Rickie Fowler’s water bottle playing starring role at U.S. Open

Yeti, the popular Austin, Texas-based outdoors goods company, has been enjoying extended exposure on the U.S. Open broadcast this week at Los Angeles Country Club.

That’s because 54-hole co-leader Rickie Fowler has been clinging to his 26-ounce Yeti Rambler water bottle like a lifeboat in a tempest. If you’ve watched even only snippets of the coverage, you might have spotted Fowler carrying, cradling or guzzling from the sticker-covered canteen with regularity.

“I started carrying it at the beginning of this year,” Fowler said Saturday evening after a third-round 70 left him knotted at the top of the leaderboard with Wyndham Clark. “I drink more if I’m carrying it, and it’s also heavy when it’s full, so I don’t want to necessarily throw that on Rick [Romano], my caddie, to tote that thing around.”

Fowler said he fills the bottle with water and electrolytes, but what’s on the outside of the container might be more interesting than what’s in it: stickers, lots of stickers.

“I have a few different stickers on there, friends of friends or connections in one way,” he said.

His favorite decal, he said, is the lightbulb logo of a St. Louis brewery called Side Project that serves up barrel-aged saisons and wild ales. The largest sticker is the skeleton logo of Sump Coffee, which has shops in both St. Louis and Nashville and refers to itself as “a safe space for coffee enthusiasts of all kinds.”

A third sticker is a caricature of Fowler donning an orange cap with a Puma logo, and another decal appears to be an alien.

The bottle has caught the eye of golf fans on Twitter, several of whom have posited that Fowler is attached to the canteen as a toddler might be to a “security blanket.”

Fowler, though, contends it’s simply a way to stay hydrated.

If all goes well Sunday at LACC, he’ll have a reason to fill it with another beverage: champagne.

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Alan Bastable

Golf.com Editor

As GOLF.com’s executive editor, Bastable is responsible for the editorial direction and voice of one of the game’s most respected and highly trafficked news and service sites. He wears many hats — editing, writing, ideating, developing, daydreaming of one day breaking 80 — and feels privileged to work with such an insanely talented and hardworking group of writers, editors and producers. Before grabbing the reins at GOLF.com, he was the features editor at GOLF Magazine. A graduate of the University of Richmond and the Columbia School of Journalism, he lives in New Jersey with his wife and foursome of kids.

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