Patrick Reed was able to win the Masters and finish off his first major championship title, in part, because he could clearly see the finish line in front of him.
Ahead of the Masters, Reed paid a long-overdue visit to the eye doctor and was prescribed corrective lenses for the first time in his life. Reed didn't want to don glasses, so he got contact lenses. The first week he wore them was at Augusta National, and he pretty much made every putt of consequence en route to a green jacket. That's not likely a coincidence.
“You know, it was just something (where) I was able to make a lot of putts,” Reed said Wednesday ahead of the 2018 Wells Fargo Championship. “Honestly, that has to be credit to not only the work that we put in the week before, but also the work my wife (Justine) had to do to drag me to Vision Source to get my eyes checked."
Reed knew he had vision issues. He said he had been unable to clearly see anything more than 30 yards from him. He would ask his caddie-slash-brother-in-law Kessler where the ball went when he hit it.
It all came to a head when Reed was watching TV with his in-laws a week-and-a-half out from the Masters.
“I'm sitting at the kitchen table in our kitchen, and we have a pretty big TV in the den, and kind of flipped through channels and I cannot read the guide,” Reed said. “I'm just moving slowly. Justine goes, ‘You can't read that?’ I'm like, ‘No, can you?’”
Reed's father-in-law put it plainly: "'Maybe that's the reason why we haven't been making putts for a year,'" Reed explained.
Of course, anyone who's ever worn contacts knows the first few times of getting them in can be a challenge, and Reed was no different.
"It would take me 30 minutes to 45 minutes to get them in," he said. "Getting them out's easy, putting them in I was struggling. Now it's easy, but those wake up 15 minutes before you've got to leave that first week at Augusta, no chance. It was wake up an hour and spend 45 minutes on my eyes."
Going from blurry to clear-eyed vision has been a revelation.
“I got a prescription for contacts, put them in, and all of a sudden I'm just looking out like, ‘Wow, I can see everything,’” Reed said. “Now all of a sudden I'm not having to ask Kessler where that ball goes. … Now all of a sudden I can read greens pretty well, and it worked at Augusta.”
