McDonnell passed away in 2011 at age 75, but shortly before he did, he sent a text message to Bill Teasdale, one of his best friends and the owner of the golf range where Fowler and McDonnell worked together. Teasdale kept the contents of that message to himself for nearly two years.

After missing the cut at last year’s Open Championship at Muirfield -- where Harmon’s most notable student went on to claim his first Claret Jug -- Fowler was ready to try something new. He was three years removed from winning the PGA TOUR’s Rookie of the Year award and playing in the Ryder Cup, where he birdied his final four holes, including a 15-foot birdie putt at the 18th, to keep the United States’ hopes alive.

It had been more than a year since his win at the Wells Fargo Championship, which remains his only PGA TOUR title. Furthermore, he was ready to revamp a swing that was giving him serious lower back pain and keeping him from the consistency he needed to excel on TOUR.

He asked Butch Harmon if he would take a look.

“He had me work on a few things and made me look like a total hack on the range,” Fowler said. “It just felt foreign to me at first. But it was really cool to see how quickly I was able to pick it up.”

After Harmon got the blessing from his other students, the two made it official last November and Fowler has become the latest Harmon success story, joining FedExCup leader Jimmy Walker as one of the breakthrough players of 2014. For Fowler, the choice of adding Harmon was an easy one.

“He’s taken two guys to No. 1, so he’s pretty easy to listen to,” Fowler said, referencing Harmon’s work with Tiger Woods and Greg Norman. “Plus, he’d seen my tendencies in those Tuesday games. It wasn’t like saying, ‘You’ve never seen me play golf before. Tell me where to go.’ ”

Fowler's play in the 2014 majors will get him to the Ryder Cup for the first time since 2010. (Andrew Redington/Getty Images)

But the cherry on top is this: If Fowler had any reservations about moving on after McDonnell’s passing, it was Teasdale who cleared them. Earlier this year, he finally told Fowler what that text message said.

“When the time is right, Rickie should go work with Butch Harmon.”

EMBRACING CHANGE

Fowler entered 2014 ready to make a serious swing change and, thankfully, the results came quickly.

When you see side-by-side video of his old swing and his new one, the difference looks drastic – gone was the re-routing and plane-changing that he picked up from swinging his dad’s full-size driver as a little kid. In his technical terms, Fowler is now “trying to stay back on my right side and keep everything shallow and then working on getting the upper body and the head moving through the ball.”

After a stretch of three consecutive missed cuts early in the year – Fowler attributes it to neglected putting while his focus was on grooving a new swing – everything finally came together at the Northern Trust Open. Even though he missed the cut, he went on to the WGC-Accenture Match Play and finished third by beating Walker, Ian Poulter, Sergio Garcia and Jim Furyk.

From there, the new swing was set and the short game and the confidence were back.