Slaying the Tiger

by Shane Ryan

Scott did better—his previous pitching wedge had been cautious, and tight. He said later that even after coming through in a Masters playoff, there’s still something to learn from each new pressure situation. His normal instinct would be to hit a full, hard shot, but now he could suppress the tension, soften his hands, and let his natural feel take over.

  His previous wedge had settled twenty-one feet from the hole. This one left him with just seven. When Dufner missed his birdie putt from a distance, Scott focused through the hushed conversation and the unfriendly skies. Something about the place reminded him of Australia, right down to the dirt. It’s why he’d won the three other Texas events, and why the so-called Texas Slam was within his reach. So why not hold the massive trophy amid the club members in their red tartan jackets? Why not see your name in calligraphy on a giant check? Why not make the putt, and why not win?

  When the ball rolled in the hole, he had it all—at least for the moment. But there’s always someone coming to take it away.

  15

  BEYOND THE BRAND

  Rickie Fowler

  “My parents never drank, so I wasn’t really around it. I just never really felt like it was something that needed to be done, and I was focused on what I wanted to do. There might have been three nights in the two years I was in college when I drank, and even then, nothing crazy. I was designated driver pretty much every weekend, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. I was around having a good time, and able to make sure my teammates got home and they were all good, so that was fun for me.”

  —RICKIE FOWLER

  Rickie Fowler’s childhood home stood on the Santa Rosa plateau in Temecula, California, twenty miles inland from the Pacific Ocean. His family moved from the lowlands when Rickie was eight, and there, in the shadow of the Santa Ana Mountains, he could lie in bed, stare at the poster of Motocross champion Jeremy McGrath on his bedroom wall, and listen to the coyotes howling in the hills and ravines.

  Rod Fowler, the boy’s father, had been a talented rider himself, and the Murrieta-Temecula area is considered the Motocross capital of America. At the time, it was also small; in 1988, when Fowler was born, Murrieta had fewer than 20,000 residents. The population explosion that would see the town quintuple in size and grow to over 100,000 people—spurred on by coastal congestion, rising real estate prices, and a surge of immigration—was still a few years away.

  For work, Rod ran a trucking business that he started after high school, hauling sand and gravel across Southern California. He introduced Rickie to dirt bikes at an early age, and was thrilled to have a partner in crime—together, they’d go to the local track on Wednesday nights and ride for hours. Rickie showed a capacity for skilled, fearless riding, even after he broke his leg at age three. He’d be the first to hit every jump with speed, navigate risky terrain, and launch off the steep dirt hills with the confidence of a much older rider.

  Rickie loved the colors on the racers’ uniforms, too. He painted his room blue, and he gravitated toward flashy designs. Fowler was a quiet kid, and the colors gave him a way to express himself. He later brought that aesthetic to the golf course, where he’d enter junior tournaments clad in white pants and a white belt with a bright shirt.

  Rod was the easygoing parent, the kind of guy who could talk to a stranger for hours. His wife, Lynn, another dirt bike racer, brought order to the family. They complemented each other, with Rod earning the money to give his children opportunities outside Temecula, and Lynn making sure everything ran on time. They weren’t rich, but they were supremely disciplined—not the kind of people who left much to chance.

  Rickie is the product of a unique blend of West Coast cultures, mostly due to Lynn’s heritage. Her mother was born to the Sage Brush Hill clan of the Navajo nation, and her father, Yutaka Tanaka, was a Japanese-American who was sent to a World War II internment camp as a child. When I asked Fowler about this lineage—his middle name is Yutaka, in homage to his grandfather—he pointed out that while his grandfather was being imprisoned, the Marines employed Navajo “code talkers,” who transmitted secret messages based on their native tongue. When Jeanie and Yutaka married, it was also a union of two cultures with complex places in the American narrative—particularly during the defining war of the twentieth century.

  The Fowlers didn’t have much money, and they didn’t belong to a country club, but they would take family vacations in winter to Ocotillo Wells, a town in the Colorado Desert outside San Diego. They’d all ride their bikes on the open terrain, including Rickie’s younger sister, Taylor. Like both of his parents, Rickie became an adrenaline junkie—a craving that would stay with him the rest of his life.

