How Matt Fitzpatrick found the extra length required for US Open glory

It is the US Open triumph with its genesis at Augusta National. Mike Walker, the coach of Matt Fitzpatrick since the golfer’s early teens, was pacing the fairways at the Masters in 2020 when a stark realisation hit home.

“Matt was playing with Brooks Koepka and Justin Thomas in the first two rounds,” Walker recalls. “I thought to myself ‘It doesn’t matter how straight I can get you to hit a seven wood, it’s not going to beat their six irons.’ I remember them hitting shots into the 11th. Matt hit an unbelievable seven wood but the other two were just flicking seven irons. To get to where he wanted to go, he had to do something about it.”

As Walker readily concedes, there are “warning signs” when golfers try to add extra length. Fitzpatrick was already one of the world’s leading players, if not in the ultra elite group. Here was a highly rated tutor instigating a potentially dangerous switch. Yet he needed an extra level; one shown when the Yorkshireman held the US Open trophy aloft at Brookline on Sunday.

“He has worked with Matt Roberts on strength and conditioning for years,” Walker says. “Matt has made him stronger. We went to see Sasho Mackenzie [a biomechanist] on a consultancy basis, which would always be categorised as a risk but we didn’t change Matt’s pattern. We were just trying to speed up his existing pattern without changing his golf swing. Matt is really fast in terms of rotation but he hasn’t got much leverage. One of the areas he could have gone down, although I don’t think you’d have heard about him again, was adding more lateral movement but we decided against that. He has done it with a combination of gym training with Matt Roberts and Sasho in the background with his weights [fixed to the end of a