by Shane Ryan
In the end, he decided to approach Harmon, and his pitch to the legendary coach became the centerpiece of countless stories in 2014: “I want to be known more for my golf than my clothes and my hat.” Despite Fowler’s insistence that his well-cultivated image is only positive, that desire tells you all you need to know about the effect the criticism had on his psyche.
Harmon sought the permission of his other students, and the two began working together after Fowler’s dismal 78-76 missed cut at the British Open. PGATour.com’s D. J. Piehowski reported that shortly after the relationship started, Fowler got a message from Bill Teasdale, the owner of the range where McDonnell had worked. Just before his death, the old instructor had sent a text to Teasdale with an eerily prescient message: “When the time is right, Rickie should go work with Butch Harmon.”
The text gave Fowler confirmation and closure—he knew he was doing the right thing, and it was a load off his mind. He gave Harmon his full commitment, and together they made his swing more efficient and gave him room to generate speed and distance. He cut his hair short in February, made the Match Play semifinals before falling to Jason Day, and earned his second top-five major finish at Augusta in April. But he also suffered seven cuts before June, and to the doubters, Fowler still had a lot to prove.
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Bubba Watson, whose tightly wound personality keeps him distant from most players, feels so close to Fowler he calls Rickie his “little brother.”…According to longtime Mickelson caddie Jim Mackay, “Rickie is like Steve Stricker: There is literally not one person on tour who has a bad thing to say about him.” Adds PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem: “You look at Rickie, and if he were self-centered or whatever, you’d say, well, anyone at his age and ability level would go through that phase. But he’s got none of that, and it’s why his connection to people is automatic.”
—JAIME DIAZ, Golf Digest
I didn’t know quite what to think of Fowler at first. If you buy what you see on television, he’s the amiable, loose character who makes fun of himself in SportsCenter commercials and plays a mustachioed PI for State Farm ads. Even before I knew his story or had ever interacted with him, though, I got the sense that this image couldn’t be very accurate.
As much as Puma and the PGA Tour might want to present him as the young, carefree face of golf, the fact is that nobody makes it very far without intense levels of obsession and focus. The simple fact that Rickie had made the big time meant he couldn’t really be the free-spirited rebel they were trying to sell, and though his people like to use the word “edgy” whenever possible, the only thing edgy about him is his love for speed.
The truth, I found, is that he only really stands out in certain controlled contexts. Bright clothes, funny videos, and great golf? Sure. But that’s it. He made the usual sacrifices along the way, eschewing a social life in service of a larger goal. He doesn’t flaunt his money. He’s not much of a joker, and though he may have played a prank or two in college, there’s nothing cruel or confrontational about him. In a sport dominated by anger, he’s remarkable for the fact that you barely ever see a hint of rage in his face. His unusual comfort with himself also explains why he avoided some of the standard growing pains—unlike an average pro, he never spent endless wasted hours on the range, or felt a compulsion to change his swing.
The best word I can come up with for Fowler, to describe his style and nature, is “gentle.” Beneath everything else, there’s an undercurrent of empathy. That’s why kids love him, too—they follow Fowler like the pied piper, and while women of all ages are drawn to Rory McIlroy, with his intense energy smoldering beneath the face of a teen idol, Fowler is the mellow soul that captures young imaginations.
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Early on in the year, I was dying to ask him a question that I thought would be very profound: Does he ever feel imprisoned inside his image? Did the glaring nature of the Puma brand overshadow his true personality? It turns out, though, that he’d heard this question a million times, in a million different ways. And each time, Rickie refused to blink. He knows who writes his checks and, money aside, he truly seems to believe that Puma gives him the best chance to represent himself to the wider world.
When he turned pro, Fowler signed with the Wasserman Media Group, and is managed today by a man named Sam MacNaughton, a former Oklahoma State golfer who enjoys a high status in the world of agents. If you want to talk to Rickie, you go through Sam—even Mike McGraw, Rickie’s college coach, has to take his requests through MacNaughton—and there are so many requests for Fowler’s time that no sane journalist expects very much.
