Homa, Max (1990- )

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    At the Masters, Champions Past, Present and Future

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    Seventy-five years ago this past week, Sam Snead won the Masters Tournament and became the first champion to receive one of Augusta National Golf Club’s green jackets.Until he died in 2002, the jacket was his to wear every time he returned to Augusta. These days, it is a sartorial symbol of how, beyond a freighted history and marvelous azaleas and golf’s geopolitical machinations and gallery roars that ripple from Amen Corner to the clubhouse, Augusta National is more enchanted by champions than most places.Since the start of the month, Lottie Woad has captured the Augusta National Women’s Amateur. Eight children were named champions of a junior golf competition after playing at Augusta. More than 30 past Masters winners gathered for dinner to honor Jon Rahm, last year’s champion, and Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player and Tom Watson hit tee shots to start this year’s tournament. Many of their brethren played afterward, because they are allowed to for life. On Sunday, someone — perhaps someone new, perhaps someone already admitted to the locker room reserved for past champions — will win the 88th Masters.There may be no place in men’s golf where hope, dazzle and ambition are as abundant as Augusta.But this past week, all of the possibilities seemed to be on greater display than usual. There was the solar eclipse on Monday, when fans peered skyward, just as Ben Crenshaw and Nick Faldo did here, too. Later on, Tiger Woods, 48 years old and two years removed from the last time he finished a major tournament, made his record 24th consecutive Masters cut. But he faded on Saturday. Higher up the leaderboard during the third round, players like Ludvig Aberg, Nicolai Hojgaard, Max Homa and Xander Schauffele hunted for their debut major title, while Bryson DeChambeau, Collin Morikawa and Cameron Smith looked to build on the magic that had made them champions elsewhere not all that long ago. Scottie Scheffler occasionally stumbled but was still at once contending for another Masters victory and wondering if he could lock it down before the birth of his first child.Golf enthusiasts often regard a trip to the Masters as the stuff of dreams. It certainly is for players. The Masters represents a shot at becoming one of those champions written into history, with the green jackets and the possibility of forever enchanting Augusta.Spectators cast their eyes skyward to witness Monday’s solar eclipse.Winners of the Chip and Putt competition.Honorary starter names are placed at the first tee.Scottie Scheffler, left, hits out of the bunker as Stewart Hagestad, right, hits out off the bunker on the 12th hole during a practice round.Tiger Woods looks at his tee shot on the third hole.Bryson DeChambeau, center, carries a Masters sign along the 13th fairway.Luke List watches his shot on the seventh hole.Danny Willett reacts after making a birdie.Collin Morikawa stretches as he walks along the 15th fairway. More

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      Ryder Cup: Home Team Gets a Course Advantage

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      This year the competition is in Rome, which means the European team controls the course setup and can adjust it to its players’ strengths.Max Homa returned from a scouting trip to the site of this week’s Ryder Cup in Rome incredulous with how the course had been set up.Not only were the fairways reduced in width where a tee shot might land, but the rough was grown so thick, high and gnarly that slightly errant shots could disappear.“One day someone hit it over a bunker, and we just lost it in the regular rough,” Homa said. “The whole first day I didn’t see a single ball from the rough hit the green.”The one exception: Justin Thomas hit a ball in the rough onto the green from 100 yards away, a distance where touring pros are thinking about getting the ball to within a few feet from the hole, not just on the putting surface.“The rough is borderline unplayable,” Homa said. “There’s going to be the highest, highest premium placed on being in the fairway, but they’re narrow.”In other words, this sounds like a typical setup for a Ryder Cup played in Europe, where the home team hasn’t lost the biennial competition in 30 years.Luke Donald playing his way out of a bunker at Marco Simone Golf & Country Club during the Italian Open in May.Andrew Redington/Getty ImagesThe Ryder Cup, which alternates between Europe and the United States, is the rare event in elite golf where the home team has an advantage, given that it gets to determine how the course will be played. At regular professional events, the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour work with local tournament directors to bring consistency