Defeated champion can’t just pack up and get out of Augusta
Missing the cut as a reigning Masters champion is one of sport’s more chastening rituals. Not only do you forfeit the right to wear the Green Jacket wherever you please, whether in Centre Court’s royal box or in the front row at Madison Square Garden, but you must linger on the premises for 48 hours to drape golf’s most coveted garment on the shoulders of your usurper. For Dustin Johnson, who has held his privileges for just 143 days, and whose jacket has seldom been seen outside family gatherings due to pandemic restrictions on glamorous soirees, the sensation could hardly be more galling.
His consolation, should he seek any, is that he is far from an outlier. For three of the past five years, the champion at Augusta has fluffed his encore, failing even to qualify for the weekend. In 2017, Danny Willett did little to dispel his caricature as a “oneand-done” winner, drifting feebly to the margins with rounds of 73 and 78. A year later, Sergio Garcia offered the most gruesome defence of his solitary major title, falling outside the cut mark by 10 at 15-over par. At the 15th, the Spaniard made a 13, equalling the highest score on any hole in Masters history.
To these strange implosions we can now add the performance of Johnson, who followed his recordbreaking, 20-under total last November with a display to suggest that he had forgotten how to putt.
Three-putting six greens in two days, Johnson never gave himself a chance as he joined Brooks Koepka and Rory Mcilroy, both four-time major champions, in beating a premature retreat. But where his peers could return to their West Palm Beach homes, Johnson was obliged to kick his heels for a couple of days, before anointing his successor. “The threeputts killed me,” he lamented. “Take those away and I’m one-under. My speed was awful.”
When Johnson pulverised the opposition just five months ago, it felt like the opening salvo of the Dustin dynasty. Finally, it seemed, he had eliminated his daft brain fades to unleash the full extent of his astounding natural talent.
How hastily that script has needed to be rewritten.
Even for an emotional flat-liner like Johnson, these indignities will sting. To have his most valued distinction wrested away after his short reign will be a wrench.
For all that Johnson is oblivious to outside pressures, there is a sense, sometimes, that he is too laconic for his own good.
Knowing that he had given himself no room for error on his back nine on Friday, he still carelessly found water at the 15th, the most straightforward of par fives for a player of his length. With that, any hope of joining the exalted coterie of back-toback champions at Augusta was sunk.
His detractors will point to this failure as evidence he is little more than a flat-track bully. At the one-off November Masters, when the course had softened under autumnal rains and when the greens were as receptive as dartboards, Johnson obliterated the field. But once it was restored to its devilish majesty in high spring, demanding greater creativity from players and more composure in their putting stroke, he disintegrated. Even by this place’s standards, it was a wildly unexpected outcome.
— Telegraph Group UK