Patrick Reed became golf’s super villain in 2018 and the sport was better for it

Pat Reed is the opposite of the smooth and uncontroversial messenger the PGA Tour wants to promote its game, but no one not named Tiger made that game more interesting in 2018.

After 20 years, the PGA Tour wanted to change. So out went the two-decades old slogan of “These guys are good” and in came “Live Under Par.” It’s not just supposed to be a slogan. It’s supposed to be a brand, a lifestyle, and maybe even a lifestyle brand if that means anything. It is, as they ubiquitously append, “not just a way to play, it’s a way to be.” Living Under Par, in theory, could be anything from a 14-hour Fortnite bender to eating Tide pods before a big night out on the town. The initial ad came dressed up in social media graphics. They wanted to appear younger, edgier, and embrace the Favs and the Like and Shares that occupy our world.

The PGA Tour, however, is not some product that will take a little collateral discomfort in pursuit of some larger spot in the brains of a younger audience. It is a sports league and a sports league that is owned and operated by the players themselves. So it is obsessed with keeping a clean image for those players, completely devoid of any controversy or the slightest discomfort. The NBA will, for the most part, embrace any mundane drama or silly moment that adds to the breathless “This league!” mania. Almost all news is good news if people are talking about the NBA. If news of a PGA Tour pro throwing a bowl of soup at another pro went public, a tight-assed panic would envelop the Tour’s headquarters and outside PR crisis teams might be engaged.

So Live Under Par is a “way to be” that “captures the vitality of today’s Tour,” but only to a certain point and that point stays inside the threshold of a sterilized room. The re-brand was supposed to be a signal to some mythical cohort of cool and young people the Tour wants scoop up as it marches toward a new post-Tiger generation. The problem is you’re only going to scoop up a limited bucket of people staying in that very sterilized room that allows for limited expression and certainly wants to avoid any conflict.

This Live Under Par campaign rolled out just two days after the winner of the sport’s highest profile event proclaimed from the dais at Augusta National, “I don’t really care what people say on Twitter or what they say if they are cheering for me or not cheering for me.” That is not living under par but it is an ethos that the vigilant golf fan knew well and one that the wider sports world would come to know well in this year of Pat Reed, golf’s most compelling non-Tiger figure.

Time and again in 2018, Reed would remind us that he is the exact opposite of a carefully crafted and expensive brand campaign. Reed is sometimes delusional and rarely sanitized, for better or worse. You may hate him. You probably do hate him. But you sure were a lot more interested in hearing what he said or did than a staged Live Under Par moment.

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Reed presents a challenge to the Tour paradigm that safe and uncontroversial is always the preferred route for promoting itself. There is an outside fascination with Reed that goes beyond just the hardcore golf fans. It’s the type of outsider demo the Tour covets and wants. But they’re not coming because of some forced window-dressing for a younger audience. They’re not even coming for the golf. They’re fascinated by “Who is this villain and what shit did he stir up now?” It’s not purposeful or intended to draw a crowd, it’s just who Reed is and the Tour was made far more fun and interesting for it.

The people in his family that he still communicates with and his few friends will say something along the lines of he’s just “misunderstood” as some sort of defense. But I think he’s one of the few people in the sport that is almost perfectly understood. In a sport full of “stars” that leave you wondering what they really think or how they really are, you’re rarely struggling to discern how Pat Reed feels or might feel about a certain situation. It may not make him a good fit for touting mortgages or insurance or cars, products with brand ambassadors plucked from the PGA Tour. It may not make him a good fit for the Live Under Par campaign. But it makes him more interesting than the colleagues who do get those kind of promotional dollars.

This year was a breakout season for Reed, not just the golfer, but the Reed disposition that had a broader sports world wondering about that villain golf guy. He started the season breaking up with his equipment company. Or they broke up with him, who can say. At some point, or multiple points, he split with his agent and went with the upstart Team Reed Enterprises, which is a fancy name for his wife and in-laws, who serve as advisers and caddies and nannies and travel agents and now some sort of representation.

