POULTER FOCUSED ON PUTTER AFTER CLEARING CLUTTER
Feisty Brit is playing better golf, and even enjoying a first trip to the Canadian Open
Ian Poulter laughs off the suggestion he is popular with fans.
“I’m like Marmite,” he says. “You either love me or hate me.”
This is a bold take. If you have never tried Marmite, which is, like Poulter, a distinctly British thing, it is a sticky brown food paste with a powerful taste. It is also very salty.
Come to think of it, Poulter’s analogy is rather on the nose. There is a fair bit of Marmite about him.
Poulter, 41, was speaking to a Canadian audience at Glen Abbey Golf Club for one of the few times in his career because this is the first time he has played in the RBC Canadian Open. He played a made-for-TV skins game at Glen Abbey several seasons ago — a sign of his status as a high-profile Ryder Cup star — but this week marks the first time he has done the British Open-Canadian Open double.
It is a good thing for golf fans here, because Poulter is one of the more interesting players on the PGA Tour, in the middle of one of the more interesting seasons a player can have.
Where many of his colleagues use social media to promote their sponsors and post photos of their custom wines, Poulter has long been willing to put himself out there on places like Twitter, showing his more than two million followers photos of his luxury sports cars or snaps of his large Florida home. He also, quite evidently, reads the feedback, and can end up in angry exchanges with some random guy with a cuss word in his user name and an egg for a photo. Poulter is not one to hold his tongue, on Twitter or otherwise.
I ask him if a young player were to ask about setting up social media accounts today, would he tell them it was worth doing?
Poulter takes six seconds to consider a response. This is a long time to ponder; stop and try it. It depends, he says.
“Probably the smartest way of doing it, is give it to someone who is employed to do it for them. Not let them get interactive with it, and completely isolate them from that.”
This is likely sound advice for us all, but Poulter gets to the nub of it when he keeps explaining.
“I would, unfortunately, tell them to not read all the comments, because unfortunately there’s always — you don’t look at the 99 per cent of comments that are fantastic,” Poulter says. “You gravitate to the ones that seem to want to pull you down, and unfortunately those people weren’t worth reading about, anyway, to be honest. They are just sad people that don’t have much of a life, so (you) shouldn’t really be looking at their comments anyway.”
Fire emoji, bomb emoji, fire emoji.
For Poulter, who has 12 European Tour wins, two PGA Tour wins (World Golf Championship victories in China and Arizona), and who has been ranked as high as fifth in the world, it would have been one thing to spar with randoms when he was riding high. It would have been something else over the past two years, when he suffered a foot injury that caused him to miss much of last season, and then had to scramble early this year in an attempt to retain his Tour card off a medical exemption.
Poulter thought his card was lost after he missed the cut at the Texas Open in April, but a week later he discovered it was safe after the PGA realized it had calculated his points incorrectly. (The mistake was only discovered by fellow pro Brian Gay.) Since then, he finished second at the Players Championship and was in the top five at the British Open last week before sagging to a tie for 14th. Still, it beats not playing at all.
“It’s been a mad few months, not just a mad couple of days, but it’s been great,” Poulter says.
Asked if there’s an explanation for the results this season after a few off years, he says he “cleared a lot of clutter in the background.” He announced in the spring he was ending his clothing line, for one. Perhaps he spent less time reading Twitter responses; maybe sold a couple of Ferraris.
“I just tidied the room,” he says. “You guys know how mad the last four months has been. Being in a position to try and maintain a card status, having the disappointment level, re-working your entire year’s schedule around what possibly could be going on, looking into the whole situation of writing for invitations; and then getting a phone call the following week to say, sorry, miscalculation, you have a card.”
The uncertainty of those months took a toll, he allows.
“So, I think from that perspective, things got cleared up quite nicely; that led to some great (play) at the Players Championship; that led to obviously a boost in the confidence levels, and because of that, I’ve been playing golf that I’d like to play.”
Poulter says he’s adjusted to the trip over the Atlantic — “Sleep. Sleep, sleep, sleep” — and just needs to familiarize himself with Glen Abbey again.
“I’ll be ready to rock tomorrow,” he says.
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