from week to week. For the major championships, the governing bodies dictate how the courses will be set up, and typically lay them out in predictably difficult ways.But the Ryder Cup is different: What the captain of the home team says goes, right up until Sunday night of tournament week. And it’s codified in the Captains’ Agreement, which starts: “It is recognized that the home side has the opportunity to influence and direct the setup and preparation of the course for the Ryder Cup. It is hereby agreed that any such influence, direction and/or preparation will be limited to course architecture/course design, fairway widths, rough heights, green speed and firmness.”This year, there’s an added bit of home team advantage at Marco Simone Golf & Country Club, because very few of the U.S. players are familiar with the course under any conditions. Several players on the European squad have at least played the course when it hosted the Italian Open on the DP World Tour.In the hope of getting an understanding of how the course would be set up for the Ryder Cup, Zach Johnson, the U.S. captain, took the team on a scouting trip earlier this month.“This is a course that most if not all of our guys have not played,” Johnson said in an interview. “To get their feet on the ground of Marco Simone ahead of the Cup is very important. Having some practice time there can only make a very trying, different, sometimes difficult week of the Cup that much more manageable and comfortable.”Johnson, a five-time Ryder Cup player, knows the setup gambits both sides play. “Because it’s in Europe, there are tendencies their team seems to employ, with regard to course setup among other things,” he said. “We will utilize past experiences and data to make decisions.”The setup shenanigans ultimately equal out. One of the most famous setup tweaks came when Paul Azinger, captain of the 2008 U.S. squad, set up the course at Valhalla Golf Club in Louisville, Ky., to take advantage of his players’ ability to drive the ball farther off the tee than their European opponents.All the hazards — bunkers, much thicker rough — were in the areas where the shorter-hitting Europeans were likely to land the ball, while the rough past the bunkers was cut shorter to make it easier for the American side to escape from wayward drives.A view of the first tee grandstand for the 2023 Ryder Cup. After visiting Marco Simone, Max Homa noted that the rough on the course was so thick and high, errant shots could disappear. Naomi Baker/Getty ImagesIn 2016, at Hazeltine National Golf Club in Chaska, Minn., Davis Love III, the U.S. captain, put many pins in the middle of the greens, making it easy for the player, but less exciting to watch.The European side has historically gone with a setup that features narrow fairways and higher rough, under the premise that American golfers are less accurate, along with greens that are much slower than those typically found on the PGA Tour. This year was no different, Homa said.That leaves an obvious question: Why do the officials allow this?The Ryder Cup is jointly sanctioned by the P.G.A. of America and Ryder Cup Europe, which is a blend of three organizations in Britain and Europe. Officials at the P.G.A. of America and Ryder Cup Europe said the setup was fair and it could reward or penalize players on either team.Zach Johnson, the United States team captain, talking with reporters in Rome earlier this month. Johnson took his team on a scouting trip to the course to increase their familiarity with it. Andrew Medichini/Associated Press“You are looking for it to be tough, but fair, and provide an exciting challenge,” said David Garland, director of tour operations for Ryder Cup Europe.Kerry Haigh, chief championships officer at the P.G.A. of America, said: “The Ryder Cup is unlike our other championships in that the home captain has a lot of influence as to how the golf course is set up. Our aim is to make any Ryder Cup golf course setup fair for both teams.”Once play starts, it’s up to the officials to maintain the course as it was at the outset. “If you want six-inch rough, four-inch rough or two-inch rough, that’s what we’re trying to do,” Haigh said.Setup aside, both officials emphasized that this year’s course has some shorter holes that are meant to increase the excitement of the matches.“There are a couple of drivable par 4s, the fifth and the 16th, which are both over water,” Garland said. “The course was completely rebuilt a few years ago for the Ryder Cup with the drama of match play in mind.” More

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      Max Homa Takes His Star Turn at the U.S. Open

