Home-town hero Tommy Fleetwood ready to join the elite

For a dose of perspective at Royal Birkdale, next to his parents’ home in his native Southport, Fleetwood does not have to go back far. Only last year he reached a trough of despair and a subsiding ranking of No 188.

“I was panicking,” he admits. “I had the yips off the tee and I do not wish that on anyone. I was trying to make cuts because I was looking after a family for the first time and I was trying to bring in money, which is not a good recipe for success. I wondered whether I was going to keep my Tour card. At times like that you wonder if it is going to get better, or if this is just how it’s going to be.”

He went back to Alan Thompson, his old coach, and stopped tinkering. Instead of trying to eradicate perceived weaknesses he focused on building on his abilities, something anathema to golf’s legion of analysts.

“Everybody is obsessed with getting better,” Fleetwood says. “There is always someone playing amazingly and you wonder how they are doing it. It means golf is probably the easiest sport in the world where you can get caught on the wrong path and, before you know it, you’re too far down it and there’s no way back.

“You think you can improve loads but you can’t. Only now do I have an appreciation of my own game.”

It is 25 years since Sir Nick Faldo became the last English winner of the Open. If Fleetwood follows suit it would be a shot in the arm globally for a sport lacking narratives and mavericks. This is the man whose reading matter ranges from Great Expectation to Mike Tyson’s autobiography; he wears tapered trousers; when he won his maiden Tour victory at the Johnnie Walker Championship in August 2013 he lauded the bravery of his dog, Maisy, who had cancer.

“I don’t know if I do things differently,” he says. “I just do things that feel right. I suppose it would be unusual to be having a baby with my manager if it was Chubby [Chandler]. It’s not something you see every day but you have to have faith in your decisions. You have to be very secure in yourself on tour when people are looking at you all the time. Me and Clare have a brilliant relationship so it was never going to faze us. Being a manager and an agent is a tough job, but I trust her more than anyone in the world and that’s a massive thing to fall back on.”

Fleetwood bucks sporting clichés and so, yes, during that final round of the US Open last month, he did indulge in thoughts of winning. Ultimately, Brooks Koepka, paired with Fleetwood again on Thursday, putted too well, but he learnt more about himself in a few holes than from all his psychological books — “I hesitate to use the word self-help”.

He says: “There is not a high percentage of golfers who ever have a chance of winning on a Sunday at a major. I didn’t know how I would feel when I woke up that morning. You will always have good and bad shots but it’s about what you feel inside. I just felt comfortable and, if it comes again, I know I can handle it. It’s one of those things. You can’t practise it.

“There was a moment on the 16th green on the last day when I looked around for the first time all day and thought, ‘Hey, there’s a lot of people here’. It was ten-deep. I realised then how into the game I was and how I’d not been thinking about anything else.”

The son of a Tarmac layer, Fleetwood has not followed a path of privilege to the edge of real fame. His dad still walks his dog on the course, but Fleetwood was not welcome at Birkdale in his youth.

Only last year, Fleetwood was in despair and a boasted a ranking of No 188

BRADLEY ORMESHER FOR THE TIMES

“The pro shop would shut at 7pm and I used to bunk on the 5th down the back of the houses,” he says. It was the sort of clandestine cameo that echoed a young Seve Ballesteros stealing on to the 6th fairway through a hole in the wall in Pedreña. “The 5th has fences and bushes now so that’s gone,” Fleetwood says. “You can’t even get on to watch the Open any more.”

Tethered to his roots but undaunted by home-town attention, Fleetwood says that he is not scared of anything. His goal at the start of 2017 was to win a tournament, but he had done that by the end of January in Abu Dhabi. He duly backed it up with second place at the WGC Mexico. The crisis was over and goalposts had moved.

“It is easy to get outside yourself,” he says of heightened expectation, but a run of seven first-time major winners proves that the so-called big three have been supplanted by a free-for-all.

“We definitely don’t have a Tiger Woods dominating everything but I think it’s harder and harder to do that,” Fleetwood says. “The strength in depth of the top 50 is stronger than it’s ever been. There have been a lot of first-time major winners but they are going to be multiple majors winners like Dustin Johnson. It’s changing, a new dawn and I would like to be part of it.”

Back in 1998 Fleetwood went to his first Open at Birkdale, aged seven. Woods walked past him and, having failed to get many autographs, he spent much of the day faking signatures. All these years, back on the same course, it would be no surprise if he made another name for himself.