Rickie Fowler’s return to form already feels like a distant memory

By the late summer of 2022, Rickie Fowler was deep into a well-documented spiral. He hadn’t won since February 2019, hadn’t played in the Masters or the US Open since 2020 and his world ranking had dropped to 185. Desperate to find answers he couldn’t find in the mud during the South Florida marathon, Fowler called Mr. Fix-It, as in his former skating coach, the legendary Butch Harmon. In the coming months, Harmon and Fowler reunited, both physically and in person, and piece by piece began to rebuild the swing that once made Fowler a top 5 player and consistent threat in the majors.

Progress came quickly: T6 at Fortinet in mid-September; T2 in Zozo, Japan, in October; more consistency in every part of his game. When the new year began, Fowler picked up where he left off. After missing nine cuts in the 2021-22 season, he didn’t miss a 10-week stretch from January to early May and finished in the top 15 six times. That cut success ended at the PGA Championship but he quickly recovered, finishing T6 and T9 in his two starts before the US Open. If you’re a Rickie fan, you know what happened next: a 62-68 start to the US Open at Los Angeles Country Club that gave Fowler a 36-hole lead. Will Fowler finally…back? The golf world seems to want to shout louder from the mountaintops, but Fowler was reluctant to deliver the necessary shriek.

“I can’t say it’s all back,” he said nervously after his second round in LA “It can be taken very quickly. Anyone who plays this game will never know.”

Fowler didn’t win that week – a 70-75 weekend left him five behind Wyndham Clark, tied for fifth – but he won a few weeks later at the Rocket Mortgage Classic, defeating Collin Morikawa and Adam. Hadwin in the playoffs. For the first time in more than four years, Fowler became a PGA Tour winner again.

This week the Tour returns to Detroit Golf Club for the 2024 edition of the Rocket Mortgage. As the defending champion, Fowler should be among the favorites, but the sportsbooks know what Fowler knows: At least some of his struggles are back, and even his +5,000 odds are probably generous. In 17 starts this calendar year, Fowler hasn’t finished in 10, and almost every part of his game has contributed to the slide. In each of the six main areas the Strokes achieved – from driving to playing the instrument to putting – he ranks outside the top 100. “Seeing the whole bag where things weren’t going well,” Fowler said Wednesday. His world ranking, which had risen to 21 in the middle of last year, has dropped to 50, but Data Golf, which puts more weight on recent performance, has him up to 98.

Form, as any golfer at any level knows well, comes and goes, and it can be difficult to pinpoint the moment it leaves you. But in Fowler’s case, his performance has been unremarkable since last year’s win. From mid-July last year through the FedEx Cup Playoffs, he had one top-20 finish – in the 30-man Tour Championship. As a captain’s choice in the Ryder Cup, Fowler played only two games and did not win a point. He opened the 2024 season by missing two of his first four tournaments.

“Obviously a bad start to the year for me coming off last year,” he said in early March at the Cognizant Classic, near his West Palm Beach, Fla., home. “Nothing has ever happened on the West Coast. I don’t think we’ve had the best weather either. I don’t blame that, but it definitely didn’t help me to move things forward.” He added, “I am ready to return things to the way they were last year.”

But things did not go well. In his next 10 starts, Fowler cracked the top 20 just once, at the RBC Heritage, followed by two missed cuts, at the Memorial, where he posted a second-round 82, and the US Open, where he posted a second-round finish. 77. Last week for travelers: a little ray of sunshine. Fowler closed with a 65 which earned him a T20.

So, what’s the deal? Fowler is still working with Harmon, whose last in-person session comes at the Masters in April. But he believes that his misery arises less from his complete conversion than from his idleness; Fowler averaged 0.244 on the greens, ranking him 131st on Tour. That lack, he says, has put pressure on him to shoot more.

“A big part of loosening up and allowing myself to play better golf starts on the green and it helps when I’m making putts, which started last week to see that,” he said Wednesday. He echoed his sentiments expressed at Travelers on Sunday when he said: “You don’t see the putts coming in and it increases the pressure to hit the greens or hit it close, close, that circle. it gets a lot bigger when you see others come in.”

When asked by the Travelers if he felt frustrated, Fowler said: “It’s definitely nowhere near as bad as it was a few years ago, but there’s a certain similarity there. After dealing with that and dealing with that and finally getting back to playing well, I can deal with anything. ” He then added another standard refrain: “I think the biggest thing is always trying to put things in perspective, the family stuff, you know, and some of the guys that we’ve lost part of the family here on the Tour, yeah. , it’s not that big of a deal, but we all just keep grinding.”

Fowler was referring to Tour pro Grayson Murray, whose suicide in May sent shockwaves through the tour community.

Fowler is not the same person who burst onto the Tour in 2010 with orange pants, shoulder-length hair and seemingly limitless energy (he beat Rory McIlroy that season for Rookie of the Year honors). He is a family man now, with a wife and young daughter and another child on the way. Winning still means a lot but “it’s not everything,” he told Golf Channel reporter Todd Lewis this week.

When Fowler was able to pay for the US Open in the break and win his first major match, he said on Sunday evening that week – this was after shooting a disappointing 75 – that seeing Maya before she scored “takes a lot. that far, because in the kind of picture In the big, big scheme of things, yes, we want to win championships and be the cup holders, but he doesn’t care if I shoot 65 or 85.”

Fowler himself still cares about what he shoots, of course. Even if his opinion has changed, he is still proud and hungry; his job will be temporary if not. Can Donald Ross’s throwback design await him this week serve as a spark?

“It’s a fun course to play,” he said, “and especially having good memories and winning last year, we’ll see if we can dominate some things.”

Alan Bastable

Golf.com Editor

As editor-in-chief of GOLF.com, Bastable is responsible for the editorial direction and voice of one of the game’s most respected and heavily trafficked news and services outlets. He wears many hats – planning, writing, imagining, developing, dreaming up one day he breaks 80 – and feels privileged to work with an insanely smart and hard-working team of writers, editors and producers. Before taking over GOLF.com, he was the features editor at GOLF Magazine. A graduate of the University of Richmond and the Columbia School of Journalism, he lives in New Jersey with his wife and four children.