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      The California native had previously played well at Los Angeles Country Club, but first rounds at major tournaments haven’t always gone smoothly. On Thursday, he found his game for a two-under 68.For a decade now, Max Homa has had regrets.A gettable birdie on the Los Angeles Country Club’s sixth hole had eluded him. On No. 8, it took him three putts to find the cup.He finished that round in 2013 with a course-record 61. In his mind, his scorecard could have read — should have read — 59. The U.S. Open, which began Thursday at the course that still haunts one of its one-round masters a little, could allow him to cast just about all of that aside by Sunday night.If Homa can move beyond the past. If he can ratchet down his internal insistence on flawlessness when he plays golf’s most formidable tests. If he can tolerate the pressures and distractions and expectations of being a guy from Los Angeles County who is positioned to star at a U.S. Open just a few traffic nightmares away from the public course he grew up playing in Valencia.“I am good enough to win whatever I want — I’ve decided that,” Homa, who finished Thursday with a two-under-par 68, said in a recent interview. “I need to go out and do that.”Few players have been as good during this PGA Tour season. Homa has won twice, most recently in January at Torrey Pines, and had seven other top-10 finishes, including a runner-up showing at the Genesis Invitational, played at the nearby Riviera Country Club.But the major tournaments have been the scenes of stumbles. He tied for 43rd at the Masters Tournament and fared even worse at last month’s P.G.A. Championship. Last year, the P.G.A. Championship had been the site of his best major tournament outing, a tie for 13th.Homa was in the middle of his group with Scottie Scheffler at three under par and Collin Morikawa finishing at one under par.Harry How/Getty ImagesEntering this week’s Open, though, Homa saw the course as favorable to his game, given his particular skill at high shots and comfort, dating back a decade, with the four- and five-irons that L.A.C.C. can demand.No, he knew, his problem this week would probably not be technical or mechanical. His most pressing dilemma was to settle his mind well enough that he could play a major without punishing himself for this error or that one.“It just feels like at the majors when I’ve done a poor job, I feel like I’ve been trying to be perfect,” he said. “I don’t need to feel and play perfect to contend.”The approach worked well enough on Thursday, the day that has so often frustrated Homa on the biggest stages. His performance tied his best opening round at any major tournament; he first played one in 2013, when he missed the cut at the U.S. Open at Merion.In more familiar environs, Homa notched his first birdie on the third hole. At the sixth hole — a par-4 of 330 yards that can thwart players with a blind tee shot and a green that can feel remarkably tight for a region so familiar with sprawl — Homa made the birdie that did not happen during his fabled Pac-12 Championship round. A bogey at the seventh hole brought him back to one under, before he birdied No. 8, the other source of his could-have-been-better misery. He played the back nine to even par.When he stepped off the course early Thursday afternoon, he was near the top of the leaderboard but trailing Rickie Fowler, who shot a 62, the lowest single-round score in U.S. Open history, by six strokes. (Xander Schauffele soon after turned in the same score: 62, tying Branden Grace’s major tournament record from the 2017 British Open at Royal Birkdale.)Scottie Scheffler, the world’s top-ranked player and a member of Homa’s group, finished his round at three under par. Collin Morikawa, the two-time major tournament winner and another star from Southern California, was one over.Homa played his shot from the 11th tee during the first round.Harry How/Getty ImagesBryson DeChambeau, the 2020 U.S. Open winner, who was in another group, finished his day tied with Scheffler, Paul Barjon and Si Woo Kim.“There are going to be times that people hit it in the rough, and I think the person that’s going to win is going to hit the most fairways and going to make the most putts and also hit it on the greens,” said DeChambeau, who won the Open at Winged Foot the same year Homa went eight over par in the first round. “It’s a simple formula, obviously. But again, you have to execute it, right? That’s the whole point of a U.S. Open.”It is, DeChambeau added, supposed to be rigorous.Homa, of course, reveled in his Thursday even as he cautioned that it was much too early to declare anything close to a victory. He had a Thursday morning tee time, when the course was in the realm of soft, to start. By Friday afternoon, he warned, the place could be hellish.The U.S. Golf Association is hardly known for indulging easy Opens.The association’s devilish concoctions will be Friday’s problem, though. Thursday, with greens that were not exacting and a course receptive to strong iron play, was merely a start.