Collin Morikawa’s Secret Ingredients to Success Include Bacon, Hashbrowns, and Avocado on His Wedges
On Sunday, Collin Morikawa won his first major title at the PGA Championship. With that victory, the 23-year-old from California will forever be known as a PGA Champion with his name inscribed on the Wanamaker Trophy. What most don’t realize is Morikawa and inscriptions are nothing new. That’s because he has incorporated numerous inscriptions of breakfast foods on his wedges for years. It’s an oddity to be sure, but with his game, no one is questioning it.
Collin Morikawa finds early success on PGA Tour
After playing four years at the University of California-Berkeley, where he won five times, including the 2019 Pac-12 Championship, Collin Morikawa made his professional debut in June at the 2019 RBC Canadian Open. He tied for 14th. A month later, he finished second at the 3M Open.
A week later, Morikawa tied for fourth at the John Deere Classic and secured his PGA Tour card for the 2019-20 season. Two weeks later, he won his first event at the Barracuda Championship. After just over a month on the PGA Tour and four events under his belt, Morikawa had sent a message to the rest of the players—he may be young, but his game was well beyond his years.
He proved it week after week. It took Collin Morikawa 22 tournaments before he missed his first cut in June 2020. That streak was second to Tiger Woods, who missed his first cut after 25 events. For anyone who thought Morikawa’s first missed cut was a sign of things to come, he quickly erased those doubts in July by winning the Workday Charity Open, where he defeated the world’s No. 1 player Justin Thomas in a playoff.
Collin Morikawa includes breakfast foods on his wedges
When you hear others talk about Collin Morikawa and the reasons for his success, maturity is the world most often used. That maturity, coupled with one of the purest swings in golf, are two reasons. But Morikawa has another secret weapon in his bag with his wedges. These aren’t regular wedges, though.
Morikawa carries Titleist wedges that have breakfast words stamped all over them. Among the words included: SOURDOUGH TOAST, BACON, HASH BROWNS, FROSTED FLAKES, and CAP N CRUNCH. The question is, why? The explanation is simple.
“So my girlfriend, we love breakfast, and we’ve got a little nicknames for each other. I won’t tell you which one [is mine]… but I’ll tell you her [nickname]; hers is ‘bacon,'” Collin Morikawa said in an interview with PGAtour.com. “But yeah, we love breakfast. We’re huge foodies. We love going out – and I think that’s what’s great about the PGA TOUR is you get to travel to so many great places and find some really good food. It just happened to be that we wanted to put some breakfast [items on the wedges] and we got some good combinations on there.”
Bacon and egg coverings
Interestingly, Collin Morikawa doesn’t stop with his clubs. His love of breakfast has also made its way on to the head covering for his putter. On the top of the cover, it spells out TaylorMade, the brand of clubs Morikawa uses, and the lettering is composed of bacon strips. The “O” in Taylor is a fried egg.
On the side of the putter cover is a skull and crossbones with the skull formed by a pair of fried eggs together. The crossbones are two pieces of bacon, one overlapping the other.
At this early in his stage and with so much success, including a major championship, Collin Morikawa has earned the right to incorporate his love of breakfast on his golf equipment in whatever way he wants to, and no one is going to question him. In fact, with his level of success, it wouldn’t be all that surprising to see others mimic it. It’s become quite evident, his appetite for success is as big as his appetite for breakfast and that’s a winning combination.
