Rickie Fowler is a southern California kid, so maybe he was influenced by The Karate Kid growing up when it comes to creatively maintaining balance. Or maybe he just got really into the Cobra Kai reboot.
Or, hey, maybe that’s a tortured narrative utilized here just so I can tell you how awesome Cobra Kai was, and that you should definitely watch it. Because it was, and you should.
But, anyway, here’s Rickie Fowler at second hole at Muirfield Village in the opening round of the Memorial, playing a precarious shot out of a hazard to avoid taking a penalty drop:
That’s a hell of a shot, all things considered! If he’d slipped and had his club touch the ground while he was addressing it, that would have been a penalty in its own right, and there was the obvious danger of leaving the ball in the hazard, or pushing it into another hazard farther up the hole, which is almost what happened.
In the end, Fowler’s advancement gave him a shot to get up and down for par, which he failed to do. But the successful shot enabled him to escape the hole with just one shot given back to par. And it looked really cool, too.