  —

  Against this backdrop, it’s hard to imagine golf entering Fowler’s world. The unlikely addition came from Yutaka, who began to play when Rickie was three years old. He practiced at the Murrieta Valley Golf Range, and one day he brought his grandson along. Rickie loved everything about the sport, though it was miles away from the speed and thrills of Motocross. Lynn even told USA Today that he got a kick out of the etiquette and rules, which is precisely the element that turns some kids away.

  When Rickie was seven, he met a man who would become incredibly important to his development—Barry McDonnell, a PGA pro at Murrieta Valley. They began working together, and the partnership lasted for the rest of McDonnell’s life. They kept their sessions simple, making sure Rickie was armed for any situation he’d encounter on the course. He learned to hit it low, and high, with a fade and draw, and to execute each shot by feel. When he turned pro, Fowler would credit McDonnell for his intimate knowledge of his own swing, a quality he felt was missing among players who became too reliant on rigid technique and video-oriented training.

  “He was a man of very few words,” Fowler said of McDonnell. “Even with me, where he was open and we’d talk about things, he’d get his point across with as few words as possible.”

  Taka and Lynn, meanwhile, had the most influence on how he behaved on the course. Fowler told me that sulking or throwing a tantrum would have been totally unacceptable. His mother even set a rule: If he broke a club, that club would not be replaced.

  But the truth is that Fowler wasn’t like most kids. He rarely had to be told to keep his cool, and even though he had a strong competitive instinct from his earliest days, it never manifested in anger or self-pity. He even admitted to reporters that he went through his whole life without ever throwing a club—at least until he hurled one at a palmetto tree during a friendly round in Florida as an adult, just to see what it felt like.

  Rickie played out of state for the first time when he was twelve years old, and from then on, his mother became his travel agent. Lynn still works with her son full-time, along with Rickie’s sister Taylor, and they approached his junior days with the same sense of professional dedication they maintain today. If golf was Rickie’s dream, and he had the talent and passion, then why not?

  He quit bike racing for good after he hurt his knee during a wreck in high school, and from then on, golf was his full priority. “I was bummed out,” Rod admitted to Yahoo Sports in 2012. A few years earlier, Rod had met Rickie’s hero, Jeremy McGrath, and the two became friends. McGrath spent time with Rickie, and thought Rickie had a bright future in racing. Rickie’s choice may seem obvious now, but putting his bike to the side was a drastic move, and the end of a lifelong passion.

  * * *

  When Kevin Tway went to Oklahoma State last fall, his father, Bob, had some advice for him.

  “I told Kevin to play golf with Rickie Fowler every day,” Bob said. “Play for dinner or for $5 because when you get tired of getting beat by him you’ll get better.”

  —USA Today, June 12, 2008

  Mike McGraw was coaching the women’s team at Oklahoma State when he first heard about Fowler from his assistant, Alan Bratton. He saw a picture—the long hair, the white belt—and took note. When he was named the head men’s coach the next summer, he made the California kid a high priority.

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bsp; Rickie visited that January, and McGraw didn’t know what to expect. McGraw coaches at Baylor now, and had no problem telling me that Stillwater, Oklahoma, is a dull town. It can be a sticking point with recruits, but to his surprise, Fowler saw the place as an asset—nothing would get in the way of his development as a golfer. The kid didn’t even drink, McGraw learned. He paid a visit to the Fowler home that summer, up in the Santa Ana foothills—he still remembers the sound of the coyotes at night—and the more he learned about Rickie, the more he wanted him in Stillwater.

  Fowler committed, and put together a spectacular freshman season that culminated in a Big 12 individual championship at Whispering Pines—“He was playing a different course,” McGraw remembered—and fourth place in nationals. At season’s end, he became the first freshman to ever win the Ben Hogan Award as the country’s best golfer.

  “He’s probably got one of the best attitudes of anybody I’ve ever seen,” said McGraw, “and that’s why he’s so much fun to watch.”

