AT THE MASTERS, familiarity breeds suspense.
Has the tournament ever been quite so anticipated as this year’s edition?
This year, Magnolia Lane leads to a rich lode of story, the headline act being Rory McIlroy.
Don DeLillo wrote that longing on a large scale is what makes history but McIlroy will make it by putting a blessed end to such epic waiting. McIlroy arrived on the scene as the anointed one and this was his anointed venue, theoretically favouring his right-hand draw and distance from the tee. But his collapse in 2011 has precipitated a cold union between McIlroy and Augusta National, and his successes elsewhere has heightened the pressure with every passing year.
McIlroy has been fielding questions about the career Grand Slam since his early twenties, and since 2014, the Masters has been his only missing piece. Only five men in history have completed the sweep, and only Gene Sarazen left the Masters for last. Consider just how abnormal the pressure is: just one win to join the game’s gods… but the one win left is at the only major to return to the same course every year. At what point are the advantages of experience and course knowledge mantled by scar tissue?
McIlroy’s pressure is multiplied by the fact everyone around here wants him to do it. Not just for the vicarious thrill of being witness to history, but also for McIlroy’s sheer likability. Only Tiger Woods drew bigger crowds to his practice rounds at the start of the week.
So, is 2023 finally going to be The Year?
“I feel like I am as good, if not better a player, as I was the last time I won a major championship,” said McIlroy on Tuesday. “So I’m feeling pretty good about it.
“I’ve got all the ingredients to make the pie. It’s just putting all those ingredients in and setting the oven to the right temperature and letting it all sort of come to fruition. But I know that I’ve got everything there. It’s just a matter of putting it all together.”
The walnut walls of the press room featured two, giant images of McIlroy’s celebrating his audacious chip-in on 18 in the final round last year, which left him signing for a best-ever 64 and ultimately a second-placed finish. Gesturing to those images, McIlroy says last year helped him “shed some scar tissue”.
His game is in a good place. An equipment change seems to have addressed some wonky driving, and in what promises to be a rain-soaked weekend, hitting the ball long and straight off the tee may be half the battle. His putting has markedly improved since he started working with Brad Faxon, and his early-year wobbles looked to have been steadied at his most recent tournament, the Match Play in Austin.
McIlroy admitted his past struggles around Augusta National have been “mental and emotional”, which he is addressing by working with sports psychologist Bob Rotella.
Rotella flew into Augusta on Tuesday, and spent some time with McIlroy that night and again on Wednesday.
“Bob Rotella tells me all that time. When you were six years old, did you read a putt? No, you went purely on instinct. As you proceed to get smarter and get more wisdom, you start to question that instinct more and more. But every time you go back to it, it seems like that instinct is the right answer at the start. I always feel a little bit better about everything, a little bit better about myself after I have a chat with him.”
McIlroy has shown he has the game to win around Augusta, but he still has to prove he can handle the awesome weight of expectation. He wouldn’t necessarily agree and maybe it’s a little uncharitable to say it, but McIlroy posted last year’s final round without truly contending. The scoreboard took a sheen of competitiveness when Scottie Scheffler bafflingly four-putted the final hole. In recent years, McIlroy has been ruined by his own slow starts: he hasn’t finished the first day inside the top 30 since 2018, and this is the wrong course around which to go chasing: 23 of the last 25 winners have been inside the top ten at the end of the first day’s play. The denizens of Augusta National might frown on anything as crass as flagrant desperation and their course chews up the same.
But as McIlroy learned so painfully at last year’s Open, doing nothing wrong sometimes isn’t enough: his steady, final-day husbandry was smoked by Cam Smith. Nobody has successfully defended the Masters since Tiger Woods did it in 2002, but few have arrived in a better position to do so than Scheffler. He has won twice already this year and the stats paint an even more impressive picture: since the start of the year, Scheffler leads the Tour for strokes gained off the tee, ball-striking, and tee to green.
Rather than join a breakaway tour, McIlroy and Scheffler stuck with the PGA Tour and then detatched themselves from everyone else, with Jon Rahm the only other player to keep pace. The illness that forced his withdrawal at the Players Championship stymied his early-year momentum, but Rahm is a credible threat to McIlroy and Scheffler this week.
That Tiger Woods was asked about McIlroy and Scheffler’s prospects before his own at Tuesday’s press conference are either a compliment to them or a reflection of his own diminished state. That Woods is competing here at all is remarkable: he plainly states he is lucky not to have lost his leg in a car crash two years ago.
