Midway through Patrick Reed’s champion’s press conference last year, after all the pleasantries and platitudes were out of the way, someone ventured a polite but pointed question about whether he thought he was popular with the fans. Reed flashed an unconvincing grin and said: “I feel like I have a lot of fans around here.”
It is true he should do. His parents live locally and he went to school here, at Augusta State, and helped it win NCAA championships back-to-back in 2010 and 2011. Only – like another local pro, Kevin Kisner, said not so long ago – a lot of the people who played with Reed back then “all hate him”. Kisner added: “I don’t know that they’d piss on him if he was on fire.”
Reed says he has enjoyed being Masters champion so much that he has kept his green jacket where he can see it every waking minute. “Everywhere I go, so every time I wake up, I see it, and every time I come home and go to bed, I see it.” Life as a Masters champion, he says, is different, “but it’s a good different. Every time you go up to the first tee throughout the entire year and they say ‘2018 Masters Champion’, it just give me goosebumps and brings all those memories back.”
But his success has brought a measure of scrutiny with it and a lot of difficult questions about his private life and his personal relationships.
On Tuesday morning, the New York Times published a long article about Reed’s complicated relationship with his parents. They have been estranged from him since 2012, have never even met his kids and while they often come to watch him play, he has said more than once that he would rather they did not.
In fact he would have them thrown off the course if he could and he has done, once, at the US Open in 2014. Then there are the old stories about what went on when he was a student. Before he joined Augusta State, he was at Georgia University, where he was kicked off the golf team after a single season.
All this is just his back story. That is before you get into his antics on and off the course. Even in the past year, which should have been all golden, he has rubbed people up the wrong way by complaining about the poor seats he was given at a Boston Red Sox game, and calling out the US Ryder Cup captain, Jim Furyk, and his teammate Jordan Spieth after the defeat at Le Golf National in September.
“Everyone has their own different personalities,” Reed says. “But you know, really, all the players and other athletes, the biggest thing is to be true to yourself and go out and do what it is that you feel like is best for you, best for your team and also, helps you perform the best.”
This week, anyway, he will try and forget all about it. “I feel like my game now is where it needs to be. We’ve put in a lot of hard work throughout the entire year,” he says. “When you come here you need to be mentally, as well as physically, ready to go out and play.”
“Augusta National,” he says, “is a place that you feel like you can get away. Nowadays, everything’s so much in the fast lane. Everything is so much in electronics and to be able to come out and get back to what golf is. It’s the fans coming out and experiencing such a perfect course, being able to actually watch golf. Everything else is just noise.”