It’s the weekend of the 80th edition of the Masters. While there are still two rounds of major championship golf to be played, the prevailing line of thinking is that the Masters normally gets rolling on the back nine on Sunday afternoon. I think the rationale for that is the very nature of Augusta National’s back nine. There are two par-5s, the 13th and the 15th, with feast-or-famine possibilties. Both are reachable in two strokes with a well-placed drive. Both have been the site of some brilliant second shots into the green such as Nicklaus’s high-arcing 4-iron on the 15th hole in 1986 and Phil Mickelson’s shot from the pine straw through the trees onto the 13th green in 2010. Yet the water fronting both greens can easily dial double-bogey into the equation. Many a Masters has been lost in Rae’s Creek, from Billy Joe Patton in 1954 (missing out on a playoff with Ben Hogan and Sam Snead by one stroke), to Curtis Strange in 1985 and Seve Ballesteros in 1986.
There are some super tough par-4s on the back nine, namely the 10th, 11th and 14th holes. If you can make par and get out of there with your mind intact, then you aren’t going to lose any ground on the field. The duo of par-3 holes, the short but watery 12th, is another disaster waiting to happen, while the left-side pin placement on the 16th hole adds to the drama of a well-placed iron shot trickling to the flagstick with all the possibilities of a tap-in birdie-two. The final two holes, both par-4s, will reward the gifted golfer with birdie possibilities as evidenced by Arnold Palmer’s efforts in 1960 and Charl Swartzels’s final-hole birdies in 2011.
One need only look back to Jack Nicklaus’ final-nine score of 6-under-par 30 in 1986 or Phil Mickelson’s 32 in 2004 or, for that matter, Rory McIlroy’s 7-over-par 43 in 2011 to realize that there is golfing drama on every hole of the final nine holes at the Masters.
As we’ve mentioned in the past, the Masters is the most unique of the four major championships in that it is contested at the same site year after year. Also, while all the other grand slam events are run by golfing organizations, namely the USGA, the R&A,and the PGA of America, the Masters is run by the Augusta National Golf Club. Augusta National is an owner’s equity club with a national and very private membership that includes some of the major movers and shakers of American business, industry, finance and politics. It is one of those places where if you have to ask how much it costs to join or how much the annual dues are, then you most probably can’t afford to belong.
All of the other major championships have a backdoor way to get into their championships. The field for the United States Open includes golfers who are exempt into the field as well as those who can qualify into the event. In 1955, one of those qualifiers, Iowa driving range pro Jack Fleck, stunned the golfing world by finishing tied atop the leader board at the Olympic Club with the iconic Ben Hogan. Fleck pulled off the biggest upset since Francis Ouimet’s overtime triumph in the 1913 U.S. Open. He beat Hogan the next day in an 18-hole playoff.
Lee Trevino, who was a municipal golf club professional in El Paso, qualified into the 1966 National Open at Olympic and ended up playing all four of his rounds with another qualifier, then teenager Johnny Miller. Trevino finished tied for 54th. The following year Trevino got through qualifying, finished fifth at Baltusrol, and earned temporary status on the PGA Tour. He ended up the 1967 season as the tour’s rookie of the year. In 1968 he won the Open at Oak Hill and he took off from there on a Hall of Fame career.
The British Open has a similar qualifying system into its championship. The most well known Open Championship qualifier of the modern era was 17-year-old Justin Rose. Rose holed out a miracle wedge shot on the final hole at Royal Birkdale and finished tied for fourth behind eventual champion Mark O’Meara. The initial stages of Rose’s professional career had numerous pitfalls, yet he has matured into a world class golfer who was the first Englishman to win a U.S. Open since Tony Jacklin did so in 1970. Rose won at Merion in 2014.
The PGA Championship has a different sort of qualifying criteria. It usually exempts the top 100 golfers on the world golf rankings into its tournament. It also gives exemptions to regulars on the PGA Tour. The final 20 spots into its championship are reserved for those golfers who finish among the top 20 in the PGA Club Professional Championship. Although no one from the ranks of the club pros has ever made a major splash in the PGA Championship, every now and then a local professional of note will earn a space into the field. Jason Schmuhl, the head professional at the Windsor Golf Club, has qualified into a handful of PGA Championships during the past nine years.
The Masters is different from the other majors in that its field is smaller, usually set at just around 100 golfers, while the other championships are filled to the max at 156 golfers. The other distinction from the three other grand slam events is the fact that the Masters was the brainchild of amateur golfing great Bobby Jones. Jones co-designed Augusta National with Alister Mackenzie and then started the Masters as his lasting tribute to the game. As a result, while the majority of the Masters field includes linksters from the world golf rankings as well as winners within the last year on the PGA Tour, it also allows a handful of amateur golfers into its field as a tip of the golfing hat to Jones.
The most noted amateur in this year’s field is Bryson DeChambeau of Clovis. DeChambeau is best known for his mathematics philosophies on the intricacies of the golf swing. He’s also the only golfer of note who has all of his irons cut to the exact same length. Yet most importantly, the Southern Methodist University golfer, who won the NCAA championship last May, is in this year’s field at the Masters because he won the United States Amateur last August. He is joined by the U.S. Amateur runner-up, the U.S. Mid Amateur champ, the British Amateur winner, the Asian Pacific Amateur champ, and the Latin American Amateur victor.
It’s Masters’ weekend at the Augusta National Golf Club. On Sunday evening, someone will don the green jacket and forever be a part of golfing history. For others such as amateurs Derek Bard, Cheng Jin, Sammy Schmitz, Paul Chaplet and Romain Langasque, there will be no green jacket. However, they will leave Augusta with memories that last a lifetime.