“From the first tee to the last putt, I was very accepting and just looked at today as just a round of golf that will set me up toward the rest of the week,” Homa said after he had finished his round. “I think that they have the old cliché that you can’t win it the first day, you could lose it, and I lose a lot of these things on the first day.”Maybe something clicked these last few weeks as he contemplated how to manage the atmospherics that accompany playing a major tournament close to home.“There’s obviously, in ways, more pressure, but that’s coming from outside expectation that because a championship is in my backyard, quote-unquote, that I should now be a favorite to win,” he said in the interview. “On the inside, it’s just cool.”Homa signed autographs for a group of young fans during the practice round on Wednesday.Meg Oliphant for The New York TimesSo he was concentrating on the simple things, like smiling. What would happen, he wondered, if he treated preparations for the Open as if they were as pleasurable as those for an ordinary tour event with lower stakes?He could do nothing, he acknowledged, to combat what everyone else would think, the cheers that would rumble from the galleries, the groans that perhaps lurked, too.Carefree, or at least as carefree as a professional golfer can get at a U.S. Open, was the strategy.After all, he said, “I’m getting to do something I would have lost my mind about as a kid.”On Thursday afternoon, he recalled, that Pac-12 Championship in 2013 had felt like “the biggest thing in the world.”“This,” he added, “is quite a bit bigger.” More

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      At The U.S. Open, Golfers Are Focused On LIV’s Merger With PGA Tour

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      Golfers competing in Los Angeles this week were caught off guard by the news that the PGA Tour and LIV had planned to join forces. Now they have to try to win a major.Jon Rahm was at home last Tuesday, preparing coffee with his children underfoot, when the news arrived in a flood of text messages. Collin Morikawa glanced at Twitter and saw the word there. During breakfast at Michael Jordan’s private club in Florida, Brooks Koepka peered at a television and glimpsed a headline.What was clear Tuesday — one week after the PGA Tour said it intended to join forces with the Saudi wealth fund whose LIV Golf league had fractured the sport — was that the deal Rahm, Morikawa and Koepka heard about in real time had been golf’s version of a flash grenade: stunning, staggering, disorienting.And now, the effects lingering, they need to play the U.S. Open, a major tournament, which will begin Thursday at Los Angeles Country Club. Some escape, huh?“I think there’s more guys that are puzzled about what the future holds,” Jason Day, who had a stint as the world’s top-ranked player soon after he won the 2015 P.G.A. Championship, said in an interview by a practice putting green.“Some guys are emotional, I think, on both sides, which is very much understandable,” added Day, a PGA Tour fixture who turned professional in 2006. “I think we’ve just kind of got to let things settle and see where things are spread out on the table once we kind of know where things are progressing.”It is hardly an optimal outlook just before the third men’s major championship of the year. But it is a pervasive one, and it will assuredly aid the United States Golf Association’s preference for Opens that compel players to use their minds as much as their clubs.No Open in recent memory may demand more compartmentalization from the field.“There’s not really a part of your game in any major championship, let alone a U.S. Open, that can really be in doubt,” Jon Rahm said.Meg Oliphant for The New York Times“There’s a lot of not-answered questions,” Rahm, who opened the 2023 majors cycle with a victory at the Masters Tournament in April, said on Tuesday. “It’s tough when it’s the week before a major. Trying not to think about it as much as possible.”For many of the elite players who could contend for the trophy this weekend in Los Angeles, turbulence in their professional lives, aside from driving, chipping and putting, has been historically scarce.The PGA Tour was unchallenged as the world’s premier circuit for most of a period that began during Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency, and the players who kept their tour cards were rewarded handsomely for performing well in events from Torrey Pines in San Diego to Sea Pines in Hilton Head Island, S.C.LIV’s thunderous emergence last year proved a most severe test of the tour’s supremacy and cast a haze over professional golf. For the first time in generations, the PGA Tour was not the unrivaled signature show in American men’s golf.Now, with the PGA Tour and LIV poised to amass their moneymaking ventures inside one new company led by the tour commissioner and chaired by the Saudi wealth fund’s governor, the dimensions of professional golf are hazier, even for the sport’s