Young Fowler is really shooting for the stars

EAST PROVIDENCE — He won the Southern California state high school title as a freshman, shooting a 62 in the final round. He works out with Phil Mickelson’s brother in San Diego. Three weeks ago, he won the Sunnehanna Amateur, one of the most prestigious tournaments in the country, the first junior golfer to ever win it. Then he went home and graduated from Murrietta Valley High School, an hour north of San Diego.

Welcome to Rickie Fowler’s world.

You say you’ve never heard of him?

You will.

Right now, Fowler is one of the top junior golfers in the country, a fast track that has him here at the Northeast Amateur this week, this jewel of a tournament that has an alumni list of many of the game’s greats: Tiger Woods, Ben Crenshaw, Davis Love III, Curtis Strange, Hal Sutton, David Duval, Corey Pavin, plus a lot of others you could name. Not to mention every other local golfer who hit a 5-iron in earnest, Brad Faxon, Billy Andrade, the Quigleys.

It’s been going on for 46 summers now, the tournament where so many of these future pros come on their way to the big time, one of golf’s way stations, one of the places where you proved you belonged with the top amateur players in the country.

And now it starts earlier than ever before.

This year, there are several kids here who have not been to college yet, Fowler being one of them.

“We’ve seen this the past decade or so,” said Denny Glass, who runs the Northeast Amateur. “Call it Tiger’s ripple. It’s all that money now in golf.”

It’s the thought of the PGA Tour, the magical place that hovers over all these young players like Oz off in the distance, the PGA Tour where the prize money and the endorsements and the courtesy cars are all there if you can just make enough cuts.

So it all starts earlier now. The national tournaments. The travel around the country. The circuit the top kids play. It’s all there in golf now, like it has been in tennis and basketball and hockey for a while now, the sense that if you’re not doing it someone else is; the sense that this is what it takes if you are truly serious, what it takes if you one day are going to have a chance to play in the big tournaments where they give out the big checks.

Take Fowler, for example:

He began playing when he was age three and his grandfather took him to a driving range. He was playing in tournaments a year and a half later. Think about that for a second. Playing in golf tournaments at four and a half years old.

So golf became a major part of his life early. He played baseball and took part in motocross as a kid, but he knew early that he wanted to play golf.

“This is always what I wanted to do,” he said.

He was sitting yesterday morning on the patio a few yards away from the first tee at Wannamoisett, this Donald Ross course that has seen so many great players walk across it. He was wearing a white golf hat and if you didn’t know better, you would have thought he was getting ready to play in some Interscholastic League event instead of the one of the top four amateur tournaments in the country, young and bushy-haired, golfer as surfer.

He is ticketed for Oklahoma State in the fall, one of the top golf schools in the country, but there are many fairways to walk before then. He goes back to San Diego after this, then to a tournament in South Carolina, back home again, then to the Porter Cup in Niagara Falls.

It’s all part of the amateur circuit, one Fowler has been on for a few years now, one where so many of the same kids are there for the big tournaments, the same kids chasing the same dream.

“I was kind of late to it,” he said. “A lot of kids were out there at 13.”

“Do you pay a price for this?” he was asked. “How does it change your life?”

“You have to give up a lot of things,” he said. “I’m giving up the whole summer. But this is what you have to do. You have to keep challenging yourself. You can always get better.”

His plan is to stay at Oklahoma State for four years, then turn pro. The dream he’s grown up with, ever since he shot 62 and won the Southern California state high school tournament as a freshman, he and Tiger the only freshmen ever to do that.

Turning pro is about sponsors and backers. Turning pro is about many things that seem too far away from playing in an amateur tournament when you just graduated from high school, even if the tournament is one on the other side of the country where he lives.

But everything is geared to it. It’s the reason he now has a personal trainer, the reason he is here this weekend.

Fowler knows that this is one of the stops along the trail, walking the same fairways that Tiger and so many others also once walked, back before they were famous, back when they were still chasing their futures. He knows that this is one of the amateur tournaments that matter, one that’s served as a springboard to where he’s one day trying to get to.

The world of the top junior golfers in the country.

Rickie Fowler’s world.