The one thing Woods did not need any more of was steel, but there is, in his words, “a lot of hardware” now holding his leg together. He spoke on Tuesday of approaching the end, and said that while his game is in a better place than last year, his leg is worse. Augusta National is hilly and steep, and the drop in temperatures forecast for Saturday won’t help his mobility either.
That said, he could make his way around this course with his eyes closed, and if he can do what he did last year and make the cut, he will tie Fred Couples and Gary Player for the most consecutive cuts made (23) in Masters history.
There has never been an Irish winner at the Masters but the weekend will be defined by Irish weather. Temperatures are going to drop around eight degrees celsius on Saturday and rain is a guarantee. If the rain softens the course and takes a kick from the fairways, it will suit bombers off the tee like McIlroy. But it might also suit Shane Lowry, given Lowry’s greatest days have been drenched in rain?
“It might suit Shane, Shane is a good bad-weather golfer,” Paul McGinley told us on Monday. “Shane has balls. Fellas who have balls and are not afraid of big moments are always contenders. Shane doesn’t have the consistency of Rory and other players but he has the balls to win a tournament this size. And not many do.”
Augusta National runs their tournament tightly but on the course, they cede control to the golfers…the weaker competitors might argue too much control. At its best, the course forces players to decide as to whether they want to be brave or not. Hence the decision to lengthen the 13th hole by 35 yards. The second shot will force a decision: do I lay-up to the front of the water, or attack the pin and risk the dreaded plunk in Rae’s Creek?
Lowry finished third here last year, his challenge faltering with a triple-bogey on the third hole. It was here last year he infamously voiced his frustration at caddie Bo Martin, from whom he split earlier this year. He is now working with Darren Reynolds – who has carried around here for McGinley in the past – while Martin is back and working with Tyrrell Hatton.
Seamus Power impressed here last year on his Masters debut, finishing in a tie for 27th, and isn’t shrinking from ambition this time. “My game feels in a really good spot, so going to be a lot of preparation the next couple days and just try to give myself a chance going into Sunday. I think that is what everyone is going to try to do, you know, on the back nine Sunday. Being in one of the last groups going into Sunday really give yourself a chance and see what happens.”
The fourth Irish player involved is Belfast amateur Matthew McClean, grabbing one of the golden tickets by winning the US Mid-Amateur last year. His aim is to make the cut and compete for the low amateur gong, a vaulting aim given how ruthless this course treats rookies.
Pulsing beneath the surface of all of this is the LIV subplot. The majors hardly suffered from status anxiety in the past, but the Saudi breakaway now gives them an added importance given these are now the only occasions in which all of the world’s best players compete in the same field. All of the players have thus far played sweet, with LIV’s agitator-in-chief Greg Norman not sent an invite.
Norman wasn’t invited, explained Masters Chairman Fred Ridley, to “keep a focus on the competition.”
“I noticed the tone has been really good here this week”, he added. “I’ve noticed the players are interacting. Last night at the Champions Dinner, I would not have known that anything was going on in the world of professional golf other than the norm. So I think, and I’m hopeful, that this week might get people thinking in a little bit different direction and things will change.”
Norman will be watching on and is promising shows of unity, saying that any LIV winner will be mobbed by his fellow defectors on the 18th green.
As to whether any of the LIV contingent can compete here remains an unknown. Dustin Johnson is the least annuated of their past Masters champions, while Brooks Koepka is talking bullishly of his physical condition and Cam Smith undoubtedly has the game to compete. But are any of them sharp enough to hang with the battle-hardened elite of the PGA Tour?
Bettors expressions of confidence in this regard suggests not. Johnson is the best-fancied of the LIV gang but rated below all of Scheffler, McIlroy, Rahm, Spieth, Cantlay, Finau, Homa, Thomas, Schauffele, and Morikawa.
Of those, Thomas is struggling for form, Spieth’s rickety foundations are playing firmer than they have in years, while Homa is gathering a reputation as dark horse – he was Nick Faldo’s tip to win on NBC this morning.
All of these pre-tournament broadcasts here have reached a consensus that McIlroy is arriving here in a sweet spot, with the form and mental tools to buttress the talent with which he is endowed.
But McIlroy knows there are no coronations around Augusta National: the only guarantee is fraught, magnetic theatre.