By Tod Leonard
It was a player-coach pairing that some people never loved, and now Rickie Fowler apparently is parting ways with his instructor of the last three years, John Tillery.

Tillery told ESPN on Tuesday that he’s no longer working with Fowler, who hired him in September 2019 after Butch Harmon cut out travel from his teaching schedule. Some in the industry questioned the move at the time, and the results of all the work with Tillery have not been fruitful.

Fowler, 33, hasn’t won on the PGA Tour since the WM Phoenix Open in early 2019 when he was still working with Harmon, and this past season he notched just one top-10—a tie for third at the CJ Cup in October 2021. Hovering around the top 125 bubbles in FedEx Cup points, he was the last player to make it into the playoffs and was ousted after the first event when he tied for 64th in the FedEx St. Jude after he opened with a promising 65. He played in only one major, tying for 23rd in the PGA Championship.

In a February 2021 interview with Golfweek, commentator Brandel Chamblee said he didn’t understand why Fowler left Harmon.

“He’s got a good coach [John Tillery] but I disagree with the philosophy that he’s coaching, which is more flex in his right knee. … I cannot believe Rickie left Butch. Get on a plane and go to Vegas. He had a wonderful relationship with Butch. It’s a risk working with anybody. It could work out or it might not.”

For 2021-22, Fowler ranked outside the top 100 in most of the tour’s major statistical categories, with only driving distance (27th with a 309.4 average) and strokes gained/around the green (31st at .274) as pluses. Particularly troubling was Fowler’s putting, for which he was 161st, losing .253 to the field.

“Man, I love the guy,” Tillery told ESPN. “This job will punch you in the gut sometimes. As a coach, there’s nothing better than watching your guys succeed, and nothing worse than watching them struggle. The Xs and Os of what they need to do is the easy part, but getting it done can be a challenge sometimes, and we didn’t get it done. I’m pulling for him and wish him nothing but the best.”

Tillery’s current stable of players includes Kevin Kisner, Sepp Straka and Hudson Swafford—the latter two having won the tour this season.

Fowler has fallen to No. 178 in the Official World Golf Ranking after climbing to as high as fourth in 2016, and just before the FedEx St. Jude he parted with caddie Joe Skovron, who’d been on his bag since Fowler turned pro.

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The post Rickie Fowler makes another change in parting ways with coach, per report appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

By Matthew Rudy
If Brandel Chamblee was looking for an outlet to relieve some of his virus-induced social isolation this week, he found it.

The Golf Channel commentator used a two-part Golfweek interview to light golf coaches on fire, claiming (among other things) that “teachers are being exposed for their idiocy,” and that the flawed teaching philosophies permeating PGA Tour practice areas are ending more careers than they help. He proceeded to say that the teachers spreading those philosophies are being “bitch-slapped by reality” and the wisdom of crowds on social media and YouTube. “There it is. You’re wrong and they’re right.”

The airing of grievances continued with a dismissive wave at Golf Digest’s 50 Best Teachers list, as Chamblee continued: “I go look up all their players and then see are they better or worse? I go online, I look at their ideas and some of them crack me up.” He had a specific takedown of Jordan Spieth and his coach, Cameron McCormick, and Rickie Fowler for his decision to start working with a new coach in John Tillery.

Claude Harmon III falls into the former category, having handled the week-to-week tour work with Fowler for three years in tandem with his father, Butch Harmon. The younger Harmon said he admires Chamblee’s television skills but dismissed the wave of anti-instructor comments as a wrestling-style storyline designed to produce heat and attention.

“I worked at Sky TV for four years doing what Brandel does, and it’s brutal how hard that job is,” says Harmon, who coaches Brooks Koepka. “Brandel is a television character. He’s an actor. He has a role he performs, and he does a great job at it. Brandel is a thinker, and he does a lot of research. He’s 100 percent entitled to his opinions. But when it comes to talking about the swing and about golf instruction, it’s hard to take him seriously. He doesn’t give lessons, or have a body of work to evaluate.”

Chamblee was pointed and specific in his critique of Spieth’s swing, comparing video of swings from 2015 and today, and essentially calling teaching malpractice on McCormick for what Chamblee characterised as balance issues in Spieth’s swing.

“Why would his teacher tell him to change that? Why? He’s either being told to do that or whoever’s watching him doesn’t see that he’s doing that,” said Chamblee. “That would take two seconds to fix.”

McCormick declined to comment on the critical remarks, but Claude Harmon said Chamblee’s volley reminded him of last April, when Chamblee torched Koepka ahead of the Masters for changing his body to prepare for an ESPN photoshoot.

“It takes two minutes to call somebody’s agent to reach out, or, better yet, to walk over to Brooks or to me or to anybody else on a practice range and say what you want to say or ask questions to get some more information. Or, you can sit at 35,000 feet and criticize,” says Harmon. “The Spieth stuff? The problem is that I never see Brandel in the world I live in. Gary Koch comes and stands on the range for hours, just watching. And if he thinks he’s going to talk about a player, he asks questions so he can get details and context. The only time I’ve even seen Brandel at a tour event is in a cart, getting driven back and forth from the media compound.”

Harmon wasn’t the only teacher to bristle at Chamblee’s characterizations. Michael Breed started his SiriusXM PGA Tour Radio show on Thursday with a fastball high and tight, calling Chamblee’s comments sour grapes for his own shortcomings as a player. “What you’re really hearing is a guy who was frustrated he didn’t perform at the level he thought he should have performed at,” said Breed. “And it has to be somebody’s fault. It can’t be mine, so it has to be a coach or a teacher. Maybe you just weren’t that good.”

Chamblee has been outspoken about how “modern” golf instruction has robbed players of the natural athleticism they could be using to play better—and has said he was one of those victims—dropping off the PGA Tour in the early 2000s after almost a decade of consistently good play and one victory. It led to him writing his 2016 book, The Anatomy of Greatness, in which he said amateurs would be better off modelling what historical champions did instead of blindly following modern swing theories.

Tour coach Terry Rowles says Chamblee obscured the truth in some of what he said—that players can be hurt by ineffective coaching—with uncharacteristically clumsy language. “I know Brandel enjoys classic literature, and I know he knows that words have power. It sounded like a generalized, ranting cheap shot,” says Rowles, who works with Aaron Baddeley.

“Do some players take too much? Yes. Do some coaches give too much? Yes. It’s hard to balance the give and take precisely all of the time. Humans are messy. The same information that saves one player would ruin the next. How does that fit in with what you would see on YouTube? Only somebody who has never coached would say it was all easy and obvious.”

That was where Harmon left it, too. “My job would be so much easier if I could just give opinions in a vacuum, but my opinions have consequences. His don’t,” Harmon said. “Brandel is in the opinion business. I’m in the results business.”

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