Rickie Fowler has been the centre of a lot of attention over the past few weeks, not all of it good. Fowler failed to finish in the FedEx Cup top 50 last season, rendering him ineligible for the 2025 PGA Tour season’s eight signature events. Despite that, Fowler received sponsor’s exemptions to six of those eight limited-field events. After a slow start to the year, a T-7 at the Memorial helped to jumpstart his mid-year run, granting him an invite to The Open, where he finished T-14.
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Those finishes were enough to sneak Fowler into the top 70, qualifying him for the FedEx St Jude Championship, where he finished T-6. That’s a solid finish in any week, but it was particularly timely for Fowler, who jumped to 48 in the FedEx Cup rankings, clinching a spot not only at the BMW Championship, but in all of the 2026 Signature Events.
Though Fowler was just trying to do his job, he became a poster boy for the problems that sponsor’s exemptions into signature events can pose—specifically commercially popular players getting multiple exemptions and taking spots from others potentially more deserving based on their season-long play. Unfortunately, the discourse around Fowler and exemptions bloomed outward until it eventually came into contact with the darker corners of the golf world.
In early August, Fowler began receiving repeated, horrific messages from a faceless Instagram user named Cliff C.
Fowler ignored the harassment for several weeks, but after wrapping up his 2025 PGA Tour season on Sunday, he finally had enough, effectively inviting Cliff C. to say it to his face. Check it out.
And then there’s this… 😳😂 pic.twitter.com/smKgPWY8Pw
— Rickie Fowler Tracker (@Rickie_Tracker) August 17, 2025
First things first, no one, and we mean NO ONE, deserves this kind of abuse. We can’t say for sure whether Cliff C.’s harassment was a by-product of the dialogue around Fowler’s sponsor’s exemptions, but if so, it becomes even more absurd. Let us remind everyone, that golf, even at the professional level with millions of dollars on the line, is still a game, and that any sponsor’s exemption Fowler doesn’t need in 2026 is a sponsor’s exemption that goes to another player.
More to the point, we applaud Fowler for calling out this troll. Despite his colourful wardrobe over the years, Fowler is a soft-spoken guy who has largely avoided controversy throughout his career, but maybe his clapback will motivate other pros to call out the online abuse they face. We don’t know if that will deter the idiots from logging on. Sometimes enough is enough, and we’re proud of Fowler for having the courage to say it.