biggest names.Will LIV exist in a year’s time? How might players who defected from the tour to LIV be allowed to return? Should golfers who remained devoted to the tour be compensated for their loyalty? And what about all of that money, said to be $100 million or more in some instances, that the wealth fund promised LIV golfers?The deal emerged from seven weeks of secret talks that began with a WhatsApp message on April 18, continued in London, Venice and San Francisco, and culminated in an announcement in New York last Tuesday. Much about the framework agreement, though, is unclear, with bankers and lawyers still rushing to fill in blanks on matters as weighty as asset valuation. Golf executives have suggested that months could pass before the deal closes, and some are privately acknowledging that the shoals before and beyond a closing may not be easy. (“I don’t have enough information about the deal yet to have an unfavorable or favorable view about it,” Patrick Cantlay, a player who is on the PGA Tour’s board, said on Tuesday.)In the meantime, some players suggested that they would simply settle for an answer, or answers, to their most essential questions.“We all want to know the why,” Morikawa said. “We’re so interested in the why. For us, for me right now, it’s just like what’s going to happen? I don’t know. But we always want to know that why answer — like, what’s the purpose behind it? But I think there’s so many different parties involved that there’s too many answers to really put it into one underlying umbrella.”Substantive answers are unlikely to emerge between now and Thursday’s first tee shots, leaving players to wonder and worry ahead of a tournament that can earn any one of them a spot in history.For Collin Morikawa, the question in the air on the merger seemed to be “Why?”Meg Oliphant for The New York Times“There’s not really a part of your game in any major championship, let alone a U.S. Open, that can really be in doubt,” Rahm said. “You’re going to need to access every single aspect of your game to win a championship like this. I think it becomes more of a mental factor, not overdoing it at home. You can never really replicate U.S. Open conditions.”Koepka, among the finest major tournament golfers ever, signaled that he had tried to excise any talk of the deal during his preparations for a course he played years ago, and primarily remembered for the Playboy Mansion’s presence on the back nine.“There’s four weeks a year I really care about and this is one of them and I want to play well, so I wasn’t going to waste any time on news that happened last week,” said Koepka, the LIV star who tied for second at the Masters in April and then won the P.G.A. Championship in May near Rochester, N.Y.Last Tuesday, he recalled, he saw the news and then went out to practice.The sport itself, after all, is to come center stage on Thursday, and the questions are not fading — or being answered — this week or next or the next.“There is potential of it being a really, really good thing for golf,” Day said. “But I feel like it’s too early to kind of even say anything like that because you just don’t know where things are going to fall.”For now, he said, “I’m trying to win a tournament.”On that much, PGA Tour and LIV golfers agree — once they stop thinking about last week. More

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      At the P.G.A. Championship, Justin Thomas Looks for Last Year’s Magic

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      The defending champion comes to Oak Hill without finishing first in any of the 20 events he has entered since claiming his second career major victory in 2022.PITTSFORD, N.Y. — Five years ago, when Justin Thomas came to the 2018 P.G.A. Championship as the defending champion, he was still cruising along as one of the top three players in the game and had spent a stint as the top-ranked men’s golfer in the world.At that moment, elite golf came easily to him.Thomas was 25 and the winner of one major championship. This week, Thomas once again returns to the P.G.A. Championship as the defending champion. But things are different now.Since his victory last year at the P.G.A. Championship in Tulsa, Okla., Thomas has endured the bumpy, maddening irregularity typical of any golf career (amateur or professional). He comes to the Oak Hill Country Club outside Rochester, N.Y., without finishing first in any of the 20 events he has entered since claiming his second career major victory in 2022.In April, he missed the cut at the Masters Tournament, which was a first for him. A month earlier, he stumbled to a tie for 60th at the Players Championship, an event he won two years ago.In 10 tournaments this year, he has just two top-10 finishes and five results outside the top 20. None of this is particularly unusual in the narrative of any lengthy professional golf career but that has not made it any easier for Thomas, whose father and grandfather were PGA teaching professionals and whose emotions are often readily apparent on the golf course.Always candid, Thomas conceded on Monday that his game was tattered enough at times in the last year that he teed up for some tournaments knowing, in the back of his mind, that he could not win. How must that feel for someone who was once rated the best golfer on the planet?