  That summer, Fowler made the cut at the U.S. Open. A few months later, he teamed with Peter Uihlein, Kevin Tway, and Morgan Hoffmann in his sophomore season, leading an Oklahoma State team that was considered the best in the country. They lived up to their billing all season, and by the time spring rolled around, they had the look of a juggernaut. At the national championships at the Inverness Club in Toledo, they crushed the nearest competition in stroke play, with Fowler finishing third individually.

  A year earlier, those three brilliant days would’ve put them one round away from a national championship. But the format changed that year, and 2009 marked the start of the new match play era in college golf.

  —

  By his own high standards, Georgia’s Brian Harman—a diminutive firebrand who would “rather chew a nail than lose,” per his coach Chris Haack—hadn’t had a very good senior season. He’d grown sick of college, and was ready to move on. Harman needed the competitive fire in his life—it had always been his fuel, sometimes to his detriment—and the well of inspiration at Georgia had run dry.

  When his Bulldog team faded to an 8-seed in Toledo, though, it meant that the dream match-up—Georgia vs. Oklahoma State—would be pushed ahead to the quarterfinals. Worse, Georgia would face a team that had routed them by twenty strokes over the three previous days.

  When the morning came, Harris English and Hudson Swafford continued to struggle, and both lost their matches 4&3. Three losses meant elimination, and when Georgia’s Adam Mitchell was penalized two holes during his match against Kevin Tway for keeping too many clubs in his bag, it looked like the fatal blow—an embarrassing 3-0 drubbing for the number 2 team in the nation. But Mitchell played scorching golf all day, beating Tway 5&3 despite the penalty, and Russell Henley came through—as he always did—with a 2-up victory, knotting the match at two wins apiece.

  That left just one match on the course—Brian Harman vs. Rickie Fowler.

  A huge contingent of fans, larger than anyone had seen to that point in college golf, converged on the final pair. By the 15th, trailing by a hole, Harman’s competitive juices were flowing again. On the green, Fowler two-putted for his par, and Harman had to make an eight-footer to avoid going 2-down with just three holes to play. He tuned everything out, and knocked it in.

  When he looked up, he saw that Fowler and McGraw had already left the green, and were standing on the 16th tee. They hadn’t even stayed to retrieve the flag—a standard bit of etiquette in college matches. Harman, already keyed up in the high-pressure atmosphere, saw red. The anger overcame him.

  “You motherfucker,” he thought to himself, staring at Fowler.

  He paced across the green, picked up the flag, and slammed it in the hole. He walked up to Chris Haack, barely containing his rage.

  “I’m about to kick this guy in the teeth,” he said.

  Haack liked what he saw—he knew that unlike some players, Harman got better when he played with rage. With the match on the line and trailing by a hole, Haack knew they needed a spark.

  Harman had blood in his eyes for Fowler. He struck immediately with an eight-foot birdie on the 16th, and though Fowler matched him there, he couldn’t keep pace when Harman made another birdie on 17—a twelve-footer, this time—to square the match. On the 18th, Harman’s drive flew into the left rough, but he struck a beautiful approach to eight feet. Fowler nearly matched him, setting up a twelve-foot birdie chance of his own.

  Fowler went first, but left his putt short. The stage was set for Harman. He had enough residual anger for one last shot, and enough to carry his team to a win. His putt tracked toward the hole, caught the right lip, and dropped.

  The incredible flourish capped Georgia’s comeback, and Harman leaped into his teammate’s arms. Fowler never understood what happened, or why Harman seemed so upset toward the end of the match. It’s unlikely that he left the 15th green for malicious reasons, but it didn’t matter—Harman had found the motivation he needed. McGraw, the Cowboys coach, would only learn about their faux pas five years later in a conversation with Haack. All he knew, at the time, was that Fowler had never been more devastated in his life.

  Later, Harman and Haack would laugh about the final match.

  “That sucker should’ve gotten that flag stick, shouldn’t he?” Haack asked. Harman just smiled.

  “It’s true,” he told me. “He should have. He might’ve beat me if he had just gotten that flag stick.”

