Fleetwood brings confidence, full set of clubs to PGA

ST. LOUIS » Tommy Fleetwood has been playing so well lately that he navigated Club de Golf Chapultepec just outside of Mexico City with a mere 12 clubs, two fewer than players are allowed in the bag.

Finished in the top 20, too.

You see, the affable Englishman with the long locks still plays his beloved set of Nike irons, even though the company got out of the golf equipment game a couple of years ago. If he breaks or loses one, there is no recourse. He even tried unsuccessfully to buy a set that Paul Casey had sitting in his garage, his countryman joking that they have become as rare as “rocking horse poo.”

So when the hosels on a couple of irons bent from wear and tear at the WGCMexico Championship, there was no Nike trailer waiting to fix them. Shipping them out was out of the question, too.

He just played without them.

Played pretty well, too. “At least it was 7 and 8 irons, so you can kind of work around that,” Fleetwood said. “Mid-irons are all right. You can go soft or hard with the ones in between. It would have been worse if it was like a wedge or something maybe. But it didn’t cause too many problems. I think there was like a couple of clubs that I might have needed one, but it was all right. I got by just fine.”

He’s been getting along just fine for a couple of years now, slowly climbing the world ranking to his current perch just outside the top 10. He won twice on the European Tour last year and captured the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship in January to keep the hot streak going.

The next step is winning on the PGA Tour. Or winning a major championship.

He could do both at Bellerive.

Fleetwood is among the favorites to win the PGA Championship this week, a reflection of the way he has performed since missing the cut at The Players Championship. He shot a blistering final- round 63 to finish second at the U. S. Open, used a secondround 65 to finish tied for 12th at the British Open and strung together three rounds in the 60s for a top10 result at the Canadian Open.

DARRON CUMMINGS — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Tommy Fleetwood, of England, responds to a question during a news conference at the PGA Championship golf tournament at Bellerive Country Club, Wednesday in St. Louis.