“It’s terrible,” Thomas answered. “How I described it for a couple months is that I’ve never felt so far and so close at the same time. That’s a very hard thing to explain, and it’s also a very hard way to try to compete and win a golf tournament.”But Thomas does feel as if he might be battling his way out of the golfing darkness in recent weeks. He shot three rounds under par at this month’s Wells Fargo Championship on the PGA Tour to finish in a tie for 14th. He has learned a newfangled system of putting, which he said was complex but made reading the greens very simple (sounds like golf, right?). Nonetheless, he sees progress with his putting.Perhaps most important, he has allowed other golfers to help him, because the sport can be too hard to manage by yourself.Thomas, for example, played his 18-hole practice round on Monday with Max Homa, who is now the sixth-ranked player worldwide but who once appeared to have bungled his chance of making a living as a golfer — at about the same time Thomas was winning his first major title.In 2017, Homa lost his PGA Tour playing privileges after he missed the cut in 15 of 17 tournaments. In golf parlance, it is called losing your tour card, which is a gracious way of saying you were expelled from the top level of golf for shoddy play.The next year, Homa magically requalified for the tour, in part by improbably making birdies on each of his final four holes of a minor league tour golf event. Since then, Homa has won more than $21 million on the PGA Tour with two of his six tour victories coming in the last eight months.On Monday, as Thomas was attempting to explain how he was trying to fight his way back to the highest echelon of men’s golf — and how vital it was to remain optimistic instead of pouting — he used Homa as an example.With the Wanamaker Trophy after beating Will Zalatoris in a playoff in the final round of the P.G.A. Championship in 2022.Erik S Lesser/EPA, via Shutterstock“Nobody is in a better place than Max Homa out here,” Thomas said. “There’s no other top player in the world who’s gone through what he’s gone through in terms of having a tour card, losing your tour card, having to earn it back and then becoming one of the top players in the world.“I’ve talked to him about it before because he’s like, nobody out here really knows how bad it can be.”Thomas snickered. He was not going to allow himself to feel too badly about his recent slump. He is still the 13th-ranked golfer in the world. Or as he added: “It’s all relative. And it’s all about making the most of whatever situation you’re in.“That’s how you get out of it, by just playing your way out of it. You hit shots when you want to and make those putts when you need to, and then your confidence builds back up. The next thing you know, you don’t even remember what you were thinking in those times when you felt down.”But Thomas smiled. He is now a veteran at 30, not just getting started in the big time at 25. He knows he has chosen a mercurial vocation.“Like anything else in golf,” Thomas said, “it’s easier said than done.” More

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      2023 Masters: Rory McIlroy Looks to Make Up Ground as First Round Begins

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      Plus, N.C.A.A. champions will be invited to play the Masters, and Larry Mize and Sandy Lyle are preparing to say farewell to the tournament.AUGUSTA, Ga. — In the last five years, Rory McIlroy has spent 27 weeks ranked as the world’s best men’s golfer. He has earned nine PGA Tour victories, including at the Tour Championship and the Players Championship. He was on a Ryder Cup-winning team. In the final round of last year’s Masters Tournament, he carded an eight-under-par 64.But the last time he shot par or better in a Masters first round? April 5, 2018.2019: 73.2020: 75.2021: 76.2022: 73.At least the trend line is improving? It stands to reason that if McIlroy is to become the sixth modern player to achieve the career Grand Slam, he is very likely going to have to refigure out Thursdays at Augusta National Golf Club. (When he made his Masters debut in 2009, he shot a first-round par 72.)“It’s been tentative starts, not putting my foot on the gas early enough,” McIlroy said this week. “I’ve had a couple of bad nine holes that have sort of thrown me out of the tournament at times. So it’s sort of just like I’ve got all the ingredients to make the pie. It’s just putting all those ingredients in and setting the oven to the right temperature and letting it all sort of come to fruition. But I know that I’ve got everything there.”McIlroy is keenly aware that Augusta National, where he has lately played more than 80 holes of practice, is “a very difficult course to chase on.”