WINDERMERE, Fla. -- After five misfires in as many years, the top NCAA program in the country had finally won one of the elite events in college golf, yet the primary topic of conversation all week centered on a peer-group kid who wasn't in the field.
Perennial college power Oklahoma State won the Isleworth Collegiate Invitational on Tuesday, contested on the track that Tiger Woods considers his backyard. Yet few were talking about the galaxy of Orlando-based stars who play at Isleworth, either, and winning the tournament title created a short-term buzz.
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| Fowler has finished seventh or better in his first two professional starts on tour. (Getty Images) |
Fowler is hotter than the Orlando humidity and just as capable of making competitors sweat, and his fast feats left his former mates with a mixed sense of shock and awe. Although, admittedly, there was way more of the latter than the former.
"He's that good," said Mark Johnson, a junior at OSU. "There was no surprise at all. He pretty much dominated in college. He's got what it takes."
In what ranks as the most eye-popping ascension of a college player in years, the diminutive Californian, all of 20 years old, has finished seventh or better in his two professional starts on tour, including a near-miss in a three-man playoff last week at the Frys.com Open outside Phoenix.
It's a blistering pace even for a free-swinger and fast mover like Fowler, who gets over the ball and pulls the trigger in a matter of seconds. He hasn't dawdled between shots or in his frenetic attempt to grab the biggest prize of all -- a tour card for 2010.
"It's just how I have always been," Fowler told CBSSports.com. "I have never thought about too much on the course. I like to step up and go."
If not go deep, as the players say.
Fowler, roundly considered the top player in the college ranks in his two years at Oklahoma State, is playing this week at the PGA Tour's Viking Classic, where his mercurial rise can best be measured by his standing across the country, in Las Vegas. Of the players in the field, only three have better betting odds than Fowler's line of 25-to-1, a clear acknowledgement of how far he's come so quickly.
Fowler, who fires at flags and makes birdies by the bucket, has made the transition from college to the tour look laughably easy. Granted, the fields in the Fall Series don't feature many, if any, top-20 players, but he hasn't blinked once over the circus or circumstance.
"I had played a few PGA Tour events before I turned pro, so I got comfortable out here around most of the guys, so it really hasn't been too big of a change," he said. "I feel really comfortable out here. I just feel like I'm out playing another tournament, like I was in college or amateur golf."
For Fowler, the college player of the year as a freshman, the results have been about the same. However, it doesn't take more than a fleeting glance to see that he's not another guy cut from the mold of tactical, technical, vanilla players.
Beyond his trendy appearance, he's a retro anti-pro. In fact, one of his opposite numbers in last Sunday's three-man playoff in Scottsdale, Jamie Lovemark, is far more representative of the typical college hot-shot these days. Lovemark, a former NCAA player of the year at USC, is the product of a silver-spoon background. He lives a few blocks from Phil Mickelson in one of San Diego's richest enclaves and plays at the same private club.
Fowler is a feel player who learned the game as a tot from a driving range pro while swinging an adult-sized driver, has a loop at the top of his flat swing that looks like a figure-eight and has the most vicious downswing since Nick Price. At 5-foot-8, he generates eye-blurring clubhead speed and somehow blows the ball far enough off the tee to play with many of the bigger hitters. He rarely uses video and has only a few swing thoughts.
"He's not very technical at all," said Johnson, his former classmate. "He sticks to basics. He knows what his tendencies are and what he needs to work on."
Fowler compared his move to Sergio Garcia, another guy whose swing wasn't a childhood science project. Both lay off the club at the top and have visible, non-traditional loops in the downswing. Fowler can putt, however.
That's only the half the visual package. As his agent told Fowler's hometown paper recently, "Rickie's not like everybody else. He doesn't look like everybody else. He doesn't act like everybody else. He doesn't come from the same background."
He raced dirt bikes, until the broken bones began interrupting his golf. Fowler's mom is part Japanese and Native American. If that personal pedigree sounds sort of familiar, there's another prominent player of mixed heritage that includes Asian and Native American blood -- he has 71 tour wins at this point.
The initial Fowler eyeful can be a bit jarring at first. Fowler has trimmed back his mop of brown hair from his amateur days, but it still looks like a desert tumbleweed at times. He wears his painter's cap pulled down over the top of his ears, which is a look you don't often see unless you hang out at urban shopping malls.
"My hair goes over my ears, to that's the way it works out," he laughed.
The whole plan has worked out, really.
With his two finishes in the top seven, Fowler has already made enough money at $553,700 to jump into the top 150 in tour earnings. If he can retain that position -- only two official events remain -- he can skip directly to the final stage of Q-school in December. However, if he continues the recent roll and logs another top-10 finish this week in Mississippi, he would cinch an automatic spot in the season finale at Disney World, where he'd have a reasonable shot at cracking the top 125 on the money list.
Reaching that rare threshold means he would secure his 2010 card and could skip Q-school completely, a feat accomplished only by Woods and Ryan Moore since 1996. If he fails to post another top-10 this week, Disney has one sponsor exemption remaining and Fowler is definitely being considered, tournament director Kevin Weickel said.
This improbable dreamscape scenario wasn't on his mind when he left OSU after two years, then elected to wait until after playing in the Walker Cup amateur matches to turn pro. It's worked out better than anybody might have imagined, with Fowler finishing 4-0 in the Walker and bolting off the line on tour, to make a motocross comparison.
He started the run with a pronounced handicap. By waiting to turn pro, he missed attracting some potential sponsor exemptions at midsummer, losing precious opportunities to make an earlier splash on the money list. So, initially, making a run at securing a card and skipping Q-school wasn't much worth discussing. When he made his first pro start on the PGA Tour two weeks ago, there was no urgency at all to make fast money.
"Not really," he said. "The whole plan was to go to first stage of Q-school. I wasn't exactly pushing myself to try and play really well to try to skip and stages. I kind of went out with no expectations and like there was nothing to lose."
Fowler's play has been the talk not only of the Oklahoma State roster, but the tour locker room, too. His ride since leaving college, with the Walker and tour successes, has been practically absurd.
"About all I could do to top it off was to have won one of these events," Fowler said. "But it's been awesome. I couldn't have thought of it to be any better, to come out in my first two tour events and be T7 and T1. It's been a pretty cool experience."
Trying to carve a niche for Fowler in an often flair-deprived golf landscape, his management team coined a nickname, "Golf 2.0," a semi-trendy nod to his potential place among the up-and-comers out there.
"The idea was that a new generation was here with some of the younger guys coming up, whether it was me, Ryo Ishikawa, Rory McIlroy, Danny Lee -- the new generation coming in," Fowler said.
Whether the Golf 2.0 tag will stick is anybody's guess, but Fowler's future in golf for 2010 is looking more and more certain.
