The Philadelphia area has been kind to England’s Justin Rose over the years.
The 45-year-old is playing the 108th PGA Championship at Aronimink this week on a course he won on in 2010 in the AT&T National and is just 30 minutes down the road from Merion, where he won the 2013 U.S. Open.
“I think the whole area feels very familiar to the part of England I live in,” he said. “Very leafy, very green. Even this time of year I feel like the spring here is very much like the spring in England right now. So it feels very familiar from that point of view. I think some of the golf course design in this area is sort of reminiscent of sort of some of the courses in Surrey that I've kind of grown up playing.
“I like the old-school golf. I like old-school tests of golf. I like the design and the architecture of these classic old courses, to be honest with you. So yeah, I've fortunately done well on these style of tracks and therefore kind of built a nice rapport with Philly, and the crowd have kind of sensed that. And I do, I get great support out there because of that. So it's been a lot of fun to kind of always come back to this part of the country and play.”
Rose’s season thus far has had its highs and lows.
In his second start of the year, he won the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines.
Rose had missed cuts at Riviera and Bay Hill before he tied for 13th at the Players Championship in March and then tied for third at the Masters.
That Masters finish, however, stung as it added to his heartbreak at Augusta National where he’s finished in the top-3 on four occasions, but never won. Rose had a two-shot lead at the turn in the final round before bogeys at 11 and 12 and he wasn’t able to bounce back.
In his last two starts – the Cadillac Championship and the Truist Championship – Rose finished T65 and T45, respectively.
Chalk it up to the Masters letdown.
“Listen, I think after The Masters I went home and there was a lot to absorb there, that was a tough loss,” he explained. “I think, to be honest with you, the first two weeks back have been just about finding my feet again, to be honest with you. So I really don't feel like I've been sort of neglecting any part of my game. I don't feel like there's been a lot of other distractions to other elements of my game. I just think that there's cycles of form and there's cycles of things you got to work through mentally. And I feel like I've done a nice job of that now and I feel like this week I feel like the enthusiasm and the energy's coming back to kind of want to compete. Obviously you want to compete well every single week but there's sometimes it's just different dynamics that are going on behind the scenes that make it just a little bit more than just ticking boxes and yeah sometimes a little bit deeper than that. But I feel like this week I feel just a little bit more switched on and ready to go.”
The longevity of success in Rose’s career has been remarkable. He bursts onto the scene with a T4 in the Open Championship at Royal Birkdale as an amateur in 1998. Shortly after, he turned professional and endured 21 consecutive missed cuts.
But he kept grinding – as he has every year since. That grinding has produced 13 PGA Tour wins to go along with 11 European Tour wins and seven Ryder Cup appearances for Team Europe.
It wasn’t all that long ago when golfers in their mid-40s were on the back nine of their career. That’s far from the case these days and Rose is a prime example of someone who always does whatever is required to dig deep for that little extra.
He recently made an iron change, something he sees as no big deal, estimating it’s somewhere around his eighth set of irons in the last five seasons. On Tuesday, a reporter asked if Rose had any trepidation about disrupting a successful formula.
“No, because I don't think the formula is to do with any luck or superstition or stuck in my ways,” he said. “It's about always pushing myself to be better. That's why I'm here. That's why I'm here at 45. I'm not here at 45 because I've done the same things over the last 10 years. Because I'm always doing something different, I'm always pushing myself, I'm always finding one percents. That's what makes it exciting. That's the only reason I'm sitting here talking to you is because I've done a good job of grinding and finding improvement. Because obviously everyone out here is getting better. These young guys, the level on Tour has just I think really gone so much stronger in the last 10 years. So if you're staying the same, you are going backwards.”
If there’s one thing to know about Rose, it’s that he’s never been content with staying the same.