Patrick Reed played one of the gutsiest rounds of golf in his life to hold off Jordan Speith and Rickie Fowler for a Masters win in April. His drives kept him out of trouble. His putts were on the money.
His first pair of contact lenses might have helped.
“First week ever wearing contacts that week and I go ahead and make every putt I look at and win a golf tournament,” he said Thursday at the Wells Fargo Championship in North Carolina.
Reed was with his wife and father in-law 10 days before the Masters, he said, when — standing in his kitchen and looking at a big-screen TV in the den — he couldn’t make out the words on the screen.
“You can’t read that?” his wife, Justine, asked.
“No, can you?” replied Reed, who hadn’t won a tournament since 2016.
“Maybe that’s the reason why we haven’t been making putts for a year,” his father in-law offered bluntly.
So Justine dragged him to an eye doctor days later. Turns out, Reed said, anything more than 30 yards away used to be blurry. He constantly leaned on caddie Kessler Karain to find his shots and help read greens.
Then he popped the contacts in. Well, more like he wrestled with his eyelids for an hour.
“It would take me 30 minutes to 45 minutes to get them in,” he said. “Getting them out is easy, putting them in I was struggling. 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.”
But once the lenses finally cooperated, Reed mowed down the field with rounds of 69, 66, 67 and 71 to finish 15 under par.
“All of a sudden I’m just looking out like, ‘Wow, I can see everything,’” Reed said. “Now all of a sudden I’m not having to ask Kessler where that ball goes. … Now all of a sudden, I can read greens pretty well, and it worked at Augusta.”
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