He bristled at a PGA Tour rules official for what he felt was a bias against him in a ruling, saying he’d get more generous relief if his name was “Jordan Spieth.” His wife, nearby, also entered the fray to get in a shot at the rules official. After implying the golden child Spieth gets favorable rulings one week, the next week he joked (maybe but probably not) that his back was still sore from carrying his 2016 Ryder Cup partner. He upbraided a European Tour camera crew in an excruciatingly long directive to move as far away as possible because they’d “lost their privileges” on account of one jingling change in his pocket. He, or someone running his Twitter account, reamed out the PGA Tour for its audacity to give him and his wife tickets to Fenway Park in a mythical “line drive section.”

After playing poorly in an ugly team USA Ryder Cup loss, Reed buried Spieth for deserting their partnership, shredded his captain for his handling of “Captain America”, and publicly shared that Tiger apologized to him for the 14-time major winner’s poor play in their underwhelming two-man games. His wife and mother-in-law also jumped into the matter with their own social media posts. Given the benefit of a couple months to cool off from the Ryder Cup loss, Reed simply doubled down to finish off the year. He again criticized his captain, brought Phil Mickelson into the crossfire, and said he had not reached out to Spieth to apologize by saying, “Nope, he has my number.” I’m not sure why Spieth would have to call Reed to apologize for Reed publicly lashing out at him, but that’s neither here nor there and I’ve had to run through these 2018 highlights with some semblance of brevity that pains me because this is all still so fun to discuss!

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This is to say nothing of the significant controversies of his college days or his first few years on Tour, like when he authoritatively claimed he was a top 5 player in the world (he was No. 20). This is just summation of 2018, the year of Reed. Oh, and he also won the Masters this year. Golf has had grumps and villains in recent years, but often in the form of some lesser player on the fringes who became a bad guy for dumb tweets or berating some volunteer at a low-level event. The villain is not usually winning the biggest event in the game and wearing the green jacket.

It was at Augusta National that Reed’s profile in villainy went worldwide. It was an odd Sunday of muffled applause for Reed shots, culminating in that awkward low energy scene at the 18th when he finished a day burying the hopes of the more popular Sunday chasers, like Spieth, Rickie Fowler, and Rory McIlroy. There was even word of a green jacket urging Reed’s ball to keep rolling away from the hole on the 18th.

He may not have been the preferred Masters champ, but he definitely made the day spicier, finishing it off with a press conference that vacillated between irritation and awkwardness.

Reed’s actions and the backlash he often engendered made this 2018 so much more enjoyable. In a recent Golf Digest article, Kevin Kisner, who tends to give answers that scan like country music verses, said Reed’s former teammates from Georgia and Augusta State “hate him,” adding “I don’t know that they’d piss on him if he was on fire, to tell you the truth.” That’s an unpleasant but riveting quote not often found in the confines of pro golf and we can thank Patrick Reed for its existence. And if Harris English or Russell Henley, two of Reed’s former UGA teammates, hate Patrick Reed, then probably most interesting thing about Harris English and Russell Henley is that they hate Patrick Reed.

It’s likely that Pat Reed prompted people to click, listen, read, discuss, and holler about golf in 2018 more than anyone not named Tiger. Golf’s most fascinating and successful villain arrived in an era when the cameras are always watching and a social media app is available to fire off the latest umbrage. This is not the kind of smoothed down approach the Tour would prefer in generating interest in its league. But it’s definitely more effective. A cadre of indistinguishable golf robots that hit the ball 400 yards and are optimized with flight tracker data are coming next. Reed manufactured a helicopter finish that helped him win a Masters that few people outside of his family, parts of it at least, wanted him to win. He is not the first or 50th choice to represent the new concocted Live Under Par brand, but he did infinitely more to make the PGA Tour fun in 2018.