Oklahoma State Golf Coach Once Hid In Bushes To Recruit Rickie Fowler

We are a few weeks away from the one-year anniversary of Rickie Fowler’s (second) coming out party at the Players Championship. My buddy DJ Piehowski recently wrote a crazy-good feature on Fowler’s background, life and future. You can read it here. The part that caught my attention was this story about how Alan Bratton recruited Fowler at the 2005 Western Junior.

“I had seen a lot of his scores in smaller tournaments and his name just stood out, the way it was spelled a little differently,” Bratton told PGATour.com. “And some of the websites that had his results had a picture of him and he’s just a striking, different-looking kid. … Even in recruiting, I’d have a plan to watch him play a few holes and then go watch someone else. But there’s something about him I couldn’t leave. He’s just fun to watch.”

Then the Western Junior.

“I was watching from fairways over, trying to hide in the bushes,” he said. His stealth was commendable, but it didn’t end up doing much good. Fowler shot 65 in the final round to win. “By the end of the tournament, everybody knew who he was,” Bratton says. Not long after, Fowler became the No. 1-ranked amateur in the world, a title he held for 37 weeks. Bratton went back to OSU head coach Mike Holder and said he’d found the best player in the country. “Every year there’s someone who is the best player in the country,” Bratton says. “But Rickie wasn’t an ‘every year’ player. He was special.”

Fowler’s mom Lynn added that her son is all orange. “He tells me that he lives and breaths Oklahoma State and I believe him,” she says. “It’s almost like he was born to be there.”

The entire thing is pretty spectacularly-done. The PGA Tour added Vines, GIFs and quotes to what was already a really great story. Check it out.