American PGA golfer Rickie Fowler has played an excellent round at the Farmers Insurance Open, shooting a bogey-free round to hit all 18 greens, and finishing the Torrey Pines North Course with a six-under 66.
Fowler played a controlled game that may have resulted in some shorter shots, but certainly demonstrated some of the precision and consistency he is capable of.
Fowler has had a few ups and downs in recent years – it has been almost three years since his last PGA tour win, at the 2019 Phoenix Open, and he has dropped in the Official World Golf Ranking from an all-time high of number four to 101 at the start of the Farmers Insurance Open, which took place in late January.
Fowler made the headlines for all the wrong reasons in 2021 when he missed the FedExCup Playoffs for the first time in his entire 12-year PGA Tour career, resulting in him finishing the season ranked number 134 in the FedExCup standings.
Fowler also failed in 2021 to record multiple top 10s for the first time since he originally joined the PGA Tour in 2011.
Early in 2022, however, Fowler entered the final round of the CJ Cup with a two-stroke lead and finished in third place with a score of -22, his best result on the tour since finishing as a runner-up at the Honda Classic in 2019.
Fowler’s solid performance at Farmers may have been due to being on familiar turf.
He grew up in Southern California, not far from the course, and the 2008 US Open at Torrey Pines was his first ever major.
Fowler is probably feeling cautious, as anyone would after the inconsistencies of the last few years, but he has been reported as saying that he feels that things are “heading in the right direction”.
