AUGUSTA NATIONAL IS a cultivated timewarp: it is manicured and obsessively maintained as the last bulwark of the old South’s gentility and grace.
Now the course is ignoring a second civil war, because for this one, blessed week, golf’s interminable split will be forgotten and all of the world’s best players will share the same stage again.
The Masters returns here every year and so too does Rory McIlroy, to the one place where he cannot travel back to the earlier era of innocence and grace he so desperately seeks.
Padraig Harrington once said that experience is overrated and McIlroy seems minded to agree. While McIlroy has won four majors, built a vaulting reputation and a gazillion-dollar fortune, the more he learns, the less he knows.
Hence he constantly seems to be trying to escape from beneath the sedimentary layers of a long career; to return to the days when he could win on instinct and intuition alone. Ahead of last year’s Masters, for instance, he told the Telegraph he was inspired by Carlos Alcaraz’ aim to play with “joy and instinct.”
But McIlroy has never found joy at the Masters, and how can he play on instinct when there’s so much pressure and expectation to swing through? How can he be Rory f*****g McIlroy when this is the f*****g Masters?
Last year’s missed cut was out an outright choke. With the field padded out by tenured septuagenarians, the Masters is the easiest cut of the year to make, and yet McIlroy missed it with rounds of 72 and 77.
He went into last year’s tournament with a 64 on his most recent Masters scorecard, a red-hot putter and a credible sense of serenity, yet it went more wrong than it ever had before. McIlroy slunk away from the course with the disturbed look of a man who has just been told that everything he believed to be true in the world was false all along. How on earth does he come back from that?
He knew last year that he needed a quick start. Tiger Woods is the only Masters winner since 2005 not to be in the top 10 at the end of the first round, and McIlroy has only twice broken 70 on Masters Thursday. They led to the two Sundays during which he truly contended: 2011, the day with which he is still living, and 2018, when he was beaten by Patrick Reed.
But an even-par start opening round meant he got too desperate too early in round two, when he looked up and realised he was 10 shots off the lead. There is no emotion treated with more contempt at Augusta National than desperation: patrons are not allowed to run, the quickest way to be shunned for membership is to ask for it, and it’s the same when it comes to winning the thing. The key to winning the Masters is falling the right side of the line dividing aggression from desperation.
To that end, it was interesting to hear Trevor Immelman on the Fried Egg podcast call for McIlroy to be less aggressive in his approach to the Masters, and to take three-wood over driver more often, as he did at last year’s US Open at LACC last year. McIlroy does appear to be stressing restraint, speaking at last week’s Texas Open of learning to deal with the “frustration” of making a string of pars. “Knowing that you’re not losing ground by doing it and accepting that fact, that’s a key to it”, said McIlroy.
Even if McIlroy figures out the mental side of the Masters, there is a major question as to whether he has the game to win it. A third-placed finish in Texas last week and a bogey-free closing round of 66 was a merciful flourish of form, given a tie for 19th at the Players had been his best result across five PGA Tour starts to then.
His short iron play is a major worry as, prior to Texas, he was outside the top 100 on the PGA Tour for strokes gained in approach. The second shot is the one that decides who wins the Masters: 11 of the last 12 winners have ranked inside the top seven that week for greens in regulation.
Whenever McIlroy has got a wedge in his hand this year, he has struggled with a left miss, and it’s led to a series of Tetris-block scorecards. McIlroy has seven double bogeys, three triples, and 46 bogeys across 23 rounds on Tour this year. These, plainly, are the kinds of errors that cannot be repeated this week.
And even if McIlroy figures it all out this week, he still has to beat Scottie Scheffler, whose short price to win – 7/2 in some places – feels both ludicrous and entirely correct. Only peak Tiger Woods could have rivalled Scheffler’s play tee to green since the start of last year, but Woods, unlike Scheffler, could be relied upon to actually sink a few putts.
