Masters pick is anyone’s guess
PGA Tour and LIV stars look set for telling battle at augusta national
Spaniard and defending champion Jon Rahm, ranked third in the world, and No 4 Viktor Hovland of Norway are also tipped in that order for this year’s Masters Green Jacket.
WITH just on five weeks to go until the season’s first major championship event, the US Masters Tournament, world numbers one and two, American Scottie Scheffler and Northern Ireland’s Rory Mcilroy, are the top two picks.
Spaniard and defending champion Jon Rahm, ranked third in the world, and No 4 Viktor Hovland of Norway are also tipped in that order for this year’s Masters Green Jacket.
But after that, the world rankings’ weight on the early backing for the Masters is tossed out of the window.
Brooks Koepka, ranked 30th in the Official World Golf Rankings, has the next best backing, along with Jordan Spieth (13th in world the rankings) and Patrick Cantlay (6th).
They are followed by Australian Cameron Smith, the
2022 British Open champion and 45th in the rankings, and Sweden’s Ludvig Aberg (11th), who got the same support.
This leaves LIV Golf, the PGA Tour’s rival, with three of the
nine leading players tipped for the title at Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Georgia, to be contested from April 11 to 14.
When the names of Dustin Johnson, a two-time major winner and Masters champion in 2020, and Bryson Decambeau, the 2020 US Open winner, are also thrown into the hat, LIV Golf appears to have a real good chance of having one of their players land the crown.
There will be much talk of Mcilroy and his chances. The world number two seems to have backed down from his sustained attacks on LIV Golf, at one time serving as the US tour’s de facto spokesman.
Recently, he spoke of allowing the LIV players to rejoin the PGA Tour without penalty. Nothing has come of this, and it is unlikely anything will, given that Mcilroy has stepped down as a players’ rep on the tour’s
policy board and lost favour with some of his peers.
But notwithstanding all of this, he will be bent on claiming his first Masters title.
A victory at Augusta National would make Mcilroy only the sixth player in the modern era to have achieved a career grand slam.
He already has the US Open (2011), PGA Championship (2012 and 2014) and British Open (2014) titles to his credit.
Mcilroy will be keen on going one better than his second-place finish at the Masters last year.
Scheffler will be just as determined to triumph at Augusta National, hoping to add to his 2022 success there, which has yielded his only major title thus far.
The 27-year-old has six wins on the PGA Tour, four of them coming in 2022, when he shot to the summit of world golf.
The other two he won last year and includes the Players Championship, which he will defend at TPC Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida, from March 14 to 17.
For a long time before the inception of LIV Golf, the Players Championship was widely rgarded as the tournament with the strongest field in world golf.
Sadly, that is no longer the case. Following LIV Golf’s arrival, several of the game’s leading players joined the Saudi Arabia-sponsored tour.
Most notably, and recently, was Rahm’s signing for a reported Us$500mil.
There are many who believe Rahm will successfully defend his title at Augusta National, and there aren’t many reasons why he shouldn’t do so.
Of course, there might now be extra incentive to show that his move to LIV Golf was the right one and that he still has it in him to win on the world’s biggest stages.
With all this, the stage is nicely set with a good case to be made for those tipped in the top 15 or so to go on and clinch it.