LOS ANGELES – I’ve been following the guy with a share of the lead at the U.S. Open for a long time, and let me tell you: He was always a big deal.

I covered golf at the Riverside Press-Enterprise back in the mid-2000s, which is to say: I was on the Rickie Fowler beat. He was the headliner. The best player and brightest star — even before he was rocking all that bright orange Oklahoma State-inspired Puma attire.

It’s impossible to overstate how much he meant to golf in the Inland Empire, where I know folks will be tuned in to see Fowler’s charge toward a possible U.S. Open title Sunday. After shooting a three-birdie, three-bogey even-par 70 Saturday, the 34-year-old heads into the fourth and final round at L.A. Country Club tied for the lead with Wyndham Clark at 10-under par. Rory McIlroy is a shot behind them.

“We always had good players, but he was the guy who took it to the next level,” said Joe Skovron, another Murrieta product who was Fowler’s caddie until last year. “He was a star on the national level and who kept doing it once he turned pro.”

But first Fowler was a quiet, driven kid whose coach Barry McDonnell used to call him “Little Hawk.” Because, Skovron said, “he’d get that look in his eyes when he had it going.”

Fowler’s game was downright loquacious, but in conversation, no, he wasn’t the most insightful golfer I covered. That was Brendan Steele, because I never had a conversation with the future PGA Tour player from Idyllwild that didn’t teach me something about the game.

Wasn’t the wittiest. That was Sydnee Michaels; never did an interview with the Murrieta golfer who’d spend a decade on the LPGA Tour that didn’t crack me up.

And, honestly, in the years since I stopped covering golf regularly, I think most often of Erica Blasberg, the LPGA golfer from Corona. She died by suicide in 2010.

Like Fowler, she wasn’t ever especially forthcoming, but she was, as Fowler was as a young golfing star, helpful, accommodating. And she also was marketable, someone with game and the ability to make golf look cool.

She was cool. And so was he.

Is he: “His reaction to everything is as cool as he was when he was a younger,” said Riverside’s Ed Holmes, a Southern California PGA board member and regional affairs director with the USGA who, like every golf fan in the Inland Empire, has kept up with Fowler.

See Fowler’s post-round demeanor Saturday: Even after closing with a bogey, he shrugged, smiled, said “tomorrow is when the tournament starts,” and then stepped out and signed autographs for anyone who asked.

That cool factor has always been a big part of Fowler’s appeal. He wasn’t a country club snob; rather a member of a multi-racial Murrieta family, a down-to-earth motorcycle-riding crew who were supportive but never pushy. At one of his first pro events, fans wore matching shirts that read: “Rickie is my homeboy” – a sentiment recalled a few times by members of his gallery Saturday.

He always seemed so at ease, so in his element on the golf course – even with the weight of the golf world, and so many heavy, heady expectations.

And we all – he and us – expected plenty.

How could we not? He’d been the high school freshman shooting 62 to win the CIF-SCGA High School championship. Skovron: “I was playing mini-tours and I called the shop and I had to ask three times, ‘No, what’d Rick shoot?’ Because it was so unheard of.”

He was named the SCGA Player of the Year at 16. He topped the world amateur ranking for 36 weeks. Twice qualified for the U.S. Open as an amateur, and made the cut once.

And even before any of that, he’d been the little boy dressing up as Fred Couples for Halloween. The 4-year-old nagging Valerie Skovron, who helped run the Valley Junior Golf Association, to let him play before he turned 5.

“He looked at me and he said, ‘I promise I will be good,’” she told me in 2009, as Fowler was embarking on his professional career. “From Day 1, he was always just so focused. … He was quiet and he got along with all the other kids, but he was out there to do something that the others hadn’t done.”

Josh Anderson, Fowler’s high school teammate, recalls the prodigy shooting in the 40s through nine holes only once in their Murrieta Valley tenure.

“I remember because he cried profusely after it,” Anderson texted Saturday from Scotland, where he’s hoping to qualify for the British Open. “At the time, we all thought he was being childish or acting like a kid. But looking back it shows how much desire and love for the game he has.

“People have always seemed to question that about him and I’ve always defended him because of that moment. Even just looking back on that, it shows just how much golf means to him.”

So, yes, we expected him to be leading the U.S. Open.

Just we expected it sooner.

But golf? Golf makes even its most devoted disciples earn it.

And since he beat out McIlroy for the PGA Tour’s 2010 Rookie of the Year, notched top-five finishes in all four majors in 2014 and finished second at the 2018 Masters, Fowler has been in a dogfight with the damn game.

He hasn’t won since the 2019 Waste Management Phoenix Open. He plummeted from No. 4 in 2016 to No. 185 in the Official World Golf Rankings last fall. And no, he has not won a major.

“There’s definitely been some love-hate at times,” Fowler acknowledged in January, when we talked after he played himself into contention at the Farmers Insurance Open on Torrey Pines’ South Course, an early sign that some alterations could pay off.

He went with a different caddie – Ricky Romano, another former Murrieta Valley High standout, is on his bag now – and reunited with Butch Harmon, the famed golf instructor who told Golfweek: “I think he’ll win this year.”

And, finally, Fowler, now dad to Maya, is where we all knew he’d end up when he was a kid.

Making a run at major success. Making history. His 18 birdies in the first two rounds were the most over any two-round span in a major over the past 30 years, per ESPN. And his 130 total in the first two days equaled Martin Kaymer’s record at the 2014 U.S. Open.

“I love that he’s making all these birdies and playing Rickie Fowler golf,” said Joe Skovron, now a caddie for Tom Kim. They happened to be on the 10th tee box in the first round Thursday, with a view of Fowler on No. 9, finishing off his U.S. Open-record 8-under 62.

“Special,” Skovron called it. “Getting to see everything he’s been through in the past three years and turning it around the last seven, eight months, it’s been great to see. There’s no one out there who deserves a major more than him.

“We’re definitely all pulling for him.”

Digging through the crates this morning. It was tough to write a golf notebook without mentioning the dude.

And this, from the morning of his pro debut in 2009: “Murrieta’s Fowler shows drive to become the best.”

Through two rounds at the U.S. Open, he is. pic.twitter.com/derIfafCX4

— Mirjam Swanson (@MirjamSwanson) June 17, 2023

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