PREDICTIONS in this game tend to be a fool’s errand so this particular fool is going to predict that this week’s Masters will be predictably unpredictable. And now that I have predicted that, it means Dustin Johnson, the man everybody is predicting to win, will romp to a predictable win with the kind of sizzling showing that will leave scorch marks on Magnolia Lane.
It’s been eight months since the last major championship on the men’s calendar. In an era of wrap-around schedules and non-stop, global competition, there has been plenty of golf in that time to stir the senses but nothing rouses the spirits quite like Augusta in the spring time. As one sage noted, “the modern golf season never ends, but it does begin.”
That beginning is here although Johnson, the world No 1, will have to wait a wee while to get going. He has been drawn in the final group for today’s opening round. Having won his last three events, while finishing no worse than sixth in the six tournaments he has contested in 2017, the 32-year-old, who marries power and finesse with near horizontal levels of calmness, has arrived in quite imperious form If it’s not Johnson going for glory then it’s Rory McIlroy aiming for the career grand slam or Jordan Spieth bolstering a Masters record that reads tied-second, winner, tied-second. But there are plenty of potentially delicious storylines.
If you like links of the tenuous variety then here’s one for you. It’s 37 years since Seve Ballesteros won his first Masters in 1980. That was the same year as Sergio Garcia was born. It would be fitting if this majorless matador finally got the monkey off his back this year. Since a runners-up finish in the 1999 US PGA Championship, the majors of 2000, 2010 and 2012 are the only seasons in which he hasn’t posted a top-10 in at least one of the grand slam events. Content in both his professional life and his private life, Garcia is in fine fettle. Along with his swashbuckling compatriot and Masters debutant, Jon Rahm, who possesses the power, the touch and the invention required for the rigours ahead, Augusta could be bracing itself for an assault by this Spanish Armada.
Japan’s rising son, Hideki Matsuyama, continues to attract serious glances and having finished inside the top-seven in the last two years, the world No 4, who won five of the nine events he played in during a spectacular end to 2016, cannot be discounted.
England expects this year and with a football team’s worth of representatives, including upwardly mobile debutants in Tyrell Hatton and Tommy Fleetwood, hopes of a second successive English winner are high. Justin Rose’s solid body of work at Augusta always stands him in very good stead while those of us on this side of Hadrian’s partition could do with our own Russell Knox plonking a saltire high among the flags of nations.
Traditions flow like the water in Rae’s Creek and the usual Augusta watchwords will be getting uttered. Minimise the three-putts, seize the moments on the par-fives and don’t get too far ahead of yourself. Leads can disappear here in the blink of an eye. Just ask Greg Norman, McIlroy or Spieth.
So what’s the prediction? I’ll stick with the predictably unpredictable.
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