Rickie Fowler has a score to settle.
Unfortunately for him, Fowler will have to wait some eight months before he has a chance to truly settle that score — by finally capturing a major championship after a career’s worth of close calls this year.
But this next month-and-a-half — beginning with this week’s Barclays Championship at Ridgewood Country Club, followed by the rest of the PGA Tour’s Fed-Ex Cup playoffs and climaxed by the Ryder Cup Sept. 26-28 — can go a long way toward validating Fowler’s rising stardom.
Because Fowler, with his near-miss at the PGA Championship two weeks ago at Valhalla, where he held the lead on the back nine, just put the finishing touches on the finest year of major championship performances ever without reaping the reward of winning a single one of them.
Fowler enters the Barclays having joined Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus as the only players in the sport’s history ever to post top-5 finishes in all four majors in a calendar year.
If that sounds like something to be proud of, it certainly is.
If it sounds like a major headache, it certainly is — particularly considering Fowler has only one PGA Tour victory on his résumé.
If you think the close calls have beaten down Fowler’s spirits, they haven’t — particularly not on a day like Tuesday when he spent the morning doing his small part in helping out a man he’d never met get into his home after being displaced for two years because of Hurricane Sandy.
Fowler was in Sea Bright, N.J., representing Farmers Insurance, one of his sponsors, to join volunteers who are working feverishly to get Erik Lovgren back into his home on Church Street, where his house was halfway under water when the Atlantic Ocean met the Shrewsbury River with no regard for the buildings in between during the historic storm.
Fowler’s presence in the small Jersey Shore village about an hour south of Manhattan helped raise awareness that — just because we’re two years removed from the destruction Sandy left behind — many lives, like Lovgren’s, are still adversely affected in its aftermath.
It all was enough to make Fowler, a multimillionaire living a dream life at age 25, take pause to appreciate what he has. Suddenly, the fifth-place finish at the Masters, the runner-up finishes at the U.S. Open and British Open and the third-place finish at the PGA Championship two weeks ago that he said “stings’’ most, were all in proper perspective.
“If you look major by major, it is tough because I was close in each one,’’ Fowler told The Post Tuesday. “I had chances in all of them. But when you look back at all four together there are only three guys in history to do that [finish in the top 5 in all four]. My main goal going into the year was to play well at the majors and be in contention, and I did that, so it was a huge step in the right direction.
“But the PGA hurt the most because I really felt like on the back nine I was in control of my golf game and had a very good chance of winning the tournament. I still look back and I try and look at the back nine and see what I could have done differently. I’ll be looking back on it until Augusta next year. I learned a little bit from each major this year and kept getting better and better, put myself in two final groups and finally was in a really good position to win a major.’’
Beginning this week, Fowler is in position to win one or more of the Fed-Ex Cup tournaments and potentially the $10 million prize at the end of the playoffs.
But before some pre-tournament work at Ridgewood with his clubs, Fowler was working on Church Street in Sea Bright with a hammer, tape measure and saw.
“Being involved in something like this makes you realize how special it is to go tee it up on a weekly basis and get to do what I love,’’ Fowler said in between helping measure, hammer, saw and hand out coffee to the other volunteers repairing Lovgren’s home.
“I hope,’’ Lovgren said as he surveyed the work being done, “one day I can pay this forward.’’
He can do so by rooting hard for Fowler to win this week and — more importantly — in next year’s majors.