SOUTHAMPTON, N.Y. — One hole marshal at the 16th green at Shinnecock Hills turned to another after Rickie Fowler left the tee box to go up to his drive on Friday.
The U.S. Open is another opportunity for the Rickie Fowler experience
Fowler and his legions of devoted fans are going pour themselves into chasing down Dustin Johnson.
Brad Penner-USA TODAY Sports
“We just got Fowlerized,” the guy said.
To get Fowlerized is to be anywhere near the world’s No. 7 player when he’s working his way through a golf course. Fowler is stone-cold serious and mostly keeps to himself, unless he’s talking and gesticulating to another player or a caddy about some element of the course. On Friday, he did that regularly with Marc Leishman and his caddy, Matthew Kelly. “It’s like a lot of these greens have crowns,” he told Leishman at one point after making a bogey.
What makes Fowler an experience is the people who follow him. His fans are a little bit different than the followings for the world’s other best players. When Tiger Woods walked around these grounds before getting cut, he carried a whole circus with him. What Fowler brings along is more like the extended family that shows up to your little league games or graduation and yells a little bit louder, a little bit more lovingly, than everyone else’s.
Fowler’s fans are ultra-protective. Golf media members will tell you that when they write stories that note that Fowler still hasn’t pulled off a major win despite being one of the world’s best players for a few years now, an unusual amount of anger pours into their inboxes and Twitter mentions. His fans are like sports parents, or maybe sports cousins.
When Fowler missed a par putt at Shinnecock’s 15th hole on Friday, the loudest voice came from a 50-something guy in the grandstand: “Ahhh, Ricky!” It was said with the same inflection of a father angry at his son for not turning off the headlights on the car when he got back from a night out, so now the battery’s dead, but there’s still a lot of love. Then the place turned into a chorus of “Get ‘em back, Rick”s and “Ricky, don’t worry about it”s.
Later, as he walked along the 17th hole, the loudest thing anyone yelled to the recently engaged Fowler was “Ricky, when’s the wedding?”
Fowler stayed dialed in on the first two days of the tournament. Now he has another chance to get the major that’s so far eluded him.
He’s been close so many times. He’s notched top-three finishes in all four majors, and his most notable career win was in the sport’s de-facto fifth major, The Players Championship, in 2015. Fowler is only 29, but it feels like he’s lived a lifetime of major close calls.
He ended Friday at 2 over for the tournament, six shots back of leader Dustin Johnson and tied for ninth place. If Johnson stays in the same command he’s been in, no one will catch him. But Shinnecock’s tough conditions could create a chance for Fowler or another elite player to catch him. (Three major winners, Justin Rose, Brooks Koepka, and Henrik Stenson, ended Friday a shot ahead of Fowler at plus-1 for the week.)
The opportunity’s there now. The opportunity’s been there before, and Fowler hasn’t quite been able to seize it. But he conveys the comfort of a guy who knows he’s good enough to be in the hunt, not a guy who’s worried about why it hasn’t happened already.
A reporter asked him after Friday’s round how “being in this position so often” helps him going into the weekend.
“It feels great. Felt really good out there today. Obviously, coming off of the finish we had at the Masters, the way we played there, especially on the weekend, I’m looking forward to it. Definitely very comfortable on this golf course. I love playing here. I feel like it suits my game, it fits my eye. I have fun with it. You get to hit different shots out here.”
Fowler wants Shinnecock to create some chaos. He thinks he’ll thrive in it.
“I’m kind of hoping that the wind picks up a little bit,” he said. “It was nice that we got it kind of calm this afternoon, but I’d like to see this place dry out a little bit and start separating the field a little bit more. At least making it a little bit more, you know, where you have to hit the proper shots on the greens. They’re still a little receptive right now.”
Fowler has had to wait a while. At some point, the wait should end.
He spent Friday in a group with Leishman and Hideki Matsuyama, two of the other best players in the world who have yet to win one of these things.
The group ahead of them had Jordan Spieth, Rory McIlroy, and Phil Mickelson in it. Fowler had to wait on the tee box several times while that group got out of a fairway or off a green, or while the gallery crossed a fairway. There’s no real significance to any of that. It’s only the logistics of a big tournament with 156 players and thousands of fans in attendance.
But it felt a little fitting anyway, watching Fowler stand still while two of his age peers in Spieth and McIlroy (who both missed the cut) got out of his way. They have seven majors between them. Mickelson was a little more like Fowler — one of the world’s greats for a while, but needing to wait until he was 33 to win his first major at the 2004 Masters.
Fowler is likely to get over the hump sometime. Can he catch Johnson?
“He’ll be tough to catch, but I’ve given myself a lot of opportunities out there, especially today,” Fowler said Friday. “And we should have been a bit closer, but we’ll — there’s a lot of golf to be played. It’s going to be a fun weekend.”
See More:
