CHARLOTTE, N.C. — There’s a special alcove in the Quail Hollow locker room that housed about 300 sq. feet of greatness this week.
At the center of this room, which was in the center of the larger locker room, sat a replica of the Wanamaker Trophy alongside Quail’s other meaningful trophies. The Presidents Cup, the Wells Fargo (now Truist) Championship, even the annual Member-Guest. Surrounding these trophies were the reserved lockers of those whose names are inscribed on that silver. This was a pop-up champions locker room hidden in plain sight, so inconspicuous that Xander Schauffele, the defending champ, had a hard time finding it at the start of the week.
At the end of the week — as players dragged their luggage out the door and deposited gloves, balls, even clubs into a bin as donations to the local First Tee — that alcove is where we found Collin Morikawa, the 2020 champ and No. 4 player in the world, deep in his emotions.
It was a fiery week for many in the field. Quail Hollow — a course they know so well — played much differently than expected, with Mother Nature leaning on the scale. There was also the world’s best player, in the lead and running away. Morikawa held it together better than most — he didn’t throw any clubs or get caught cussing on the broadcast — all the way through the final putt. Just not after.
As he approached scoring, he found his longtime coach and agent waiting for him, and loudly shared a three-word assessment for his game:
“Pathetic f—king golf.”
He signed for one-over 72 and then returned to his coach, Rick Sessinghaus, and new caddie, Joe Greiner, for a stern venting session, very much out in the open. It lasted about 15 minutes as players came and went. Bryson DeChambeau headed to the 1st tee. Rory McIlroy passed through, very much intent on not speaking with reporters (or anyone but the club owner) about his week.
Morikawa needed to talk about it.
“I don’t try and be harsh like that,” Morikawa told me, duffel bag over his shoulder, just a few steps out of the champions alcove. “But you just have to talk things through. I don’t think people do that enough with their team around them. They kind of internalize it. Sometimes you just got to let out your frustration.”
That frustration is partly why I was curious to get Morikawa’s perspective. Emotion is the center of golf stories. Of human journeys. But another reason is because, back in March, Morikawa lost his lead in the final few holes of the Arnold Palmer Invitational and declined to speak with reporters post-round. A few days later, at the Players, he spent an entire press conference explaining that day at length, but made headlines for declaring that, in the moment, he didn’t owe an explanation to anyone. He didn’t want to speak with anyone, period. He wanted out of Orlando as soon as possible. But he also said one more thing in that impassioned take: that if he had given it an hour or so, he would have been able to chat with a clearer mind. It’s an increasingly popular sentiment among pros.
So there we were, about an hour after Morikawa declared his play of the “pathetic f—king” variety, getting into the details.
“It’s small things,” he said. “Because I know this game is so — everything is just by the thread of a needle, right? Small margins could mean big results. At the end of the day, I can live with bad golf. But bad golf to me is poor swings, you know, and poor execution.
“When I am giving away shots that I feel like I shouldn’t — and me being, I feel like, a mentally strong player — that’s what’s frustrating.”
Ultimately, he said, there is something about his game that befuddles him at the moment. (That’s golf.) Making double bogey on the 18th hole in rounds 1, 2 and 3 is going to annoy him for awhile, and probably will until he plays it better next spring at the Truist. But Morikawa takes pride in not showing that frustration when he’s inside the ropes. In the locker room, he struggled to pinpoint the specifics of the small, mental errors, or maybe he’s just keeping them to himself. I’d guess his team probably knows. He thought back to the 2022 season when his swing was just a little bit off, and he couldn’t quite explain it. This week, he says, it was a little physical and a little mental. The way he described the pain of his six Sunday bogeys — with a sigh, followed by three seconds of silence — made them sound like they’d caused him personal offense. Maybe that’s what it’s like in an arena with the tiniest margins.
It felt like a particularly insightful, meaningful moment, this locker-room scene, and somehow more real than what he would have said in front of a microphone, anyway. Like a conversation that those of us who care about professional golf — golf nerds, golf media, golf gamblers, sports fans who peek in during the majors, even the casuals who only know Morikawa from a Netflix binge — would find interesting and instructive. How does a missed-opportunity major championship settle with a top pro? How will we understand his next peak if we don’t fully grasp his valley? And while he may have unnecessarily garnered a bit of angst two months ago, at least on Sunday it was clear: Morikawa gets it. His eyes still red with emotion, he was forthright and raw and generous with his time. Those conversations with his team, plus some time to exhale, left him ready to discuss what had happened and what it means.
“I set high standards for myself, and when you don’t reach them, sometimes you go a little crazy,” he said as we started to close. “But sometimes it wakes you up. For me, at the end of the day, it’s like, how do I just wake up a little bit more, to be firing. You can see the competitiveness in Scottie, right? You can really see that through. That’s what I need to kind of pull out of myself again, because that’s what I had when I first came out.”
Scheffler has developed a knack for that. He’s been so good he’s got the world’s best thinking about their best, what it was like when it happened, and what it took to get there. Morikawa’s best was the reason he was in that champions locker room to begin with. This game is littered with stuff like that. Reminders of where you’ve been, and where you want to go.
