THE MASTERS CAN be said to its own little parable of the American Dream.
Augusta National does not look as forbidding as the sites of the The Open and US Open, and its wide fairways, absence of rough and sheer manicured perfection can tempt anyone into believing that they are upwardly bound for greatness.
“Such fantasy,” writes Curt Sampson in his history of the Masters, “is wonderfully easy at Augusta.”
And then Augusta National takes these wanton dreamers and spits them back out.
A view of the 12th green at Augusta National. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
There is no more decorous hell in professional sport. Rory McIlroy is the chiefly tormented and here he is again, trying to prove he is not like Ernie Els or Greg Norman, and one of the Masters’ eternally condemned souls.
This is McIlroy’s 17th tilt at the Masters, and 11th at the Grand Slam. His is now one of the most famous quests in all of sport, despite the fact that his Augusta record is distinctly mid-table.
Only twice has McIlroy truly contended at the Masters. First on the Sunday of original sin in 2011, when he started with a four-shot lead and ended with nothing but great webs of scar tissue, and secondly in 2018, when he was in the final group with Patrick Reed but missed a short eagle putt on the second hole to instantly wipe out Reed’s three-shot lead. Reed was a bag of nerves, but McIlroy let him off the hook.
For all of our high-minded inquisitions into McIlroy’s mental fragility, the reality is the golf course just doesn’t suit him. Augusta is routinely described as a second shot golf course, where power off the tee is subordinated to target practice facing the greens. Hence why Scottie Scheffler has so much green in his wardrobe.
To this end, it was instructive to listen to American pundit Brandel Chamblee dissect McIlroy’s issues on the Indo Sport podcast last week.
Augusta’s fiercely sloping fairways means a player’s shot to the greens are often below their feet; a hook lie from which McIlroy has often responded with a, well, hook, or else by flaring his shot too far right. For McIlroy to contend around Augusta, says Chamblee, he needs to be able to hit those soft, left-to-right fades which Scheffler has made his signature.
Advertisement
McIlroy appears to be of the same opinion and has been adding more versatility to his shot-making. He has worked at taking off some of the height and speed off his short irons and has balanced this by putting a new, spinnier ball in play, all in a bid for more control when he faces down the greens at Augusta National. Given his radical improvement with the putter since he started working with Brad Faxon, this is McIlroy’s last technical frontier.
McIlroy has won twice already this year on the PGA Tour , and his victory at the Players was a validation of his new gameplan, winning his play-off over JJ Spaun not because he hit the best shot, but the right shot. He safely found the island 17th green with a slightly withdrawn 9-iron, as Spaun flushed an 8-iron into the water. Afterwards, McIlroy turned to his caddy Harry Diamond and said, “that little shot will take us a long way.”
Rory McIlroy. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
So McIlroy could not have done any more ahead of the Masters. His problem is he has to do more than anyone at the Masters. That the majors have become a mental issue for McIlroy was put beyond doubt when he made bogey from three feet on the 69th hole of the US Open. This leaves him in a bind: he won’t win another major without conquering the mental demons. . . and he won’t know he has actually conquered them until he has won another major.
If he is to end his epic striving at the Masters this week, he must start fast. Tiger Woods is the only tournament winner since 2004 to finish outside the top 10 at the end of the first round. and McIlroy has only finished the first round within the top 10 on three occasions: 2011, 2016, and 2018. On each of the latter two occasions, he finished Thursday tied with the eventual winner.
Augusta is an exercise in balancing risk against reward, and the course scorns anyone getting desperate and chasing a score. Hence McIlroy’s main focus has to be on scoring on the par-5s and avoiding bogeys everywhere else.
The Masters YouTube channel last week uploaded a video with Scheffler talking through his final round win last year, in which he constantly preached the importance of finding the fairway on the par-fours. McIlroy is 54-over on the par-fours across 58 rounds at the Masters: his length may tempt him to diminish the importance of position, but it has been the wrong play.
So if McIlroy brings a technical level he has never before showcased at Augusta and also conquers one of the greatest mental blocks in professional golf. . . then all he has to worry about is the competition.
Scheffler is bidding to join Jack Nicklaus as the only man to win three Masters titles in a four-year span, and his putting will decide whether he wins or merely contends. He has made a slow start to 2025 having injured his hand in a kitchen accident at Christmas, and though he hasn’t won yet this year, his form is ominous, tying the course record in finishing second at the Houston Open a fortnight ago.
McIlroy has admirably narrowed the gap to Scheffler, but the Masters brings with it the unpredictability of the official visit of the LIV delegation. Many arrive in form, even if the LIVstock is hard to value. Past champions Jon Rahm, Sergio Garcia, Patrick Reed, Charl Schwartzel, and Phil Mickelson all finished in the top 10 of LIV Miami last week, as did Bryson DeChambeau, who contended last year before shattering McIlroy’s dreams at Pinehurst.
