raft-riding refugee than a golfer bouncing around on a private jet. But Fowler didn’t do any of those things. He remained unfailingly professional and courteous. He put his head down and kept grinding.
He reconnected with his old coach, Butch Harmon, who is as much psych-svengali as swing guru. “Butch is great, just his voice and having him in your corner,” Fowler said Thursday. “Just telling you something to give you a little confidence to go out there and just go play golf and keep it simple.”
He still hasn’t won since early 2019, but Fowler’s incremental progress is no less impressive for the absence of trophies. His last dozen starts have yielded 10 finishes inside the top 20, with just one missed cut. His statistical performance shows enormous gains in every category. He’s back inside the world’s top 50. In the world of small victories, Fowler has been on a heater.
“A lot of it for me is what I’ve been able to get out of off weeks where I’m not playing very well and still able to make the cut and kind of turn those into at least top 20s or top 10s,” he said. “The last few years those were missed cuts and going home.”
Fowler grew up about 90 miles southeast of here in Murietta, but this is about as close as he’s ever likely to get to a hometown major championship. And as he has done through the lousy times, he’s making the most of the situation.
“It’s definitely been long and tough. A lot longer being in that situation than you’d ever want to,” he admitted. “But it makes it so worth it having gone through that and being back where we are now.”
