It's been a wild ride for Rose
By Lauren Deason, PGATOUR.com Editorial Coordinator
PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. -- Justin Rose: the 1998 British Open story is the stuff Hollywood salivates over.
They'd probably cast Jude Law to play Rose, a tall, skinny Englishman who was just a 17-year-old kid the last time the British Open was held at Royal Birkdale.
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Here's the synopsis: it's 1998 and Rose is coming off a stint as the youngest player ever in the long history of the Walker Cup, an amateur competition held between the United States and Great Britain and Ireland. He plays his way into the Open Championship through pre-tournament qualifying.
Once in the tournament, Rose finds himself up against the Goliaths -- Tiger Woods, Mark O'Meara, Davis Love III, Jim Furyk. The teenager never falters, holes a shot from the fairway in dramatic fashion on the final hole, ties for fourth and captures the Silver Medal as the leading amateur.
Playing in his home country, Rose finishes one shot behind Woods, tied with Furyk and three strokes ahead of Love. Fans and the golf world heap tons of expectations on his young shoulders.
Rose reflects back on his last tournament as an amateur -- he turned professional the next day -- and how it threw his pre-conceived golf plans off track.
"I think it was obviously an incredible week and a fairy tale ending, and it's much easier for me to sit here as No. 7 in the world [today] and to say I don't regret anything that happened that week. But I think for a significant period of time, it probably distorted my view of my game and everybody else's view of my game and probably made things a lot harder."
He had planned to spend a year on the mini-tours, a year on the Challenge Tour and then work his way up to a European Tour card by his third year. But "that all went out the window when Birkdale happened."
So he did it backwards. He turned pro early and went from major championship glory to 21 straight missed cuts.
Fast forward the Justin Rose story to 2007, when the kid who could became the kid who did -- he won the Volvo Masters in 2007 to take the European Tour's Order of Merit. At the same time, Rose finished in the top 12 at all four majors, made 15 of 16 cuts on the PGA TOUR and was 16th in the final FedExCup point's standings.
Rose is gearing up to play The Honda Classic at PGA National Resort & Spa for the first time. He purposefully chose to head to Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., when he saw that last year PGA National was the eighth hardest course on TOUR.
"That's one of the large reasons why I put it on my schedule. I looked at the scoring last year and obviously 5-under par winning the tournament meant to me it was a tough challenge and a good test. That's the kind of golf that I enjoy.
"Obviously it's had some great tournaments here, the Ryder Cup and [1987] PGA Championship, so this always was going to be a great track. It didn't disappoint me. I played 14 holes on Tuesday and really enjoyed the course."
Even his first encounter with the "Bear Trap" -- Nos. 15, 16 and 17 at PGA National that can be especially tricky -- merited praise.
"It's two great par 3s," Rose said, adding that overnight rain and downwind conditions made the greens soft and the wind harmless during his Wednesday round.
"But if you had the wind in off the right, greens firming up, it's a completely different golf hole. Because if the ball goes on the wind, you hit it long left or if you just hold it up too much you're short right in the water, and it becomes a totally different hole."
Though he doesn't think any golfer actually thinks they putt well -- "I think we expect to hole everything, and sometimes when we don't, we're hard on ourselves" -- Rose credits his putting prowess with helping him become a better player over the last two years.
"I do feel like I've become a good putter and I think the advantage for me is I feel like I'm a good putter on fast greens...and I felt like in the past, that was a weakness of mine. I've worked hard on that.
"It is a key to winning, holing putts at the right time."
Rose hasn't captured a victory yet on the PGA TOUR but he's come a long way from his post-1998 British Open days. Since golf's oldest major championship is headed back to Royal Birkdale this summer, he paused to reflect on all that has changed in his life since then.
In the late 1990s, he headed to the Challenge Tour after missing 21 straight cuts and clawed his way back by finishing fourth in the European Tour qualifying tournament in 1999 for his first card.
By 2002, he had gotten back on track and proved the 1998 Open Championship was no fluke when he won four international events, including two on the European Tour.
Now, when his back is against the wall in a tournament, he can draw upon that early learning curve.
"I felt like what I got out of that experience was just the fighting. I had to really dig myself out from a pretty big hole that I made for myself, so I guess that's...where I feel like I've gained from that whole thing."
When he returns to play Royal Birkdale for the first time -- the wildly successful pre-major routine that Rose developed in 2007 involves taking a week off prior to a major -- it won't be his first time back. He plans to go to the venue before tournament week to get the reminiscing out of the way.
After all, a golfer's concentration can't be tarnished by either good or bad memories from the past.
"You really do need a selective memory as a golfer...My recollections of when I first turned pro and all those missed cuts, it seems like another lifetime to me," Rose said. "I can't even really remember it at all. It's like a huge, fuzzy -- that's probably like a defense mechanism, you do block it out.
"I would say it's an attribute to have a selective memory or memory loss."
Sounding much older and wiser at 27 years of age, Rose has come a long way from that 17-year-old kid. And he's prepared to continue writing the Justin Rose story with a PGA TOUR or major championship victory.
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