  Fowler broke down in tears as Georgia celebrated in front of a large gallery—it was his last round of golf for Oklahoma State. That fall, he turned pro.

  * * *

  “I love the position I’m in, and I definitely wouldn’t change it. But yeah, there’s times where it would be cool just to be out and blend in. But uh…I guess that’s not going to happen.”

  —FOWLER

  Titleist had been Fowler’s club of choice for most of his career, and he was friends with the Uihlein family, so a sponsorship deal was a no-brainer. But it was his contract with Puma that would come to define him as a golfer. Fowler had chased the apparel company as much as they chased him, and the partnership was one of those rare moments of corporate synergy that sends marketing departments into euphoric spasms.

  Puma’s edgy style and Fowler’s Motocross background made a perfect match. What many don’t realize is that Fowler actually requested the orange outfit with the white belt—a nod to Oklahoma State—which, along with a flat-brimmed cap and a puma bounding across the front, would quickly become his signature look.

  “They didn’t really have any orange in the line,” Fowler told me. “So I’ve had to make it all.”

  In the flashy new duds, Fowler became a hot commodity for the PGA Tour, who desperately needed young stars as they prepared for a future without Tiger Woods. Fashion-wise, Fowler was an immediate success, and it wasn’t long before kids at every PGA Tour stop came decked out in orange Puma gear from head-to-toe—not to mention a few adults. The company was thrilled, and Fowler quickly gained a reputation as a player in Phil Mickelson’s mold, who went the extra mile with his sponsors and didn’t mind turning himself into a walking advertisement.

  The clothes came with a few side effects. He gained legions of detractors, and the image he conveyed bore no resemblance to the humble, easygoing kid from Murrieta with a strong family foundation. Based on your perspective, he either looked like a hip young emblem of the counterculture, a sneering punk who thumbed his nose at the golf establishment every time he donned his garish orange duds, or a cynical clothes horse cashing in on his looks. Neither one came close to the truth, and almost everyone who came to know Fowler personally understood that the dichotomy was false. But even among some of his fellow pros, annoyance brewed—especially when the fashion campaign proved incredibly successful.

  By 2013, Fowler was making an estimated $4.5 million off the course annually—he’s had sponsorships with everyone from Cobra to Red Bull to Farmers Insurance—which eclipsed almost everyone in his age b
racket, and put him in a class with major winners and national icons. It was a gaudy sum for a kid who had won just a single PGA Tour event and managed only one top five in the majors, and it’s easy to see why it bred resentment.

  Not that his golf game didn’t merit praise—in 2010, Fowler won the PGA Rookie of the Year award, and earned a captain’s pick for the Ryder Cup. In 2012, he earned his first PGA Tour win at the Wells Fargo Championship, hitting a risky fifty-one-degree wedge over the water and into the green on the 18th hole. It stopped four feet from the pin, and he made birdie to top McIlroy and D. A. Points in a playoff. In the budding Rickie-Rory rivalry, the early rounds had gone to the American.

  The win carried emotional value, too—a year earlier, he’d suffered a heartbreaking loss. In the early days of his professional career, he would return to Murrieta a couple of times each year and visit Barry McDonnell, the only coach he’d ever had. He’d hit balls while McDonnell smoked a cigar or sipped a beer, and they’d chat about his game. Being home was like therapy for Fowler, and he enjoyed those moments with the quiet instructor who had helped define his playing style.

  In May 2011, McDonnell passed away at age seventy-five after a heart attack. McGraw was with Fowler a week later, and the pain he witnessed was intense. That feeling stayed with him through the next year, and through his first PGA Tour win. The closest he came to crying in Charlotte was when a reporter mentioned his old mentor.

  “I tried not to mention my swing coach Barry a whole lot,” he said, “because that definitely pulls a whole lot out of me.”

  —

  After struggling in 2013, he began to think about working with Butch Harmon. His only hesitation came when he thought about McDonnell. Would it be the right career move to use another coach? Would it be disloyal in some way to the man that had guided him since he was seven?