Michelle Wie West reveals how Rickie Fowler helped her win US Women’s Open

Rickie Fowler may not yet have managed to get over the line at a major championship, but he did help Michelle Wie West break her duck on golf’s biggest stage.

Wie West enjoyed a stellar record in the majors – including four top-ten finishes as a teenage amateur – but her sole victory came at Pinehurst in 2014, when both the men’s and women’s US Open tournaments were played in back to back weeks at the famed North Carolina resort.

Speaking on Golf.com’s The Scoop series, Wie West revealed that she asked Fowler if she could have his yardage book as a “cheat guide”. Not only did he agree, Fowler, who finished a distant second to runaway leader Martin Kaymer, “took it above and beyond”.

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She added: “He took so many notes being like, ‘This bunker, you shouldn’t be here for this pin, you should be there for that pin’, and the system of how he did it.

“I learned a lot from looking at his yardage book.

“But he also wrote down, like, every single break that he had on most of the holes, and most of our pin positions were very similar.”

Wie West – then just Wie, of course, as she didn’t marry husband Jonnie West until 2019 – double bogeyed the par-4 16th on Pinehurst’s revered No 2 course to give her rivals a glimmer of hope, but she bounced straight back at the next hole.

Again, with a little help from her friend.

“On 17, the birdie putt that I made, he actually had the same putt and wrote down the break.”

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Wie West would go on to sign for a 278 and finish as the only player under par for the tournament, edging out fellow American Stacy Lewis by two shots.

And how did she thank Fowler?

She signed the yardage book and returned it to him, of course!

Alex Perry is the Associate Editor of bunkered. A journalist for more than 20 years, he has been a golf industry stalwart for the majority of his career and, in a five-year spell at ESPN, covered every sporting event you can think of. He completed his own Grand Slam at the 2023 Masters, having fallen in love with the sport at his hometown club of Okehampton and on the links of nearby Bude & North Cornwall.

Associate Editor