From horrible and playing without any confidence to soaring into the top five, it’s been a week of grind and reward for Louis Oosthuizen, writes WADE PRETORIUS.
SA’s No 1 admitted his rust following the tour’s resumption at Colonial Country Club. It went from bad to worse …
‘I was very rusty coming back. Last week was probably as bad as I can hit it, and I was horrible on the greens, as well,’ he said on Thursday after firing a 64 that leaves him in fifth at the Travelers Championship.
But for an errant tee shot on 15, he was in play with scoring opportunities and for the most part, Oosthuizen took them.
‘I worked hard on Tuesday and Wednesday and found a few things again, a few things that I remembered what I did in January and February when I was playing decent, so tried to go back to that.’
Part of that work was feeling comfortable with his putting stance as well as changing his iron approach – from hitting full shots to ‘hitting more flighted shots, a little bit more three-quarter compression shots’ which in turn helped his timing.
Oosthuizen is looking forward to continuing on this trend after seeing his game drift from where he likes it.
‘Yeah, I think I felt like I was playing decent coming to the PGA TOUR sort of this year, playing decent in South Africa and a few in Europe and end of last year. So I tried to keep everything pretty similar and remembering what I did, but sort of gone away from it. And then we all had that big break, so it didn’t really help me. But yeah, it’s a slow sort of start coming back to it, but at least now it feels like I’m in the right direction,’ he said.
Gaining 2.7 strokes on the field with his putter is certainly proof of that.
Photo: Rob Carr/Getty Images
