Rickie Fowler is back in the spotlight at the 2026 Miami Championship, and with him comes renewed attention to the woman often identified as the Rickie Fowler wife, Allison Stokke. The couple’s story has always blended two California sporting paths: his rise on the PGA Tour and her name recognition from a track-and-field career that reached far beyond the runway.
Fowler, a professional golfer who began his career in 2009, has long been one of the most recognizable figures in the game. He was ranked No. 1 in the world for 36 weeks in 2007 and 2008 and later reached a career-high fourth in the Official World Golf Ranking in January 2016. Stokke, meanwhile, grew up in Newport Beach, California, and began pole vaulting as a freshman at Newport High School. By her senior year, she was reportedly ranked second in the state and second in the nation, then went on to compete for UC Berkeley after being recruited by Harvard, Stanford and UCLA.
Her name entered a much wider public conversation in 2007, when photographs of her pole vaulting went viral while she was still a teenager. The attention brought sexualized comments and media scrutiny that followed her through college and into her post-collegiate career, with coverage from major newspapers and her own description of the experience as “a little creepy.” She later said the unwanted attention felt deeply demeaning, despite the years she had spent working toward her sport.
That background is part of why Stokke remains such a visible figure alongside Fowler. She broke a freshman record in 2008, placed fifth at the Pac-10 championships as a junior and tried to qualify for the London Olympics in 2012, though she did not complete the qualifying jump. After graduating, she continued to pole vault for Nike, Athleta and GoPro. The couple have also made a point of presenting themselves as California athletes first, with Stokke writing, “Just a couple of Southern California kids always looking for the beach,” and later posting, “California Christmas 2018.”
Their connection to Berkeley has also been part of the public picture. In 2017, Stokke returned to campus with Fowler, who wrote that their tour continued to Cal for her homecoming and thanked her for showing him her stomping grounds. For all the attention around Fowler’s play and Stokke’s athletic past, the story that keeps resurfacing is not just one of celebrity pairing but of two careers shaped by California sport, public visibility and the way old images can still pull a couple back into the news years later.
