Race to Dubai champion Fleetwood wants to be world number one

Matt Jones - Editor 23:10 20/11/2017
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  • Eighteen months ago he wanted to pull out of a tournament because he was petrified he wouldn’t physically be able to tee off on the first hole. Now, Race to Dubai champion Tommy Fleetwood is flying and targeting becoming the number one golfer in the world.

    The affable 26-year-old Englishman has been extremely candid in Dubai this week about the dark days of a year-and-a-half ago. It was the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth last May and Fleetwood recalls feeling “embarrassed” at the way he was hitting the ball.

    The Southport native had attempted to alter his swing soon after entering the world’s top-50 in June 2015 in his search to be a “world-class golfer”, but his ploy soon backfired and he began tumbling down the rankings.

    He was as low as 188th in September 2016. But he went back to former coach Alan Thompson and old caddie Ian Finnis and gradually things started to turn around. He has been on a steady rise ever since and is now 19th, having been inside the top 20 since July, although he is set to rise sharply again after his European Tour crown.

    As good a year as it’s been, both on and off the course for Fleetwood – he became a dad to Frankie seven weeks ago and will marry fiancée Clare in a few weeks – he doesn’t want the Race to Dubai champion to define his career.

    “My ultimate goal in life is to be the best player in the world,” he said at his champion press conference on Sunday.

    “That will always be the same. Whether I achieve it or not is another thing, but I’ll always strive for that.

    “I’ve got a lot of experience in me after the last two, three years. I know that you can go down the wrong path very easily and I think I’ve got people around me and myself included that know how to stay on the right path.

    “I’ll always have high expectations but we’ll see where we can go. The ultimate goal, and I think everybody in the profession should have that goal, is to try to be number one in the world.”

    Having ended the season with the finest achievement of his career in Dubai, Fleetwood credits UAE capital Abu Dhabi as being the catalyst for his fine 2017.

    It was there he won the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship at the end of January – ending a winless drought of more than three years.

    And even though he had clambered back inside the top-100 before beating former Abu Dhabi champion Pablo Larrazabal and reigning US Open champion Dustin Johnson, Fleetwood admitted victory proved he was back.

    “I won, but that was more a point where my game was back to where I wanted it because we put a lot of work in,” Fleetwood said of the Abu Dhabi triumph that ended a 1,247-day wait for a tournament victory since triumphing at the Johnnie Walker Championship at Gleneagles in August 2013.

    “I had come from the lowest point in my playing career, all the way to where I was right where I wanted to be.

    “I hadn’t won in three years. But it was more I had proved I was back where my game should be and I knew that I could win. So I wanted to win again and I was very confident that I could.

    “I’m quite a determined person and I have a lot of goals in my career. Abu Dhabi was more, it was a goal to win but it wasn’t like the be-all and end-all. It wasn’t like I had achieved what I wanted to achieve.”

    Confidence is soaring and after conquering Europe at Jumeirah Golf Estates’ Earth course, one of the goals for next season is to play on the PGA Tour.

    “This year has been a big year in terms of my career. You know, some of the performances, I have put myself on the world stage a bit more,” said Fleetwood, who will surely have September’s Ryder Cup in the back of his mind.

    “When we sit down after this year, we’ll make sure that the goals get high and lofty and that I push myself to achieve more.

    “I’ll always have 2017 Race to Dubai No. 1 but the big events, they will always be on our minds. I want to win, there’s a lot around majors. I’d love to have a couple by the time I’m done.

    “I obviously want to play a bit more over there (the US) next year. I think it is a different style of golf and there is a lot of the best players in the world over there. The majors, the majority of majors are over there. The WGCs are there.

    “I think it makes you a better player trying to play over there. People come over to the European Tour and I think it makes them better. It makes you a more rounded player. It’s all part of a learning curve and a stepping stone.”

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