There are a few agents who are so stingy with a player’s time that they earn the nickname “Dr. No,” and MacNaughton is one. The tight circle Wasserman forms around Fowler also serves to keep the details of certain stories quiet—like his car crash on July 1 in Palm Beach Gardens, which left him with cuts near his head.*
Time with Rickie isn’t just a hard sell for small-timers like me, either; in mid-October, as the 2014 season wound to a close, Karen Crouse of The New York Times got so fed up that she took the unusual step of tweeting at Fowler to draw public attention to the stonewalling:
“Hey @RickieFowlerPGA, I proposed in-depth profile on you 4 NYT, your agent told me ‘don’t get your hopes up.’ What gives? Won’t u sit w/me?”
Crouse is one of the few journalists to get the in-depth goods on Bubba Watson, and the fact that a strong writer working for the world’s most respected newspaper couldn’t get any time with Fowler is a clear indication that he’s essentially off-limits to anyone without a video camera.
I had been through the same process with MacNaughton, and we had developed what I thought was a fairly comical relationship. I’d approach him on the range, endure his gruff but subtly humorous glare—he has the uncanny ability to intimidate while still giving the impression that, deep down, he might like you—exchange a couple of awkward pleasantries, and then make my latest pitch. He’d balk, ask for something clearer, watch me stutter, and then give an answer that wasn’t quite “no,” but was very far from “yes.” My favorite response came at the PGA Championship, when he looked up from his phone and said, “To be honest, I’m not engaged in your story.” I didn’t know how to respond, but I knew what it meant—yet again, I’d be forced to approach him a week or two down the line, and repeat the process.
This went on all year, and by July I had resigned myself to the usual Plan B—asking Rickie my questions in press conferences, and hanging out by the flash area after his rounds in an attempt to salvage a spare minute or two. I held out a faint hope of something longer down the line, but when he declined The New York Times, I realized my own chances were laughable.
Which is why it shocked me, in early November, about a month after I had last emailed MacNaughton—and nearly eighteen months since our first exchange—when I got the okay to do a twenty-minute phone interview with Fowler.
This kind of access is worth its weight in gold, at least in theory, but in practice it’s only as valuable as the player. I knew Rickie well enough to hope for the best, and when we finally spoke, I wasn’t disappointed. What stood out to me, over the course of that call, was his unpretentious sense of himself and his past. We spent a few minutes talking about Rod and Taka’s businesses, and it became clear that he could go into as much detail as I wanted—a stark contrast to the many golfers I spoke with who were only dimly aware of what their parents did for a living—“something in finance, I think”—and couldn’t care less. For Fowler, there was never a point when his own rising star cut him off from the world he knew.
He also cares about his lineage, and not just as an interesting autobiographical detail to throw at reporters. When he learned that his grandfather had been in an internment camp as a child—it wasn’t a topic the old man brought up or talked about very often—it interested him enough that he wrote a book report on the topic at school. On his grandmother’s side, he was able to tell the Navajo Times exactly which
clan she came from, and to relate memories of visiting Tuba City, Arizona, the largest community in the Navajo Nation. There’s also a spiritual side to him—he was raised Catholic—but it’s a silent part of his life.
I knew, by the time we spoke, that my question about losing himself behind a brand was neither original nor interesting. When I asked a modified version—is there any consequence to being so closely identified with such a specific style?—the most I could get was that he didn’t always like the fact that he has to watch his step in public.
“I don’t want a publicity disaster,” he told me. “I want to make news on the course, not off.”
But that’s not particular to his life, or to the Puma brand, and he said it without much regret—he knows it comes with the territory, and it’s not like he’d change his situation if he had the chance. The clothes even come in handy at times, creating a sort of separation between Fowler the public figure and Fowler the private individual.
