Gavin Cooney reports from Augusta National Golf Club

RORY MCILROY HAS his Grand Slam and this week his Holywood Golf Club protege Tom McKibbin will complete his own, smaller sweep: McKibbin’s rookie appearance at the Masters will mean he has played at least once in all four majors by the age of 23. 

He has also made the cut at least once at each of the other trio of major events to this point, so his next small step along the path will be a weekend tee time at Augusta National. 

“To be able to say I made the cut in all four would be nice”, says McKibbin. “What might be trickiest is how much the course will change from today to Thursday. I don’t know what to expect, it’s such a difficult golf course, especially around the greens. I’d love to play four rounds and put four solid scores together, that would be a nice first Masters experience.”

Having traded his PGA Tour card for a place on LIV, McKibbin has supplemented his schedule with appearances on the DP World and Asian Tours, and it was on the latter that punched his ticket to the Masters, leading wire-to-wire to win the Hong Kong Open. 

“It was the reason I went there and played”, he says, “to have this opportunity to come and play the Masters.”

Now that he is here, he is leaning on the expertise and experience of his LIV teammates Jon Rahm and Tyrrell Hatton. Hatton took him up to Augusta for his first look at the course 10 days ago, while both partnered McKibbin for a nine-hole practice round on Monday.

“Last week when I came up, it was the first time in a long, long time I’d been nervous playing a golf course”, he says. “With nobody here and nothing on the line, it was one of those, ‘This is so cool’ moments, and I didn’t want to play like an absolute idiot the first time. A little daunting the first time, and [again] coming back today when there are a lot of people around and the fairways look a little narrower off the tees, how close they are on the par threes, but it’s really cool.” 

McKibbin suffered from a very different kind of claustrophobia last month. He is based in Dubai and was uncomfortably close to some of the fallout from the US/Iran war, and so when the second of two bombs landed nearby, his windows shook. McKibbin was among seven LIV players who were stranded in Dubai, and so they made their way to Oman, from where Rahm arranged for his private jet to spirit them away to Hong Kong, for the upcoming LIV event. 

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After his impressive end to last year, McKibbin’s start to the 2026 season on LIV has been comparatively humdrum, not finishing better than in a tie for 17th place across the first five events of the year. So while he is taking the nervous and giddy excitement of the rookie into the Masters, he is not taking a huge amount of form. 

“It’s obviously a lot of precision golf into the greens and need to be good around the greens”, he says of the challenge ahead this week. “I have really enjoyed playing it the last few days and what I have found trickiest is my depth perception is really weird: it looks like the ball has gone nowhere off some of the tees. But besides that I have really enjoyed it, the more I have played it the more comfortable I have got, and know where to hit it a little bit more.

“This is the one I’ve watched since I was nine years old, to watch it every year to now and this is the first – I wouldn’t say pinch me moment – but I have watched it and always wanted to play here and play the Masters, to have that dream come true is really cool.”