His putting problems have been extraordinary, but across three tournaments since swapping to a mallet putter – following advice from McIlroy! – he has won twice and finished second. If Scheffler can putt even moderately well – he need only not lose strokes on the field – then it’s hard to see anyone beating him. The rest can cling to the hope of the second-last putt we’ve seen Scheffler hit: a horribly diffident pull from seven feet that would have forced a play-off in Houston a couple of weeks ago.
Scheffler is a former winner at Augusta, and is one of three players to finish inside the top-25 across all of the last three editions of the Masters, along with Hideki Matsuyama and Shane Lowry.
Lowry’s post-Masters dismay last year went curiously under the radar in Ireland. “The hardest part to take is I was very close”, said Lowry after a T19 finish. “It might not look like that with the result, but I felt like it.” He said he struck the ball well enough to win the tournament, but was undermined by his putting. That putting has since improved, and with two top fives on Tour this year, he arrives in good form.
He also ranks third in Strokes Gained: Approach on the PGA Tour this season, the facet of the game most important around Augusta National. Lowry can genuinely contend.
Finding a form line on the returning band of LIV defectors is more difficult. What we can say is the notion that LIV doesn’t adequately prepare their players for the Masters is nonsense. Phil Mickelson and Brooks Koepka finished in a tie for second last year, while Patrick Reed finished T4. Plus, defending champion Jon Rahm has since jumped ship to LIV. One of the theories behind his decision was that, as a student of the game’s history, he wants to be remembered in years to come as being the tipping point; a kind of reverse Helen of Troy figure who forced warring factions to come together. The dragging on of the merger agreement and the speculation it may never happen means Rahm might end up stuck in a golden cage.
If it’s tough to win the Masters, it’s tougher to successfully defend it: Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods and Nick Faldo are the only golfers to go back-to-back. Rahm hasn’t won on any of his many tours since last year’s Augusta triumph, although a pair of eighth-placed finishes are his lowest finishes on LIV so far this season. As to what this actually means for the Masters…who knows.
Brooks Koepka has shown his previous results means nothing when the majors come around, but LIV’s best contender may be Joaquin Niemann, whose form has been such that he has earned an invite to the tournament. All of his other LIV buddies are here under exemptions earned for winning previous majors or, in Tyrrell Hatton’s case, because he hasn’t been on LIV for long enough to drop out of the world’s top 50.
If LIV is imperfect context for the Masters, the PGA Tour is providing the wrong kind for many of its stars this week. None of Collin Morikawa, Justin Thomas, Jordan Spieth, or Viktor Hovland have won a tournament so far this year, and have more missed cuts than top fives between them. Thomas’ travails are such that he has split from caddie Jim ‘Bones’ Mackay.
Scheffler’s best rival on Tour has proved to be last year’s US Open winner Wyndham Clark, but his challenge this week will be weakened by the fact this is his first appearance at Augusta. There’s a reason no rookie has won the Masters since Fuzzy Zoeller in 1979. Ludvig Aberg is aiming to dodge the same precedent.
Tiger Woods’ days of winning the Masters are behind him, and he’s managed all of 24 holes of competition in 2024, having withdrawn ill from the Genesis two months ago. He withdrew having made cut last year, his battered body gingerly struggling around Augusta’s steep hills, which were slicked by the sluicing rain. This year Woods bids to beat Freddie Couples’ record for the most consecutive cuts made at the Masters, and it would take a brave punter to bet against him on that front, given he knows the place so well. It’s a revised, diminished frontier for the great man, but you get the sense Woods is happy having any kind of war to fight.
Woods has to fight his body, the course, and the field, where most of the others must battle only the course and the field.
McIlroy is another exception: before he takes on the course and the field, he must find a way past himself. If he can do that, then he has a chance. Strap in.
Tips
- Hideki Matsuyama to win at 16/1
- Wyndham Clark e/w at 25/1
- Russell Henley e/w at 50/1
