If this admission from Patrick Reed is true, the man might never lose again.
Playing at the Wells Fargo Championship this week, Reed was asked how he earned his Major breakthrough without playing his best golf on the Sunday. In response, in which Reed extolled the virtues of his short game, the 27-year-old revealed an interesting tidbit: the Masters marked the first time he wore contact lenses.
“Honestly, (my putting) has to be credit to not only the work that we put in the week before but also the work my wife had to drag me to Vision Source to get my eyes checked,” Reed said. “First week ever wearing contacts that week and I go ahead and make every putt I look at and win a golf tournament.”
Reed elaborated that his wife noticed he was struggling to read the TV menu, an observation that provoked a blunt response – “Maybe that’s the reason why we haven’t been making putts for a year” – from his father-in-law.
“So we went to the eye doctor and next thing you know, I could see up close, but I can’t see anything past about 30, 40 yards,” Reed said. “Everything’s really blurry. So I got a prescription for contacts, put them in and all of a sudden I’m just looking out like, wow, I can see everything.
“Now all of a sudden I can read greens pretty well and it worked at Augusta.”
That might be the understatement of the season. Reed lead the Masters field with 1.44 putts per green.
He also acknowledged that anything past 40 yards was blurry, and he often had to rely on his caddie to discover where his ball had gone. It’s eerily reminiscent of the movie “Major League”, where Charlie Sheen’s Ricky “Wild Thing” Vaughn character struggled with command issues, only to gain a semblance of precision after realising his vision was poor. If this revelation doesn’t lead to Reed rocking skull-‘n-crossbone glasses, talk about a missed opportunity.
Not that it’s been a seamless transition for Reed.
“It would take me 30 minutes to 45 minutes to get them in. Getting them out’s easy, putting them in I was struggling,” Reed said. “Now it’s easy, but those wake up 15 minutes before you’ve got to leave that first week at Augusta, no chance. It was wake up an hour and spend 45 minutes on my eyes.”
