Rickie Fowler's Game Is Turning A Corner And He Has One Thing To Thank For It: Sunglasses

I mean... what a statistic that is. Sabermetrics like you read about. They say numbers never lie and THAT right there.... is a statistic.

Rickie has historically been one of the best putters on Tour ever since he joined it. Dude's got a beautiful stroke. Unbelievable tempo. Cock full of confidence on the dancefloor for years. Rick gained strokes against the field with the flatstick every single year since 2012, including #1 on Tour back in '16. His putter was a massive part of why he had spent more time in the world top 25 than out of it throughout this career.

For whatever reason, that shit went out the window for Rickie somewhere in 2020. Tee-to-green was a disaster, but the putter went ice cold too. Couldn't even lean on ol' reliable. That had him fall alllll the way out of the OWGR top 100 for the first time since... pretty much ever for him. I hypothesized at one point that it might be early/late tee times or something along those lines (definitely not his gf/wife) that had him on tilt.

Nope. Turned out he just needed a little ease on the eyes. Who cares if he didn't play with sunnies on early in his career?  When shit stopped working, he had to shake some shit up. Rickie popped the glasses on and instantly became a new man. No coincidence about that. Sunglasses = Success. 

Now Rickie's put up a handful of respectable starts in the past few weeks and he's contending this week at the 3M Open.

GO RICKIE GO!

PS I'd love to learn more about the guy behind the scenes crunching the numbers on this stat. I'm imagining a guy with a notepad watching Rickie film in a dark room, jotting down whether he was wearing his sunnies or not on made and missed putts. What a life that guy lives.