“There’s definitely a lot of people that don’t know me,” he said, “but it’s not that I’m hiding. It’s not that I don’t want people to know me. But I’ve enjoyed keeping my personal life and family life away from the course. I don’t want it to blend together.”
That’s true of his friendships and love life, too—he dated Alexandra Browne, a singer and the daughter of former pro golfer Olin Browne, for years, but that relationship ended. He now lives in Jupiter, Florida, with fellow pro Cameron Tringale now, and hangs out among the robust golfing community in Jupiter, including Rory McIlroy. The two rivals golf on occasion, but only among larger groups. He’s also good friends with Bubba Watson, which is as puzzling a duo as you’ll find anywhere, but which speaks to Rickie’s ability to relate to almost anyone.
Like everything else in Fowler’s life, there’s no dramatic answer to the brand problem. It may rub you or me the wrong way—or feel like an insidious corruption of a grounded golfer with a unique past—but he approaches it earnestly, without much calculation. The fact that it masks him, and affects the way America views his personality, is more of a fault with our culture, and the way television tends to reduce everything to a simple formula.
There is nothing sinister to Fowler himself—he’s the same as he’s always been. He’s the quiet Murrieta boy who likes bright colors, who works like hell, and who hasn’t changed his essential nature despite a life that couldn’t be more different from his childhood on the Santa Rosa plateau, with the coyotes howling off in the dark hills.
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* The severity of his injuries, which may have required stitches or staples, never came out, though the police report from the incident outlines the sequence of events. Fowler, driving a gray 2011 Porsche 911 with an eighteen-year-old junior golfer named Morgan Hobbs in the passenger seat, took a turn too fast off an I-95 exit ramp on a rainy night, jumped the curb, crashed through a chain-link fence and into a housing development, and hit a tree. Nobody was hurt, and Rickie couldn’t have blinked at the four thousand dollars in property damage . But he proved that his need for speed is alive and well when he admitted to the cop that he had been driving “a little too fast.”
16
PINEHURST, NORTH CAROLINA
The U.S. Open; Cruel & Unusual Punishment at the USGA; Martin’s Run; Restorations
“Charlie Price, the great writer, he’d say Pinehurst in his day was fairways, and the fairways were oases within sandy country. The wispy rye grass, pine needles and sand, the little tufts of ground, that’s what Pinehurst was.”
—BEN CRENSHAW, to PGATour.com, on the restoration of Pinehurst no. 2
The United States Golf Association might be the cruelest organizing body in the entire sport, and when they take center stage each June at the U.S. Open, they set out to punish and humiliate any golfer with dreams of winning America’s oldest major championship.
The USGA’s unofficial goal at each U.S. Open, at least in the past decade, is to stage an event so challenging that the winning score is close to even par—ideally on the high side. Sometimes the courses they choose aren’t quite difficult enough on their own, but that doesn’t faze the USGA. They simply doctor the course in the weeks leading up to the event, using some tried-and-true methods to rig the whole event. For starters, they grow out the rough, creating gnarly patches of grass that you’d need a machete to hack through. Then they deprive the fairways of water, speeding them up so that even decent tee shots run forever and eventually find their way into the dense thickets along the side. They do the same to the greens, making it impossible to stick an approach, or to putt on them even if you do. They’ll even use artificial methods, like turning a normal par 5 into a laughably long par 4, so that a birdie becomes a par, and par becomes bogey. And if all else fails, they can simply push tees back to lengthen their holes, or set the pins in diabolical locations, near the highest point of the humped, turtleback greens they love so much.
There are players, believe it or not, who appreciate this type of setup. The one thing you can always say about a U.S. Open is that it will be a true test of golf, and it will never devolve into a putting contest of the kind you sometimes see on the PGA Tour. Players like Adam Scott, Martin Kaymer, Justin Rose, and Tiger Woods would take this setup every week, because they’re among the most complete golfers in the world, and any course that demands every single shot from your arsenal will benefit the player with no weaknesses. And the U.S. Open comes with one absolute guarantee—if you have a weakness, it will be exposed.
