Biggest day of my career: Fleetwood
dubai — Tommy Fleetwood is the new Race to Dubai champion but the long-haired Englishman had to spend a few nail-biting moments in front of a television screen in the scorer’s tent before it was confirmed that the Harry Vardon Trohpy was his to keep for a year.
“It’s the biggest day of my career for sure. The emotions were difficult on me because even — I don’t trust computers, so even when everything had finished, it was so difficult to get up or down,” Fleetwood explained his dilemma while watching close rival and friend Justin Rose’s fate on the 18th.
“I felt for Justin a lot, you know, because I saw him when he came in. I think how gracious he was shows a lot about his character.”
“It’s not sunk in yet. I had never done anything like this before, and it was actually quite an up-and- down week,” the golfer said softly.
Fleetwood carded back-to-back 65 on second and third day but had ordinary opening and closing rounds but his consistent performance throughout the season was enough as both his close challengers faltered at the finish. He confessed: “First day was poor.”
“The next two days were… well, even the third day was up-anddown. And, then today, obviously didn’t perform how I wanted to but it just shows golf can be such a cruel or difficult game sometimes,” he reasoned about his performance in the season-ending DP World Tour Championship.
“Justin had played unbelievable for three-and-a-half and then that back nine; it just shows that,” he said justifying his statement that golf can be cruel sometimes. “It’s an experience for me, (for) everybody watching what’s going on, it was completely out of my hands after 12 or 13 holes.”
“It’s a massive learning curve seeing that still anything can happen, but yeah, it’s still definitely not sunk in,” Fleetwood added.
On winning the Race to Dubai, the Briton says: “It turns out, it’s quite a strange one because you kind of — you’re always looking week-in, week- out. I had a bad Sunday. Then you know, you’ve won The Race to Dubai. It’s like a really weird scenario. And like I say, it’s still not sunk in but the actual — we’ve been saying it for a while.”
“The achievement of winning a year-long accomplishment is massive and it holds a lot of respect amongst your peers and the players. It shows sort of the level of consistency and the amount I’ve improved as a player and as a person,” said the 26-yer-old golfer, who has won three titles on the Tour.
He insisted that he didn’t keep all the permutations and combinations in mind to win the Race to Dubai title. He had kept it simple: “I was trying to win this week, and I felt like I could, I was playing well. It just didn’t turn out that way.”
When Rose walked into the scorer’s room at the end of the day, he congratulated Fleetwood. “He (Rose) just said congratulations. It was such a hard thing to do. It was a tough scenario. I didn’t really — I didn’t feel like I could take any credit for what I had just achieved,” the Race to Dubai winner modestly said.
“You know, because we are good friends and everything, and it’s just the nature of the game; somebody wins, somebody loses, and it was a difficult — it was just a difficult sort of situation,” he added emotionally before leaving the media room.
sunilvaidya@khaleejtimes.com