Rickie Fowler figures it’s better to be a four-eyes than a fore-eyes, so the PGA Tour fan favorite has gone to a pair of prescription sunglasses to improve his game.
“I always struggled with seeing more than, say, 150 yards and little things far away,” Fowler said after shooting a 3-under-69 that put him in contention Thursday at the Memorial Tournament. “The only time I start to struggle with some depth perception is in low light situations, like early morning or as the sun is going down. And so I just wanted to try another option, before going to Lasik down the road.”
That other option is a pair of Oakley tinted sunglasses that improve his vision, which measures a mild -.75 in one eye and -.50 in the other.
“It’s not bad enough to where I wanted to try going to like Lasik (now),” he said.
Fowler would have donned prescription spectacles earlier except that his golf swing interfered with the glasses, which impacted his vision.
Rickie Fowler watches his tee shot off the 10th hole in the Nationwide Invitational Pro-Am on Wednesday morning at Muirfield Village Golf Club on June 1, 2021.
“I always felt the nose piece, with how much I move sometimes in the swing, it would get in the way and I would lose sight of the ball, which is why I didn’t like glasses forever,” he said.
A recent swing change, where Fowler is not as loose with the club, allowed him to finally try glasses.
“With just standard sunglasses without prescription I saw that I wasn’t squinting as much, wasn’t stressing my eyes as much,” he said, adding that at home in Florida the bright light is especially troubling. “I said, ‘Shoot, why don’t we try prescription? So now I can actually see the ball land.”