Rickie Fowler – His 2015 PLAYERS Win Doesn’t Prove Anything
By Joe Walton
Rickie Fowler put together one of the best closing stretches of golf in PGA TOUR history at the PLAYERS Championship last year but it was only one tournament.
Rickie Fowler was a man on fire this time last year. Nobody who watched Fowler’s incredible closing stretch of holes at TPC Sawgrass during last year’s PLAYERS Championship will ever forget it.
Fowler went out seven groups before the leaders on Sunday and was not given a prayer. But, he put together a solid round before going mad on the final four holes.
Beginning on the 15th Fowler just couldn’t do anything wrong:
15 – birdie.
16 – eagle.
17 – one of the most nerve jangling holes in all of golf – birdie.
18 – birdie.
And with that, Rickie Fowler had booked his spot in a playoff in which he saw off both Kevin Kisner and Sergio Garcia.
All of this from a player who had developed a reputation as a choker when it came to getting over the line and who had been publicly called ‘overrated’ by a selection of his peers hiding behind anonymity. That, my friends, takes serious heart.
It’s silly to call Fowler a bottler and equally silly to call him one of golf’s best finishers. Fowler, like every professional golfer out there, is capable of both extremes.
In the year that has followed the media view of Rickie Fowler changed dramatically. His impressive wins at the Deutsche Bank Championship toward the end of the PGA TOUR season and at the Abu Dhabi HSBC Golf Championship right at the start of the European Tour season gave rise to this idea that he is one of the best finishers in golf.
It’s true that at the Deutsche Bank Fowler closed out very impressively and in Abu Dhabi he held off the challenge of the European Tour’s finest. More recently though, we’ve seen the 27-year-old make a meal of some strong positions. He was pipped in a playoff at the Phoenix Open, had a poor weekend at the Honda Classic and saved his worst round for Sunday at the Wells Fargo Championship when in the final group.
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The coverage of Rickie Fowler flip-flops between lethal, dead-eyed finisher who rises to the challenge when the pressure is turned on one week to a sweaty-palmed, bottle job always capable of a big mistake when in contention the next week.
Where’s the truth? As ever, it is somewhere in the middle. It’s silly to call Fowler a bottler and equally silly to call him one of golf’s best finishers. Fowler, like every professional golfer out there, is capable of both extremes.
James Hahn won the Wells Fargo after eight missed cuts. Charley Hoffman won the Valero Texas Open after throwing away multiple winning opportunities earlier in the season. Jordan Spieth romped home at the Hyundai Tournament of Champions but had that horrible Sunday at the Masters. Everyone has bad Sundays. The best manage to put those behind them
You don’t become a great finisher by winning a couple of tournaments and you shouldn’t be branded a choker if the pressure of Sunday gets on top of you from time to time.
Golf is hard. Winning one golf tournament against the best players in the world is a massive achievement and it is always troublesome to try and draw too much from one performance. After his disappointment at Quail Hollow last week, Rickie Fowler’s reaction was a simple: “That’s golf.” He’s not making too much of one performance and neither should anyone else.
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No matter what sort of defence the world number five makes at TPC Sawgrass this week conclusions will be drawn. Let’s take a deep breath and remember that it is just one tournament, for Rickie Fowler and for the entire PLAYERS field..