Rickie Fowler hopes for turnaround in Rocket Mortgage Classic return

The way Rickie Fowler sees it, bad golf can spread through the bag like an invasive species.

It may be as good an explanation as any for the patchy, thatchy quality of his game.

“You're seeing it throughout the bag where things haven't been as good,” Fowler said Wednesday at the Rocket Mortgage Classic in Detroit, where his sixth PGA TOUR victory last summer was his first in four and a half years. “I think a big part of freeing myself up and allowing myself to play better golf starts on the greens and helps when I'm making putts, which last week started to see that. Not that ball-striking was good by any means, but I feel like when I'm putting at least up to my standards or at least average, it kind of frees up the rest of the game.”

In case you missed it, and odds are you did, Fowler finished T20 at the Travelers Championship last week. Oddly, that’s what passes for a highlight so far this season. It’s one of just two top-20 results (the other is a T18 at the RBC Heritage) in 17 starts so far. He has no top 10s.

Fowler and his wife, Allison, are expecting their second child in early August. Their first, daughter Maya, is 2 and charmed onlookers alongside pal Sammy Spieth at the Masters Par-3 Contest in April. So, yes, life is still good. It’s the golf that has been lacking.

At 91st in the FedExCup, Fowler is outside the top-70 cutoff for the FedEx St. Jude Championship in Memphis, the first stop in the three-week FedExCup Playoffs. That would have seemed like a strange prediction when he was the feel-good comeback story of the year.

Last season, fortified by a reunion with coach Butch Harmon, Fowler racked up eight top 10s, contended at the ZOZO CHAMPIONSHIP (T2) and U.S. Open (T5, with an opening-round 62), and won the Rocket Mortgage in a playoff, shedding happy tears alongside Allison and Maya, all of it captured in an episode of “Full Swing.”

Soon, though, Fowler began slumping. He was benched for much of the Ryder Cup in Rome and went 0-2, including a loss to Tommy Fleetwood in the clinching singles match.

This year’s results have followed suit. Fowler ranks a distant 163rd in Strokes Gained: Total after finishing 12th in that statistical category last season. And it doesn’t appear to be any one thing. He is 131st in SG: Putting but also 144th in SG: Off The Tee and 142nd in Approach. He is losing strokes to the field, often decisively, in every Strokes Gained category save for one, Around-the-Green, and even there he is barely in positive numbers.

Those struggles have translated into some atypical scores, like his second-round 82 to miss the cut by a mile at the Memorial Tournament presented by Workday.

Has Fowler been able to pinpoint the problem?

“Not necessarily,” he said at Detroit Golf Club, where it was announced that a menu item, a turkey sandwich, has been named for him as the defending champion. “Working on basically a lot of the same things and basically still trying to do the same thing as how to control the golf ball, hit it the right distance and hit it as close as possible.

“Done some golf ball testing throughout the end of last year, into this year,” he continued. “Not saying that’s a part of it or anything.”

Golf isn’t easy, not even at the elite level, or maybe especially not at the elite level. And it isn’t like Fowler is the only one who’s still searching this season. He is one of the few, however, for whom the difference between last year and this year is quite so stark.

Fowler can only hope that his play at the Travelers, where the ball went where he aimed it and he opened with a 64 and closed with a 65, heralds another new beginning.

“Looking forward to hopefully leaning on the putter a little bit more going forward,” he said, “and allowing the others to kind of fall into place and see the ball-striking stats come back up.”