Rickie Fowler's Sunday at Aronimink ended in a familiar slide — a final-round 75 dropping him from contention to 60th — but his week did not. The USGA's latest wave of US Open exemptions, announced on Monday, included Fowler's name. Twelve months after missing the championship entirely, the 36-year-old will be at Shinnecock Hills in June.
A year ago, Fowler's season was spiralling. He lost a heartbreaking qualifying playoff for the 2025 US Open and stayed home for one of golf's biggest weeks, quietly fighting a shoulder problem that dated all the way back to his college days. By the end of the year, he had recorded only three top-ten finishes in 21 starts.
The 2026 picture looks completely different. Through just twelve events, Fowler already has four top tens — a runner-up at the Truist Championship at Quail Hollow, a tie for eighth at the RBC Heritage and tied-ninth finishes at the Cadillac Championship and the Arnold Palmer Invitational. That has put him 19th in the FedEx Cup standings on 1,037 points, well inside the bracket of players the USGA exempts through its world-ranking criteria. He has effectively matched his entire 2025 top-ten total before the summer.
The medical context behind that turnaround is unflattering and important. Fowler spoke at the Truist Championship about a left-shoulder issue that had become chronic — pain dating back to his college days that had disrupted his swing through most of 2025. ACP injections in September finally gave him meaningful relief, and a full off-season allowed a proper rebuild rather than a series of in-season patches. He paired that with a near-total equipment overhaul ahead of 2026, switching out nearly every club in the bag rather than incrementally adjusting.
The Truist itself was a microcosm of the new Fowler. After an opening-round three-over performance, fighting a sinus infection with a temperature between 102 and 103 degrees, he responded with a second-round 63 and ground his way to a tie for second — one of the grittier comeback weeks on Tour this year.
That is the kind of profile the USGA's exempt-rankings exist to reward. The federation announced exemptions for the 156-man Shinnecock field on May 18. Fowler's place is not the result of a 36-hole local-and-final qualifying gauntlet but of his accumulated 2026 work — exactly the path he could not produce in 2025.
There are reasons to think the timing is more than administrative. Fowler's US Open record is, for a player without a major title, unusually strong. He famously finished tied second at the 2014 US Open at Pinehurst, added a top-five at the 2017 US Open at Erin Hills and produced another top-five at the 2023 US Open at Los Angeles Country Club. His comfort on US Open setups — long, narrow, premium on patience and ball-striking — is among the most consistent features of his career.
CBS Sports reporter Amanda Balionis, interviewing Fowler at Quail Hollow earlier in May, summed it up on Instagram: "I have a feeling we'll be seeing a lot of Rickie Fowler on the leaderboards this summer."
The Aronimink finish will sting — particularly the contrast between a third-round 68 that put him in genuine reach of the lead and the Sunday 75 that erased most of it. But the bigger story of his week is, on any reasonable read, the bigger one of his season. A healthier shoulder, a fully overhauled bag, and a US Open record that already includes three top-fives.
Shinnecock Hills is set up to favour exactly the player Fowler has spent the last twelve months rebuilding into. He will arrive there for the first time since 2018 — and, for the first time in some years, on a clear upward trajectory rather than a managed-decline one.
Whether the major finally falls is, at this point, the only outstanding line on his comeback. The rest of the story is back on track.
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*Originally published on [Golf News Global](https://golfnews.global/article/rickie-fowler-2026-us-open-spot-shinnecock-aronimink-collapse-usga-exempt-rankings). Visit for full coverage.*
