Fleetwood speaks out about Honda heckle

If there was a small crumb of comfort for Tommy Fleetwood at the Honda Classic it was that a moronic spectator didn’t play a part in him finding the water at the 72^nd hole.

At the time it appeared that someone from the ‘Get in the hole’ brigade had pulled the trigger in Fleetwood’s takeaway. Anybody watching spotted it, Twitter went berserk but, for a period of time, nobody on the commentary even mentioned it nor asked Fleetwood after the round if he had heard it.

But thankfully news then dripped through that he hadn’t been affected.

Tommy Fleetwood needed birdie to force a playoff.

His approach landed in the water and he made bogey to finish solo third. pic.twitter.com/ZNtQI7h1O0

— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) March 1, 2020

Journalists at the course caught up with Fleetwood in the car park and, ever the good guy, he wasn’t making any excuses and said that he hadn’t heard anything. The likelihood was that the ‘fan’ was just close to one of the TV microphones.

“It didn’t affect anything. I’d be making excuses if I said it was,” Fleetwood said.

As it was Fleetwood’s 5-wood went right, found the water, Sungjae Im got the win and the, hopefully short, wait for Fleetwood’s first PGA Tour victory goes on.

“I had to hit a 4-iron which was always going to be left or I take the 5-wood on, which was like a really big cut, and that’s what you do, isn’t it, you play the shot. That’s all you can do. I hit a bad shot. Could have been a great shot, but actually as bad as it was, it could have landed three yards left and been on the edge of the green and I’d have had a chance,” explained Fleetwood.

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The 29-year-old admitted that his swing wasn’t there all day but, just 24 hours earlier, he had been just the seventh player to find the 18th green.

“It was a slightly different wind on Saturday, and I cut a 5-wood that pitched like 238. I had 239 to the pin but the wind was off the right. I felt like it was playing shorter, wasn’t hurting. But there was only one shot really. You think I had the world left and could have got up and down but, playing for that, I could have easily bailed left, not got up and down and then said, why did I bail out left. So you pick your shot and you hit it, and that’s it. I think we picked the right shot 100 per cent, I just didn’t pull it off.”

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