Rocket Mortgage Classic: Rickie Fowler overcomes blisters with 7 birdies en route to 67

Fowler carded seven birdies en route to a 5-under 67 in the first round of the Rocket Mortgage Classic.

Rickie Fowler has blisters on his hands from practicing so much, but they didn’t stop him from blistering Detroit Golf Club to the tune of seven birdies and a round of 5-under 67 in the first round of the Rocket Mortgage Classic.

“Anytime you make seven birdies, it’s a good day,” Fowler said.

Indeed, it is. It’s even better when you’ve entered the week having missed back-to-back cuts at the Charles Schwab Challenge and RBC Heritage for the first time since 2016. A week off may have been just what the doctor ordered for the 31-year-old Southern California native to get a better grip on his game. Hard at work on making swing changes with instructor John Tillery, Fowler suffered from blisters when he last played in the second round at Harbour Town Golf Links in Hilton Head, South Carolina.

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“Last week at home I wasn’t able to play interlock, which is my normal grip, so just kind of had to hit balls overlap and work on some fundamentals and not really worry too much about how I was hitting it and stuff like that,” Fowler explained. “So, once I got here, Tuesday was the first day I was actually able to start hitting balls somewhat interlock. It was still bothering me, but they’re healing, so today was the first day that it felt at least good enough to go ahead and go.”

Fowler looked sharp early. He spun his approach to two feet at the 10th hole, his first hole of the day, for a tap-in birdie. He was cruising along with four birdies in his first six holes when he fanned his drive to the right into a precarious lie and made double bogey.

“It one-hopped into a thick area and it went all the way to the bottom,” Fowler said. “It was basically sitting on dirt, but there was probably, I don’t know, eight inches of grass there and I thought it was going to kind of just pop up when I hit it and it kind of came out low and left, which was not where I wanted it to go. Next time we’ll just hit it in the fairway, won’t have that problem.”

 

It turned out to be Fowler’s only dropped shots of the day as he poured in three birdies in a row on the front side, beginning at No. 2 and capped off by a 17-footer at the fifth to trail the leaders by two strokes. Fowler, blessed with one of the silkiest putting strokes in the game, blamed his putter for his failures in his previous two starts.

“It’s some of the worst I’ve putted or maybe the most inconsistent,” he said.

So what did he do to get back on track?

“I was standing too close to the ball and the putter was going a little outside on the way back, and then with that it was causing me to have to back out or my head moving backwards through impact,” Fowler explained. “I was pulling a lot of putts, and once you do that, you start getting two-way misses because you’re trying to match it up.”

Fowler took just 27 putts and ranked fourth in Strokes Gained: Putting on the day.

“It’s nice to see the ball rolling off the putter how I want it to. Been putting some work in there,” Fowler said. “Other than that, we’ll just tighten the tee ball up and I’m happy with the start.”

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