“You start to fire at pins and short-siding yourself and you’re missing in the wrong spots, it’s hard to make up a lot of ground,” he said.Dottie Pepper, the CBS commentator and a two-time winner of women’s major championships, said she thought McIlroy had made some of the shifts necessary to contend, like switching putters and drivers. But Thursday, she said, may well reveal if it will be enough.“He has played himself out of the tournament year after year on Thursday, and all of a sudden, gets it in gear and it’s a gear too late,” she said. If he can sort out the first round, she predicted, “it could be a pretty spectacular movie come Saturday and Sunday.”McIlroy, who will play with Sam Burns and Tom Kim for the first two rounds, is scheduled to tee off at 1:48 p.m. Eastern time on Thursday.A new pathway into the Masters: the N.C.A.A. titleGordon Sargent, the reigning Division I men’s individual champion, was invited to this year’s field before Augusta National announced that N.C.A.A. title winners would be automatically invited next year.Andrew Redington/Getty ImagesAugusta National announced the entry criteria for the 2024 Masters, and although the standards did not change much for professionals, America’s male college golfers have a new incentive to win the N.C.A.A.’s Division I individual title: It now comes with a Masters invitation.“That is a major amateur championship, and I thought it was time that we acknowledged it,” Fred S. Ridley, Augusta National’s chairman, said of the N.C.A.A. competition. Gordon Sargent, a sophomore from Vanderbilt University who is the reigning Division I champion, is in the 88-man field this week, having received an invitation from tournament organizers before the new policy was announced.“It really goes back to our roots, and that is that Bobby Jones was the greatest amateur of all time,” Ridley said, speaking broadly about the place of amateurs at Augusta National. “He believed in the importance of amateurs in the Masters. I had the personal experience of enjoying that on three different occasions, and I can tell you that it changed my life.”Past N.C.A.A. individual champions include Bryson DeChambeau, Luke Donald, Max Homa, Phil Mickelson, Curtis Strange and Tiger Woods.Sargent, who is from Birmingham, Ala., has reveled in the experience, even if he has been mistaken around Augusta National for, say, a participant in the youth Drive, Chip and Putt competition.“I’m walking around, and no one is with me,” Sargent said. “I don’t even know if I had my badge with me — I think I probably still had it in the car or something. I was like, ‘Can I have player dining?’ They’re like, I don’t know, player?”He eventually made it inside.“It was pretty funny,” he said. “They’re like, ‘Where are your parents? Like, did they send you by yourself?’ I was like, ‘No, they’re coming in. I can travel by myself sometimes.’”Ridley also said Wednesday that the winner of the N.C.A.A.’s individual women’s championship will be invited to play in the Augusta National Women’s Amateur. Stanford’s Rose Zhang, the reigning Division I champion, won that tournament over the weekend.Two past champions are ending their Augusta National careers.Larry Mize, the 1987 Masters victor, is the only Augusta, Ga., native to win the tournament.David Cannon/Getty ImagesRidley, ever diplomatic, did not identify Larry Mize as a reason Greg Norman was not invited to this year’s Masters. But it was Mize who hit a brilliant chip — from 140 feet away — at No. 11 in 1987, making Norman a Masters runner-up for a second straight year.Mize, 64, has played every Masters since, and this one will be his last. It will be also be the final Masters for Sandy Lyle, 65, who won in 1988.“Club head speed lowers down without you even trying sometimes, and then the course is getting longer and I’m getting shorter,” Lyle said. “Not a good combination. The young ones are so good these days that I can’t really compete against that.”Mize, the only Augusta native ever to win the Masters, has spent part of the week doling out counsel to newcomers.“Trust your talent, believe in it, and just let it go,” said Mize, who added, “You’ve got to respect this golf course, but you can’t fear it. You can’t play in fear out there, or it’s going to be a long week.”Mize, Lyle suggested, struggled to get through his remarks at Tuesday’s private dinner for past champions. He had figured Mize would be at ease. He was not.“He clammed up like a clam shell,” Lyle said. “He just stood up there and had a glass of water and another glass of water.” As it turns out, Lyle said, “He’s tough enough to win a Masters, but when it comes to that kind of emotional thing, we’ve all got feelings.” More