All of us who followed his career from the outset have been waiting for the supreme golfing talent to succeed on golf’s grandest stage.
I’ve been following the guy with a share of the lead at the U.S. Open for a long time, and let me tell you: He was always a big deal.
I covered golf at the Riverside Press-Enterprise back in the mid-2000s, which is to say: I was on the Rickie Fowler beat. He was the headliner. The best player and brightest star — even before he was rocking all that bright orange Oklahoma State-inspired Puma attire.
It’s impossible to overstate how much he meant to golf in the Inland Empire, where I know folks will be tuned in to see Fowler’s charge toward a possible U.S. Open title Sunday. After shooting a three-birdie, three-bogey even-par 70 Saturday, the 34-year-old heads into the fourth and final round at L.A. Country Club tied for the lead with Wyndham Clark at 10-under par. Rory McIlroy is a shot behind them.
“We always had good players, but he was the guy who took it to the next level,” said Joe Skovron, another Murrieta product who was Fowler’s caddie until last year. “He was a star on the national level and who kept doing it once he turned pro.”
But first Fowler was a quiet, driven kid whose coach Barry McDonnell used to call him “Little Hawk.” Because, Skovron said, “he’d get that look in his eyes when he had it going.”
Fowler’s game was downright loquacious, but in conversation, no, he wasn’t the most insightful golfer I covered. That was Brendan Steele, because I never had a conversation with the future PGA Tour player from Idyllwild that didn’t teach me something about the game.
Wasn’t the wittiest. That was Sydnee Michaels; never did an interview with the Murrieta golfer who’d spend a decade on the LPGA Tour that didn’t crack me up.
And, honestly, in the years since I stopped covering golf regularly, I think most often of Erica Blasberg, the LPGA golfer from Corona. She died by suicide in 2010.
Like Fowler, she wasn’t ever especially forthcoming, but she was, as Fowler was as a young golfing star, helpful, accommodating. And she also was marketable, someone with game and the ability to make golf look cool.
She was cool. And so was he.
Is he: “His reaction to everything is as cool as he was when he was a younger,” said Riverside’s Ed Holmes, a Southern California PGA board member and regional affairs director with the USGA who, like every golf fan in the Inland Empire, has kept up with Fowler.
