You’ll often hear a couple of buzzwords from Paul McGinley in his analysis of players. One of them is “momentum”. Another is what he terms “bouncebackability”, in highlighting a player’s resilience in recovering from a setback to perform brilliantly.
In each case, Matt Fitzpatrick ticks the boxes, and the Englishman’s win in the Valspar Championship a week after losing out by one stroke to Cameron Young in The Players showed that the former US Open champion is headed into the Masters at Augusta National in tip-top form.
Yet, for all of the 273 strokes which Fitzpatrick took en route to a third career win on the PGA Tour, it was his actions in again highlighting the plague of slow play that could well have wider implications.
In this case, it was his playing partner Adrien Dumont de Chassart who was the guilty party, although Fitzpatrick very carefully didn’t actually call out the Belgian – who had two triple-bogey 8s on his scorecard as he plummeted down the leaderboard – by name.
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“That was really frustrating. It was slow today. I felt like there was a lot of stop/start,” said Fitzpatrick of the times he was left waiting, with his playing partner at times taking three minutes to ready for shot execution.
Fitzpatrick added: “When you’re not ready to play a golf shot it gets frustrating after a while. Particularly when you playing well yourself or you’re in contention or whatever it is ... it definitely knocks you out of your rhythm. Because you hit, you walk to it, you kind of think about it, you hit again, and you go.”
One incident in particular, at the 11th hole, proved especially frustrating. “It definitely knocked me out of rhythm. I felt like for the next two, three holes, I was kind of chasing my tail, because I’m trying to speed up and trying to keep us or get back in position. And at the same time you’re obviously trying to win a golf tournament. So it’s like at that point in the week it’s kind of a hard balance.”
But one which Fitzpatrick successfully managed to pull off, his fist pump on the 18th providing visual proof of how much it meant to him.
The win on the back of his runner-up finish at Sawgrass had the effect of moving Fitzpatrick back into the world’s top-10, in sixth position, quite the contrast to less than a year ago when he slipped to 85th in May.
With a winning finish to the Florida Swing, Fitzpatrick has opted to take two weeks off ahead of the Masters where his best finish was tied-seventh back in 2016.
“I’m obviously very confident in my game right now. But what it takes to win a Major is very different to what it takes to win on the PGA Tour, in my opinion. Particularly the Masters, there’s extra pressure on the Masters, no matter who you are, it just has that standing above all the other events, as well as the Majors.
“There’s stuff that I still want to work on. I’m coming away from this week, obviously I won, delighted with where my game’s at, but there’s stuff I want to improve. I want to make sure that I’m ready for when I get to Augusta to be ready to play and be ready that Thursday morning.
“I’m really looking forward to that week. Obviously still two weeks away, so time to prepare and get ready and as well as rest and recover and just be in the best shape as possible.”
