Wizards of Oz are on a roll
Day and Scott heading to Augusta as favourites
Never underestimate the significance of a friendly rivalry. Would Adam Scott have found the hunger to fuel his welcome revival if Jason Day had not been stealing all his thunder over the past year?
And is it pure coincidence that Day has won the last two events on tour after Scott also won a couple consecutively in Florida earlier this month?
To think, if you had been asked back in January who would be the friendly rivals battling it out at the Masters next week, you would have plumped for rory McIlroy and Jordan Spieth.
But the two Australians who grew up in the same state, went to the same sports academy and who have known each other since Day — at 28, the younger man by seven years — was a teenager, will arrive at Augusta National holding the hottest hands.
Of the last five events to have been staged on the PGA Tour, the only one they did not win was the one where both were having a week off.
There are shades of roger Federer and rafael Nadal about Scott and Day.
Scott, who used to live in Switzerland before moving to another tax haven — the Bahamas — is all grace and elegance, a purist’s delight. Day makes it all look like hard work by comparison.
He drives us all nuts with the interminable amount of time he takes to play but the one thing you can say in his favour is it is usually worth the wait. Day will start firm favourite to follow up his win at the US PGA Championship last August with a victory in the season’s first major because of his incredible powers of recovery.
Like Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, some of the shots he hits are off the planet but like the American pair with seven green j ackets between them, he invariably gets the ball up and down from anywhere.
If you had to pick the pivotal tournament in the rise of Day, you would end up at the greatest week of Scott’s career. Day left the Masters in 2013 believing he should have won rather than his fellow countryman and understandably so, given he had the lead with three holes to play.
Not only did the prize slip through his fingers, so did the chance to become the first from his nation to win the Masters, the final frontier as far as Australian sport was concerned, the one prestigious trophy phy that had always hung out of reach.
‘I think Scotty will go on to win five or six majors,’ predicted a proud Greg Norman, but it is the scrapper who came up just short that day who has claimed the only one the nation has won since.
Bedevilled with putting problems, the most pleasant surprise the season has unleashed to date has been how Scott has gone back to the short putter and overcome them. ‘I think he’s been walking round with a chip on his shoulder with what Jason has been doing,’ an Aussie golf beat writer who knows both men well told me.
At the WGC-Cadillac Championship in Doral at the start of this month, Scott holed the sort of 8ft putt to win under pressure that banishes all the demons.
Now to Augusta, where Day will arrive on Thursday to begin his extensive preparations. In his last 13 starts in the US he has won one major and five other events, includi ng the WGC Match Play on Sunday. To put that amazing run of form into perspective, it adds up to the entire career achievements on the PGA Tour of a player as good as Tom Lehman.
Are the hands the two Aussies hold too hot? Since 2006, 13 players have arrived at the Masters with two wins under their belts already for the season. None added a green jacket.
That said, precious few were as good as the friendly rivals from Queensland who will arrive in Georgia in the form of their lives.