Eventful Week For Rickie Fowler Yields Positive Results Thus Far

Rickie Fowler, who was the last man to get into this year’s FedEx Cup playoffs, is off to a great start at this week’s FedEx St. Jude Championship as he aims to keep his season alive.

It has been a busy week for Fowler, who scraped into this year’s playoffs at 125th in the end-of-season standings. The 2015 Players Champion is back in the playoffs this year after missing out last season for the first time in over ten years.

Soon after discovering that he would indeed be a part of this year’s FedEx Cup playoffs, Rickie Fowler opted to part ways with longtime caddie Joe Skovron.

“obviously an amazing partnership over the years, but it was going to be more about me taking ownership and putting more of a workload on myself and more accountability,” Fowler said about the change following his opening round in Memphis.

The change in caddie was just one change that Fowler decided to make heading into the playoffs. Rickie also opted for a change in putters heading into the week.

“It was a new putter that Scotty had just come out with. Drew, one of the reps who was a teammate of mine at Oklahoma State, he just happened to have it out on the putting green on Tuesday. Hit a couple putts with it, everything looked good, felt good. Messed with it a little bit more yesterday and decided to give it a shot,” Rickie added about the change in clubs.

Spurred on by a fresh start and renewed playoff life, Rickie Fowler opened with his best round in over a year, a 65 which sees him inside of the top 10 at the end of round one.

Rickie Fowler needs a finish of 11th or better at this week’s FedEx St. Jude Championship in order to advance to next week’s BMW Championship.

The top 70 in the FedEx Cup standings at the end of this weekend will earn the right to advance to next week’s second playoff event at Wilmington Country Club.

Promising start for Rickie Fowler

It was the exact start that Rickie needed in order to give himself a shot at advancing come Sunday.

Something which will give Fowler encouragement of building off of his great start was his performance on the greens with the new putter in hand.

Putting has been a major issue for the 33-year-old the past couple of seasons and this one has been no different as he ranks 179th on Tour with the flatstick.

"“One of the biggest issues over the last year or two, I’m just not putting anywhere near what I — I’m used to or I know I can. That does a lot with momentum and confidence and freeing you up from the rest of the game, not feeling like you have to necessarily hit it super close to make birdies.”  – Rickie Fowler"

Rickie gained strokes on the greens during his opening round with the new putter. Both changes during an eventful week have, at least so far, yielded positive results.

Fowler will be encouraged by his start this week in Memphis but he will know that he still has plenty of work left to do over the next three days as he looks to survive and advance in the 2022 FedEx Cup playoffs.