Golf’s greatest showman shows he is ready to compete against all odds after a solid if mostly unspectacular start There were about 50,000 people at Augusta National for the start of the Masters: fans, media, members, stewards, caddies, cooks, camera crew and all the other support staff, and on Thursday morning almost every last one of them was asking the same sort of question. Plenty had come along to the 1st tee at 11am to find out the answer, too. The dogged ones had staked a front-row spot first thing that morning. Everyone else was craning their necks and popping up on their tiptoes, jockeying to try to find a line of sight that would allow them to catch a...
Carelessness on the closing greens on Saturday cost the Texan, but second place has returned him to the world’s top 15When Jordan Spieth completed his final round at Royal St George’s and turned to acknowledge the crowd, he kept his head down. Perhaps it was the evening sun cutting over the gallery that caused him to avert his eyes. Or perhaps it was something else. A sense of disappointment, maybe.The former boy wonder of golf had to watch Collin Morikawa assume that mantle, as the 24-year-old won the Open at the first time of asking. But Spieth, 27, is on the back of one of the biggest comeback seasons in golf, and it was only the consistency of the champion,...
Eisenhower’s drinking partner and the man who helped make the Masters what it is today surely deserves more recognitionTucked away in a corner of YouTube sits the kind of cheesy 1976 sales pitch Augusta National had to make to Asia decades before Hideki Matsuyama came along. Cigarettes, whisky and terrain far less manicured than is the case for Masters of this day and age feature. So, too, Philip Russell Wahl Sr.“We have had the finest group of players, the greatest competitors, on our golf course,” says Wahl. “That’s what makes the Masters great.” And then the payoff: “The Masters is my life.” Related: Hideki Matsuyama is Japanese but his victory matters for Asian Americans Related: Gary Player’s apartheid history is...
Player invited Lee Elder to play in South Africa and was praised by Nelson Mandela but admits his past is not blamelessIt has been almost 50 years since Lee Elder became the first black man to play in the Masters, and five months since Augusta National announced they were at last going to mark his achievement by inviting him to join Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player as one of the tournament’s honorary starters.So long that when the moment finally came around early on Thursday morning, Elder, who is 86, wasn’t able to get up and swing a club. Instead he sat and watched as Player and Nicklaus did. It was a poignant moment, despite the way Player’s son (and caddie)...
His last major was in August 2014, he is in questionable form and has a new swing coach – but Rory McIlroy knows AugustaIf he hadn’t seen such riches he could live with being poor. Any assessment of a run for Rory McIlroy without claiming a major championship – which has now stretched to six years and eight months – comes with yearning. McIlroy at his best provides sporting masterpiece.McIlroy won two of his four majors thus far by eight shots. Albeit the margin of victory at the 2014 Open Championship was far smaller, McIlroy controlled that event from start to finish. Just weeks later at the US PGA Championship, the ease with which he recovered from a mid-round Sunday...