Brooks Koepka is showing less form, but Koepka has made a career at arriving into the biggest weeks of the year under the radar. Don’t underestimate the extent to which McIlroy is driven by the fact that Koepka currently has one more major title than him.
The Tour is spilling with lurking contenders too. Ludvig Aberg finished second on his Masters debut last year and has the game – if not the form – to go one better, while Collin Morikawa is slinking into this year’s Masters without a victory to validate his outstanding play. Nobody on the PGA Tour ranks higher in Strokes Gained: Tee to Green this year than Morikawa.
Shane Lowry at Augusta National on Monday. Alamy Stock Photo
Alamy Stock Photo
McIlroy is second on that list, with Scheffler third. Fourth on that list is one of the most curiously underrated golfers ahead Thursday’s kick off: Shane Lowry.
The bookmakers have Lowry among the third tier of potential winners, with a fleet of fitful, majorless players like Patrick Cantlay, Tommy Fleetwood, Tyrrell Hatton, and Viktor Hovland. Lowry has the pedigree and the form to be rated above them.
Like Morikawa, Lowry is without a victory this year, but that masks the height to which he has raised the floor of his game. He also has a very solid record around Augusta – T3 in 2022 and in the top 25 in four of the past five years – and the quality of his ball-striking means his contention rests on his putter.
To illustrate that point in exaggerated fashion: among the players to make the cut at last year’s Masters, Lowry ranked first in strokes gained on approach but bottom in putting.
His competitive instinct can sometimes weigh down too heavily upon him – after missing out on last year’s PGA Championship, Lowry gnomically lamented to Sky Sports that sometimes he wants to win too badly – but fewer stars have to align for Lowry to win this week than the majority in the field.
McIlroy, meanwhile, is one of the greatest golfers of all time and yet is stuck waiting for a very rare kind of constellation.
Such is the cruel caprice of the Masters. It’s why we’ll be watching.
Tips
Gavin Cooney
Winner: Collin Morikawa (12/1)
A solid, make-your-money-back e/w bet: Shane Lowry (28/1)
A wild outsider who might make you a fortune: Sergio Garcia (55/1)
Fintan O’Toole
Winner: Rory McIlroy (11/2)
A solid, make-your-money-back e/w bet: Min Woo Lee (40/1)
A wild outsider who might make you a fortune: Adam Scott (90/1)
Gavan Casey
Winner: Scottie Scheffler (4/1)
A solid, make-your-money-back e/w bet: Bryson DeChambeau (12/1)
A wild outsider who might make you a fortune: Michael Kim (100/1)
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
Close
Comments
This is YOUR comments community. Stay civil, stay constructive, stay on topic.
Please familiarise yourself with our comments policy
here
before taking part.
Preview: McIlroy has never been better-prepared for the Masters - but still it may not be enough
THE MASTERS CAN be said to its own little parable of the American Dream.
Augusta National does not look as forbidding as the sites of the The Open and US Open, and its wide fairways, absence of rough and sheer manicured perfection can tempt anyone into believing that they are upwardly bound for greatness.
“Such fantasy,” writes Curt Sampson in his history of the Masters, “is wonderfully easy at Augusta.”
And then Augusta National takes these wanton dreamers and spits them back out.
There is no more decorous hell in professional sport. Rory McIlroy is the chiefly tormented and here he is again, trying to prove he is not like Ernie Els or Greg Norman, and one of the Masters’ eternally condemned souls.
This is McIlroy’s 17th tilt at the Masters, and 11th at the Grand Slam. His is now one of the most famous quests in all of sport, despite the fact that his Augusta record is distinctly mid-table.
Only twice has McIlroy truly contended at the Masters. First on the Sunday of original sin in 2011, when he started with a four-shot lead and ended with nothing but great webs of scar tissue, and secondly in 2018, when he was in the final group with Patrick Reed but missed a short eagle putt on the second hole to instantly wipe out Reed’s three-shot lead. Reed was a bag of nerves, but McIlroy let him off the hook.
For all of our high-minded inquisitions into McIlroy’s mental fragility, the reality is the golf course just doesn’t suit him. Augusta is routinely described as a second shot golf course, where power off the tee is subordinated to target practice facing the greens. Hence why Scottie Scheffler has so much green in his wardrobe.
To this end, it was instructive to listen to American pundit Brandel Chamblee dissect McIlroy’s issues on the Indo Sport podcast last week.
Augusta’s fiercely sloping fairways means a player’s shot to the greens are often below their feet; a hook lie from which McIlroy has often responded with a, well, hook, or else by flaring his shot too far right. For McIlroy to contend around Augusta, says Chamblee, he needs to be able to hit those soft, left-to-right fades which Scheffler has made his signature.
