We need a hero, Rory
With Tiger out and the other big names floundering, it’s …
THE MASTERS: McIlroy must seize moment at Augusta
If ever a sport was holding its breath for a hero, i t’s surely this one at the start of the 78th Masters. Let Rory McIlroy’s comment last week — that golf was waiting for s omeone to s t amp his authority — act as a rallying call for the world’s top players.
There’s certainly no better place to s t ep f orward t han Augusta National and the first major championship of the season.
The last time we saw anything like this was in 2012 and what happened then will hopefully serve as a good omen.
At the time, 16 majors had come and gone with 16 different winners and then McIlroy lengthened his stride to follow up becoming the youngest winner of the US Open for 90 years the previous season by winning the US PGA Championship by a record margin.
It was an instant reminder that, while what had gone before had been interesting enough, there is no substitute for greatness.
McIlroy, on the eve of this Masters, has the confident demeanour of the man who blew away the field at Kiawah Island two years ago. Like then, he knows this course offers him untold advantages.
As with Seve Ballesteros and many other greats before him, McIlroy believes it is his destiny to win a bucketload of majors. He not only knows the players who have achieved the fabled career grand slam, he has studied how old they were when they achieved it.
This isn’t misplaced arrogance. This is how someone has to think if he is to continue to stand shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Bobby Jones, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods.
The loss of Woods for what is likely to prove the whole summer is a grievous blow for a game that loves history as much as this one and for his realistic pursuit to this point of Nicklaus’s total of 18 majors — perhaps the toughest record in all of sport.
But McIlroy could make everyone feel a whole lot better about Tiger’s absence this week.
He has sorted out the distractions off the course that held him back last year. He has sorted out his equipment. But has he sorted out that occasionally dodgy putter for these treacherous greens?
There are days when his putting stroke looks beautiful and those are the ones where he waltzes round even difficult courses in 63 or 64.
But, as has happened for each of the last three years here, there are other days when it seems he will never hole a putt again, and those e are the days when he gets ts too aggressive with his iron shots and throwss in a calamitous nine holes to fall out of the equation.
If he can keep one of those off his four scorecards this week — it is a sizeable if, alas — Adam Scott will be helping him into a green jacket come Sunday and he will be threequarters of the way to a career slam at the age of 24. He’d like that. As he ppoints out: ‘Only three players have done it in their twenties. Tiger was 24 and Jack was 226 (Gary Player was 229).’ Immortality waits fofor no man. TThis has been unquestionationably the weirdest start to any campaign in recent memory. When was the last time we got to the second weekend in April and only one player in the world’s top 10 had a strokeplay victory to his name? When was the last time three of the world’s top seven (McIlroy, Scott and Matt Kuchar) got to the final rounds of tournaments holding big leads and all three failed to get the job done against rank outsiders?
There are two ways of looking at this. ‘This is just a great moment in time to be ranked outside the world’s top 50, isn’t it?’ said Justin Rose, humorously.
‘You’d have a heck of a chance of winning this week.’
And then there’s how Rose really feels. That all this flux has to end at some point, given the quality inside the top 10, and here we have the perfect stage.
With so many surprise successes and PGA Tour winners getting a ticket to Augusta, the result is that a record 24 rookies are part of this field of 97 players. Only one debutant — fuzzy Zoeller in 1979
— has claimed a green jacket since the inception of the tournament in 1934.
Given the quality contained in this year’s crop — Americans Jordan Spieth, Harris English and Patrick Reed, flamboyant Frenchman Victor Dubuisson and Scotland’s very own Stephen Gallacher, to name but five — it’s hardly surprising there’s a lot of speculation about the likelihood of a second this year.
It would certainly fit the tone of the season to date but it remains a huge ask at a place where experience is such a blessing.
The Australians are understandably buoyant following the lifting of the curse with Scott’s win last year. A successful defence is an obvious possibility, as is the gifted Jason Day following him into the green jacket.
What about Europe? No wins on the PGA Tour this year. No wins at an Augusta venue that was once their stronghold since the second of Jose Maria Olazabal’s victories in 1999.
Surely it’s time for those two sorry statistics to end?
From Henrik Stenson to Ian Poulter, Sergio Garcia to Graeme McDowell, the talent is obviously there.
From a British standpoint, it would also be good to see the two English amateurs, Matt Fitz patrick and Garrick Porteous, give a good account of themselves and make it through to the weekend play. What a great draw, in particular, f or Sheffield teenager Fitzpatrick, who finds himself in the slot usually reserved for the US amateur champion, alongside the defending champion of the Masters itself. And so to the end of the long eight-month wait for a major. Maybe the anticipation is not quite so bristling this year. Maybe we’ve all been a little dulled by this succession of unlikely winners. Time for a hero, then. Over to you, Rory.