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How the players distinguished themselves last week. They recognised instinctively that this Masters was not all about them, with their gratitude to Augusta National for putting on the tournament at this time of year shining through on a daily basis. Have we ever seen so many on- and off-course smiles (including Tiger Woods’ after that 10) and can European golf ever have felt prouder of Rory McIlroy?
Long ago, the McIlroy shoulders would have succumbed to a Colin Montgomerie-type slump in the course of what was an opening 75. Last week, on the other hand, we saw nothing worse than the odd rueful smile. The player accepted everything the experts said about how badly he had performed before responding with a 6-under-par 66. In the process of his Masters journey of 2020, this four-time major winner sped from 77th in the field to the top five on 11-under par.
Of the other Europeans who progressed to the weekend, Jon Rahm finished on 10 under, with Tommy Fleetwood, Justin Rose, Danny Willett, Shane Lowry, Ian Poulter and Bernhard Langer all pulling up in the top 30.
Anyone who is planning on becoming the youngest winner of a Masters (Woods and Jordan Spieth both did it at 21) is unlikely to be remotely interested in the case histories of the older fry at Augusta last week. Yet, heavens, how fascinating it was to hear some among the 30-and-olders talk of what it had taken to arrive where they are.
McIlroy was as interesting as any. Now 31, he spoke of selfishness having played its part in his first 30 years.
“As an only child, the whole world had revolved around me – and now it doesn’t,” he said. “It revolves around this little person (his daughter Poppy) who came into the world on 31 August.
“I think you need to be a pretty selfish person to be a good player, but a little bit of selflessness probably isn’t a bad thing for me.”
He went on to use the word “grit” to explain what goes into a great golfer and how, in his case, that grit was born “of failing a whole lot more than I have succeeded.” That thought, and plenty of others, tripped from his lips like a succession of perfectly timed chips.
With his grit everywhere apparent as he kept his score in check with some tough putts halfway through Sunday afternoon, McIlroy also talked of the huge admiration he has for Dustin Johnson’s simple way of golf – one of seeing the ball and hitting it, of seeing the putt and holing it: “I think he’s got one of the best attitudes towards the game of golf in the game’s history. The way he approaches it is awesome.”
McIlroy employed the world No 1’s approach last week – and said at the end of his closing 69 that he would be sticking with it.
Failing more often than you succeed, or having a career mix of bad times and good, featured in so many of the players’ stories. No-one was going to bring up the 63-year-old Langer’s old attacks of the yips in a week when he opened with a 68 and closed at 3-under par, but can anyone have suffered as much as he did? For Rose, the bad times included 21 missed cuts directly after he had finished in a heady share of fourth place in the Open at age 17. For Willett, who did as Fleetwood in following an opening 71 with a 66, there was a dive to 442 in the world two years after he had won the Masters of 2016.
The 43-year-old Lee Westwood, who was lying second behind Paul Casey on Thursday night, focused on his age after someone hinted that his time had maybe come and gone. “There’s no age barrier to doing what you need to do to win at Augusta. There’s definitely a knack to playing this course and it’s a knack you only really master by playing in the championship. You can play as many practice rounds as you want, but it’s only when the tournament begins that you (really) start to learn more about the course. ”
How many Masters has Westwood played? Nineteen, with his record taking in two runner-up spots, the most recent of them in 2016.
It was out in China a couple of years ago that I fell into step with him as he played a few practice holes one evening. Along the way, he brought up the subject of his major-less career. There had been times when he would get niggled by negative press comments, but that evening he analysed his career as follows: “If I were standing here talking to you today having won a major, I would probably give myself 8½ out of 10. So how much should I knock off for not having played well in a specific week?”
“You start to pick up snippets of information from the guys that have played here like 15 times and more. … You can never learn enough.”
Tommy Fleetwood
The answer, we agreed, was that no-one would have wanted to knock anything off that 8½ tally, particularly in an era when bagging a single major was relatively commonplace. With the help of such thinking, he would seem to have shrugged off some of the pressure he used to feel.
Fleetwood, whose fourth Masters this was, had sought out Westwood as a practice companion. “You start to pick up snippets of information from the guys that have played here like 15 times and more. … You can never learn enough.”
Several of the Europeans suggested the lack of spectators had taken away from the atmosphere. It probably did but, to watch the event in its stripped state was to begin to understand more of why the Masters works so well.
The mannerly foundations would seem to count for as much as anything. With the club members/officials prefixing their every instruction with a “Please,” all those involved in the event tend to up their games. Players with a tendency to be haughty are humbled, with no better example than how they are apt to give the media something better than the often wearily delivered answers they might get in a regular week. Not, mind you, that that is difficult to understand when they will often be expected to talk to a series of TV and radio people before they are wheeled out in front of the writers. By then, they have usually lost the will to live.
Moving on to the patrons, I always used to think that the members' insistence on calling spectators “patrons” was nothing more than a quaint affectation. I could easily be reading something into this that does not apply, but could it be about affording them the kind of status that has each and every one of them feeling welcome? And before you ask, they are not all from the privileged backgrounds you might suppose. I’ve spoken to people who saved for months for their tickets.
A pride of patrons is what they have become. They don’t push and they don’t shove – and Johnson, McIlroy and the rest are all hoping against hope they will be back in time for next year.
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