McIlroy appears to be of the same opinion and has been adding more versatility to his shot-making. He has worked at taking off some of the height and speed off his short irons and has balanced this by putting a new, spinnier ball in play, all in a bid for more control when he faces down the greens at Augusta National. Given his radical improvement with the putter since he started working with Brad Faxon, this is McIlroy’s last technical frontier.
McIlroy has won twice already this year on the PGA Tour , and his victory at the Players was a validation of his new gameplan, winning his play-off over JJ Spaun not because he hit the best shot, but the right shot. He safely found the island 17th green with a slightly withdrawn 9-iron, as Spaun flushed an 8-iron into the water. Afterwards, McIlroy turned to his caddy Harry Diamond and said, “that little shot will take us a long way.”
So McIlroy could not have done any more ahead of the Masters. His problem is he has to do more than anyone at the Masters. That the majors have become a mental issue for McIlroy was put beyond doubt when he made bogey from three feet on the 69th hole of the US Open. This leaves him in a bind: he won’t win another major without conquering the mental demons. . . and he won’t know he has actually conquered them until he has won another major.
If he is to end his epic striving at the Masters this week, he must start fast. Tiger Woods is the only tournament winner since 2004 to finish outside the top 10 at the end of the first round. and McIlroy has only finished the first round within the top 10 on three occasions: 2011, 2016, and 2018. On each of the latter two occasions, he finished Thursday tied with the eventual winner.
Augusta is an exercise in balancing risk against reward, and the course scorns anyone getting desperate and chasing a score. Hence McIlroy’s main focus has to be on scoring on the par-5s and avoiding bogeys everywhere else.
The Masters YouTube channel last week uploaded a video with Scheffler talking through his final round win last year, in which he constantly preached the importance of finding the fairway on the par-fours. McIlroy is 54-over on the par-fours across 58 rounds at the Masters: his length may tempt him to diminish the importance of position, but it has been the wrong play.
So if McIlroy brings a technical level he has never before showcased at Augusta and also conquers one of the greatest mental blocks in professional golf. . . then all he has to worry about is the competition.
Scheffler is bidding to join Jack Nicklaus as the only man to win three Masters titles in a four-year span, and his putting will decide whether he wins or merely contends. He has made a slow start to 2025 having injured his hand in a kitchen accident at Christmas, and though he hasn’t won yet this year, his form is ominous, tying the course record in finishing second at the Houston Open a fortnight ago.
McIlroy has admirably narrowed the gap to Scheffler, but the Masters brings with it the unpredictability of the official visit of the LIV delegation. Many arrive in form, even if the LIVstock is hard to value. Past champions Jon Rahm, Sergio Garcia, Patrick Reed, Charl Schwartzel, and Phil Mickelson all finished in the top 10 of LIV Miami last week, as did Bryson DeChambeau, who contended last year before shattering McIlroy’s dreams at Pinehurst.
Brooks Koepka is showing less form, but Koepka has made a career at arriving into the biggest weeks of the year under the radar. Don’t underestimate the extent to which McIlroy is driven by the fact that Koepka currently has one more major title than him.
The Tour is spilling with lurking contenders too. Ludvig Aberg finished second on his Masters debut last year and has the game – if not the form – to go one better, while Collin Morikawa is slinking into this year’s Masters without a victory to validate his outstanding play. Nobody on the PGA Tour ranks higher in Strokes Gained: Tee to Green this year than Morikawa.
McIlroy is second on that list, with Scheffler third. Fourth on that list is one of the most curiously underrated golfers ahead Thursday’s kick off: Shane Lowry.
The bookmakers have Lowry among the third tier of potential winners, with a fleet of fitful, majorless players like Patrick Cantlay, Tommy Fleetwood, Tyrrell Hatton, and Viktor Hovland. Lowry has the pedigree and the form to be rated above them.
Like Morikawa, Lowry is without a victory this year, but that masks the height to which he has raised the floor of his game. He also has a very solid record around Augusta – T3 in 2022 and in the top 25 in four of the past five years – and the quality of his ball-striking means his contention rests on his putter.
To illustrate that point in exaggerated fashion: among the players to make the cut at last year’s Masters, Lowry ranked first in strokes gained on approach but bottom in putting.
His competitive instinct can sometimes weigh down too heavily upon him – after missing out on last year’s PGA Championship, Lowry gnomically lamented to Sky Sports that sometimes he wants to win too badly – but fewer stars have to align for Lowry to win this week than the majority in the field.
McIlroy, meanwhile, is one of the greatest golfers of all time and yet is stuck waiting for a very rare kind of constellation.
Such is the cruel caprice of the Masters. It’s why we’ll be watching.
Tips
Gavin Cooney
Fintan O’Toole
Gavan Casey
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
Golf Masters Preview Rory McIlroy Shane Lowry Tips and preview