You know it’s Masters week when your local golf club stalwarts like Hugh and Davy, who couldn’t normally tell the difference between a potted chrysanthemum and a Pot Noodle at any other time of the year, get all botanical and flooery and start extolling how radiant the azaleas at Augusta look while banging on about how they are part of the Ericaceae family of flowering plants and why they tend to fare better in well-drained acidic soil before shanking their tee-shot in the Wednesday medal off into the “bloomin’ s***e.”
Yes, with its comforting sense of sameness, the Masters has a familiarity that breeds contentment even if all the rapt reverence, dewy-eyed veneration and drooling piety that tumbles forth from all and sundry has ventured far beyond the realms of self-parody.
It remains remarkable, for instance, that folk can trot out the trademark phrase “a tradition unlike any other” with a straight face amid all this gushing genuflection.
What was it Gary Player said back in the day again? “There is absolutely nothing humorous at The Masters. Here, small dogs do not bark and babies do not cry.”
You’ll no doubt get a few players barking up the wrong dogwoods, though. And one or two whimpering like a bairn without a bottle as Augusta’s mind-mangling nooks, crannies, perils and pitfalls tease and torment with impunity.
Infographic by www.golfbidder.co.uk
Perhaps everybody will resort to Rory McIlroy’s new approach of juggling and meditating to clear the mind and soothe the senses as the first men’s major of the year unravels?
“I won’t be spending a month with the monks in Nepal but it’s important to find things that resonate with you and I’m committed to the path I’ve chosen,” said McIlroy of a sport which has always demanded a canny juggling act involving the mental, the physical and the technical side of things.
Hopefully, that path leads him to the career grand slam. It would be wonderful to see him do it this week. He is in the form of his life and, while the expectation on him is akin to the weight Atlas used to burden, the more nonchalant approach McIlroy has adopted may be the tactic that finally gets him over the line after five successive top 10s and some well-documented mishaps and anti-climaxes in this corner of Georgia.
Of course, in a global game that has a strength in depth that’s deeper than a heart-to-heart with Sigmund Freud, predicting who will ease themselves into the green jacket is not so much a game of pin the tail on the donkey, more an exercise in pinning it on to any number of thoroughbreds.
Rory’s case is compelling. At 43, meanwhile, Tiger Woods knows that only Jack Nicklaus, at 46, is the only player to have won the Masters at an older age.
Time is not on his side. The support and the you-can-never-write-him-off fever most definitely is, however, as a golfing world wills another miraculous twist in the Tiger tale.
READ MORE: Tiger Woods eyes fifth Masters title
Nobody generates pandemonium like him but scroll down the list, from Brooks to Dustin, Francesco to the Justins through a Phil, Rickie or Tommy and there’s no shortage of sturdy candidates.
Matt Kuchar, who leads the PGA Tour’s greens in regulation stats and comes into the week with two wins already this season, has a solid pedigree at Augusta, Paul Casey is rejuvenated while swashbuckling Spaniard, Jon Rahm, looks a tasty offering too.
Fourth in just his second outing at Augusta last year, questions over his temperament at a course which demands a calm heid will always surround him but six top-10s on the tour in 2019 hint at a man ready for another assault on a maiden major title.
And what of Hideki Matsuyama, the Japanese golfer who cracked the top 30 as an amateur on his Augusta debut in 2011 and has built up a fine body of work in this neck of the woods with a 19th, an 11th, a seventh and a fifth in his last four Masters starts?
Throw in former winners like Bubba Watson, Louis Oosthuizen and Adam Scott or effective under-the-radar campaigners such as Marc Leishman and Charley Hoffman, both of whom have been features on the leaderboard in recent years, and you have more ingredients than Fanny Craddock’s pantry.
As for Jordan Spieth? Well, without a top 10 since last year’ Open, the 2015 champion is hardly in the best of fettle. But Augusta stokes his fires like nothing else, despite the harrowing collapse which scuppered his title defence of 2016.
A win, two ties for second and a third in five appearances is terrific going while one his greatest weapons, his putting, may be coming back at the right time and at the right place.
The great Gene Sarazen once observed that, “you don’t come to Augusta to find your game, you come here because you’ve got one.”
Spieth has lost his form over the past few months. But what do they say about class again?
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