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You might have thought that Oliver Fisher, who made European Tour history with his second-round 59 at the 2018 Portugal Masters, would have been thinking of little else as he returned to the same Dom Pedro Victoria Golf Course for this year’s event.
However, though it was inevitable that others would want to quiz him about that day of days, the Englishman could not stop himself from looking forward rather than back. Entering the European Tour’s last regular-season tournament at No. 112 on the Race to Dubai, and with only 115 tour cards on offer for next season, he was uncomfortably conscious of having to make last week’s cut. He doubted whether anything less would be enough.
Then, as has so often happened with him in the past, he responded to a potential disaster in dramatic style, this time opening with a pair of 65s to take the halfway lead before ending up in a share of eighth place, good enough to secure his card.
The now 31-year-old Fisher is the equivalent of a minister without portfolio. He may not have a major championship tag but my how he adds to the rich tapestry of the European Tour. Not only is he one of the good guys but his crazy miscellany of golfing ups and downs are such that he cannot but enjoy the prospect of regaling his newborn son, Teddy, with the details at some point.
Fisher’s career began with an outstanding run in the amateur game in which, in 2005 and at a time when he was still only 16, he became the youngest to represent Great Britain & Ireland in the Walker Cup. Often, in the junior ranks, his name would be bracketed with that of another gifted up-and-comer in Rory McIlroy, with whom he remains the firmest of friends.
It was the Duke of York, Prince Andrew, who, after watching Fisher winning his Young Champions tournament in 2005, voiced the view that he was “so good as not to need a Plan B” when he turned professional, which came late the following year.
The Duke was right on that score in that Fisher has made well nigh €5 million in prize money alone across the last 13 years. Yet if you delve deeper, those ups and downs, most of them allied to losing his card or looking like losing it, have hardly made for a peaceable existence.
Take, for example, what happened in 2011. That year, he made the cut in only one of his first 20 starts.
If only to himself, he started pondering on what else he could do with the rest of his life. “I thought of giving up,” he reflected some weeks later at the Johnnie Walker Championship at Gleneagles. “The trouble was that the more I thought about it, the more I realised that there was nothing else I could do. It was a terrible time. There I was, working my butt off and asking myself over and over, ‘Why isn’t anything happening?’ ”
Then it happened. Those dark depths gave way to a week in which he won the Czech Open – it remains his only European Tour title – and he soared from 124th on the Race to Dubai to 75th.
With no flights home that night, golfers and caddies gathered in a local pub by name of The Dubliner where the reception given to Fisher tells you everything you need to know about him.
According to Pete Futcher, from the ranks of the caddies, there was a heartwarming moment as a gentle round of applause for the player turned into something more.
“We loved it,” said Futcher, “when Darren Clarke won the Open but Ollie Fisher’s result was probably the most popular of the year. We all rate Ollie. He’s worked hard and, even when he’s been going through the toughest of times, he’s never complained.”
Fisher’s account of the circumstances surrounding his 59, the first in European Tour history, was another example of his going from one extreme to the other. “I was genuinely unhappy with my golf in an opening 71 – and the next thing I knew I was making 10 birdies and an eagle on the Friday. Weird, don’t you think?”
Oliver Fisher may not have a major championship tag but my how he adds to the rich tapestry of the European Tour.
Though he ended that week in a somewhat anticlimactic share of seventh place, the way he broke the 60 barrier in the second round would have been the envy of many a great player who has been unable to get across the line.
You put it to Fisher that if, say, a lawyer, an accountant or a shopkeeper made the kind of money that he has made at his age, no-one would say anything other than that he had done incredibly well for himself.
The golfing public, on the other hand, are not so easily satisfied. Where plenty will be full of admiration for Fisher’s efforts thus far, others will harp on about how he should have won a bagful of titles.
Rather more interesting is how Fisher himself looks at things.
“Golf is such a strange profession,” he began. “You spend a lot of time concentrating on what you are doing and trying not to focus on where you stand in relation to others and yet, at the end of every round, you have the scoreboard which immediately assesses you against every other player out there.
“That doesn’t happen with the accountants, the lawyers and the shopkeepers you mention; they don’t have to score themselves out of 72 every day. Of course, they will have pressures of their own, but whether they go through the same ups and downs as someone like myself is another matter.”
Whatever, it can be safely said of those others that they won’t know the excitement that goes with winning a tournament out of nowhere, following a thoroughly ordinary 71 with a 59, or doing as Fisher did last week in his latest zero to hero mission.
What good news it is that he will be back to create more of his own brand of magic in 2020.
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