Spring is in the air and we find ourselves 11 days away from the commencement of the Masters Golf Championship at the Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia. One of golf’s four major championships alongside the PGA Championship, the United States Open and the British Open, the Masters was the brainchild of amateur golfing great Bobby Jones, who was the 1920s sporting equal to the New York Yankees’ Babe Ruth and the Chicago Bears’ Red Grange as he won four United States Opens, three British Opens, five U.S. Amateurs, and one British Amateur. In 1930 he won all four of them and then retired at age 28 from competitive golf to build his dream course in Augusta, Georgia, with heavyweight golf architect Alister Mackenzie.
Jack Nicklaus has won a record-setting six Masters tournaments and he has always contended that the Masters just might be the easiest of the four grand slam events to win because of the size and nature of the field. The other three major champions historically have fields in the neighborhood of 150 contestants. The Masters is a strictly invitational tournament. When all is said and done, there will be somewhere between 90-100 contestants in the field next month.
Among the categories for invitation to the Masters is the one for past champions. If you should perform well enough for 72 holes and get to don the green jacket Sunday evening, then you will be invited to the Masters for the rest of your career through age 65. A certain percentage of those Masters champs such as Bernhard Langer, Larry Mize, Freddie Couples, Jose Maria Olazabal and Vijay Singh are now senior golfers and far removed from their primes. You have to figure that regardless of how talented they are on today’s Champions Tour, Langer and Couples will not be anywhere near the Masters leader board come Sunday afternoon.
Because Masters’ founder Bobby Jones was a lifetime amateur golfer, he had always made it clear that he wanted some invitational criteria afforded to successful amateur golfers of note. Although no amateur has ever won the Masters, Frank Stranahan, Ken Venturi and Charlie Coe did finish as the runner-up in the 1947, 1956, and 1961 Masters, respectively. Nowadays there are six slots available to amateur champions provided they remain amateur golfers when the Masters is held. The U.S. Amateur champion and runner-up from last summer at Bandon Dunes are in the field as well as the reigning titlists from last year’s British Amateur, U.S. Mid-Amateur, Latin American Amateur, and Asia-Pacific Amateur. The low amateur at the Masters is recognized at the final-day awards ceremony. Past low amateurs have included Ben Crenshaw, Curtis Strange, Phil Mickelson, Tiger Woods, Sergio Garcia and Bryson DeChambeau, all major champions. Yet low amateur at the Masters is no guarantee to future success as evidenced by golfers such as David Gossett, Manny Zeman and Jim Hallet.
A number of golfers in the Masters field fit into multiple categories. For instance, Bryson DeChambeau is at this year’s Masters because he is the reigning U.S. Open champ, because he is in the top 50 in the World Golf Rankings, because he won the Arnold Palmer Invitational three weeks ago, and because he was among the top 30 on last year’s PGA Tour Fed Ex Cup points list. Of course, those golfers in multiple categories are the ones who are most likely to show up as favorites among Masters’ prognosticators because they are at the top of their games. There haven’t been any “who’s he?” winners of the Masters in the modern era.
There is a most interesting sixsome in the field at the up-and-coming Masters who fit into the category of winners of PGA Tour events during the course of the last 12 months. While golfers of note such as Justin Thomas, Daniel Berger and Brooks Koepka, have won tour events during the course of the last year, so too have Stewart Cink, Brian Gay, Martin Laird, Harris English, Robert Streb and Matt Jones. Those last six names find themselves in the Masters field this year.
What’s most interesting about the aforementioned sixsome is the fact that it has been more than a few years since they’ve won an event on the PGA Tour. Robert Streb won at Sea Island this past November. He previously won a PGA Tour tournament some six years earlier at, of all places, Sea Island. Those are the only two tour victories on Streb’s professional resume. In the case of Brian Gay, Martin Laird, Harris English and the winner of last week’s Honda Classic, Matt Jones, it has been a full seven years since they showed up in the winner’s circle on the world’s most competitive golf circuit. For Stewart Cink, it has been an even longer time. He won the Safeway Classic this past September at the Silverado Resort in Napa. A seven-time winner on the PGA Tour, Cink last won a tour event in 2009 when he beat the iconic Tom Watson in a playoff to lift the Claret Jug as the 2009 British Open champion at Turnberry. For Cink, it has been an 11-year wait between tour titles.
The 49-year-old Brian Gay is an aging veteran who has five tour wins and had a breakthrough moment last fall at the Bermuda Classic. Martin Laird of Scotland has four victories on the PGA Tour and won this past October in Las Vegas. His previous win was in the 2013 Houston Open where he outlasted Rory McIlroy. Matt Jones is an Australian who first met his golfing hero, fellow Aussie Greg Norman, when he was just 7 years old. It’s been seven years since he’s won on the PGA Tour although, to his credit, he has won a pair of Australian Opens in 2015 and 2019. Perhaps the strangest member of our sixsome is Harris English. He won the Tournament of Champions at Kapalua in January. Normally the field at the TOC is made up of the previous year’s winners, but because there were so few events during the pandemic spring and summer of 2020, the folks who run the TOC decided to invite the top 30 golfers from the previous year into their field. Harris fit into that category, won the TOC, and got his first tour victory in seven years. It is fair to note that English has been on the comeback trail and did finish in fourth place at the U.S. Open at Winged Foot last September.
The big boys of professional golf are playing at the World Match Play in Texas this weekend. After that it’s on to the Houston Open, and then it’ll be Masters week in Georgia. The dogwoods and the azaleas will be blooming and the golfing world will be anticipating the start of a new major championship season. The 2020 season was a most unique one with the cancellation of the British Open and the movement of the PGA Championship to August, the U.S. Open to September, and the Masters to November. However, this time around all is right in the world of golf and the majors will return to their historical dates.