In the nine years preceding the 2014 U.S. Open at Pinehurst, the winning score was even par or worse six times. Two of the three winners who actually went under par—Tiger Woods in 2008 and Lucas Glover the next year—stayed nice and close, at -1 and -4, respectively. The only exception came in 2011, when Rory McIlroy put on a historic show at Congressional Country Club, decimating a difficult track to the tune of -16 and asserting himself as one of the world’s best players.
The first winner in that difficult stretch was Michael Campbell, who won at the Pinehurst Resort in the Sandhills of North Carolina with even par in 2005. Campbell has largely been forgotten—he’s a member of golf’s one-hit wonder club, and you can barely find a mention of him at the club—but the previous Pinehurst champion in 1999, Payne Stewart, has become an important part of the resort’s identity. Less than six months after he won the event, he died in a plane crash, and he’s honored today with a large statue outside the clubhouse that captures the moment when he sunk the winning putt on 18 to beat Phil Mickelson—clad in his famous knickers and tam-o’-shanter cap, right foot off the ground, fist extended in triumph.
The U.S. Open returned to Pinehurst in 2014, and the three biggest stories going were Stewart, Mickelson, and the course itself.
Payne was the legend who had won the first U.S. Open ever played at the course, and his name was already on everyone’s lips in the week leading up to the event. On Thursday, Rickie Fowler upped the ante with his own moving tribute. Stewart had been one of his heroes growing up, and Fowler still remembered the moment when he heard about the plane crash in October of 1999. He was in the car with his mother, and news of the tragedy was broadcast over the radio. He broke down crying, and fifteen years later, in his first round at Pinehurst, he wore white knickers and a pair of teal argyle socks, Stewart’s signature outfit.
Phil Mickelson, runner-up to Payne, had gone on to five more second-place finishes at the U.S. Open—the kind of success that you can only call brutal. It’s the one tournament that eluded him, over and over, all the way up to 2013, when he had started the final round in the lead, only to shoot 74 and lose to England’s Justin Rose. He was viewed as something of a tragic figure after that event—someone destined never to fulfill his dream at his country’s national tournament. He spit the pity right back in everyone’s face later that summer, though, winning his first ever British Open. Now the U.S. Open was the only tournament standing between Mickelson and a career grand slam, and he arrived at Pinehurst as the overwhelming
crowd favorite.
Unfortunately for him, his past success at the course meant very little. The Pinehurst no. 2 that greeted players this time was miles different from the track they’d played in 1999 and 2005. Back then, it looked like a typical U.S. Open course—very green, with thick rough and the usual USGA trapdoors. Some of that remained the same—the “par-4” fourth hole, at 529 yards, was the longest par 4 in U.S. Open history, just edging out the “par-4” 16th, a 528-yard beast. Both play as a par 5 at every other time of year, and are changed only to make everyone’s score eight shots worse by the end of the week. The par-3s, too, were punishingly long, with the shortest clocking in with a standard length of 191.
Beyond those USGA special effects, though, the course looked nothing like its previous iterations.
In 2010, the resort took the bold step of commissioning a total restoration to Pinehurst no. 2—a return to the course as it looked before the U.S. Opens, and to the 1935 design undertaken by legendary designer Donald Ross. The team of Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore were hired to handle the job, and in the broadest sense, the aim of their project was to make Pinehurst no. 2 reflect the natural terrain of North Carolina’s Sandhills, as it had all those years ago.
The Sandhills represent an interesting geographical phenomenon—a holdout from a time, twenty million years ago, when the ocean encroached farther inland, and places like Pinehurst were still a beach. Sandy dunes built up on the shores, and they remain as remnants of an ancient era. Today, they fight for turf with towering pine trees, and form a boundary between the plateau region called the Piedmont and the coastal plain that extends to the ocean. The land is dry and hard-baked, covered with pine needles and sand, and it doesn’t have the kind of soil that can produce acres and acres of green rough without enormous amounts of water.