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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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      To Win the British Open, You Have to Go Through the Road Hole

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      Some say the 17th hole on the Old Course at St. Andrews is the hardest in the world. Many championship dreams have died there.Forty-four summers ago, Tommy Nakajima of Japan was in the hunt during the third round of the 1978 British Open. On the Old Course at St. Andrews — where the tournament will be staged once again this week — Nakajima knocked his second shot onto the putting surface at No. 17, a par 4 known as the Road Hole. Mission accomplished.Nakajima would now likely make a par, or bogey at the worst, on one of the most intimidating holes in professional golf.His putt, however, made its way down the wrong slope, taking an unfortunate left turn into a pot bunker with remarkably high side walls. But his troubles were just beginning. From there, Nakajima needed four shots to get the ball onto the green. He ended up recording a nine on the hole, ruining any real hopes of winning the claret jug. He would finish the tournament in a tie for 17th.Tommy Nakajima’s putt found its way into the pot bunker beside the Road Hole during the 1978 British Open, ruining any real hopes of winning the competition.Peter Dazeley/Getty ImagesNakajima’s playing partner in that third round was Tom Weiskopf, who had won the 1973 British Open.Before Nakajima hit his first putt, Weiskopf said to his caddie, “He better be careful,” Weiskopf recalled.Nakajima’s collapse, as crushing as it was, has hardly been the only calamity on the Road Hole, so named because it’s next to a road.“There are a lot of things that can go wrong on this hole,” said Nick Price, who won the British Open in 1994. “It’s like walking through a minefield.”In 1984, Tom Watson found the road. He was aiming to win the tournament for the third consecutive time. Such a victory would be his sixth title in the Open; he would tie the record held by the British golfer Harry Vardon. However, Watson’s dream would soon be history.In 1995, Italy’s Costantino Rocca, in a four-hole playoff against John Daly, needed three shots to get out of the bunker. That was it for him.The first challenge for players at No. 17 — which was lengthened in 2010 to 495 yards from 455 — is to navigate a treacherous blind tee shot, meaning players can’t see the landing area on the fairway because the view is blocked by a green shed on the right.The preferred landing spot is on the right side of the fairway, but if the ball veers too far right, it might end up out of bounds. Players will typically set their target, depending on the wind, for one of the letters on a sign on the shed that reads: Old Course Hotel. Sometimes, balls hit the hotel itself.No wonder a lot of golfers play it safe by aiming left, but that approach isn’t foolproof, either.“There are a lot of things that can go wrong on this hole,” Nick Price, the winner of the 1994 British Open, said of the 17th hole. “It’s like walking through a minefield.”Phil Sheldon/Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesIf you go into the rough on the left, “you’ve got a terrible angle to the pin and a terrible angle to the front edge of the green,” said David Graham, a two-time major champion.Wherever that first shot ends up, the next shot is just as daunting.“The last thing you want to do is go on the road,” Tony Jacklin, who won the 1969 Open at Royal Lytham & St. Annes Golf Club in England. “The best you can expect to do with a second shot is go for the front part of the green. I don’t care how in command of your game you are. You can’t guarantee hitting that green in two.”As Tom Watson knows too well.During the 1984 Open, Watson was tied with Seve Ballesteros when he sent his drive at 17 to the right. He hit it far enough to clear the wall of the hotel, but the ball wound up on a steep slope.“The shot you want to play to that green is a low-running shot,” Watson said. “You can’t do that from a severe upslope.”He flew his two-iron approach about 30 yards to the right, the ball coming to a rest on the road close to a stone wall. With an abbreviated backswing, Watson managed to get the ball to within 30 feet of the flagstick. He could still save par.Before he putted, however, Watson recalled, “All of a sudden, I hear this roar at the 18th hole. I look up and there’s Seve with his fist up in the air. I said, ‘Uh-oh, I’ve got to make this putt and birdie the last hole.’” When he didn’t make the putt, Watson knew it was over. He lost by two shots and never won another claret jug.Watson, who played in the Open at St. Andrews on eight occasions, strongly advises against challenging the back or middle part of the green.“If you really play it smart,” he explained, “you never try to hit it more than 20 or 30 feet onto the surface of the green. Try to two-putt for your par and get out of there.”Or maybe not go for the green at all.In the 1990 Open, which he won, Nick Faldo laid up short of the putting surface on 17 in three of the four days, including the final round. Leading by five shots and 215 yards away, he saw no reason to take any chances. Faldo walked away from the hole with a bogey. Earlier in that same round, Peter Jacobsen had needed three strokes to move the ball 30 yards from the rough at No. 17, recording an eight.In 1984, Ballesteros seemed to approach the hole as if it were a par 5, hoping to make no worse than a bogey. Price, the 1994 British Open winner, expressed a similar sentiment.“If it was really into the wind, I’d lay up with a four or three iron and then chip up,” Price said. “If I made 4, I made 4. I wasn’t going to make six, seven or eight, that’s for sure.”Players who strive to avoid the road over the green must also be wary of the pot bunker to the hole’s left.Andrew Milligan/PA Wire, via Associated PressThat the hole comes so late in the round, with a championship possibly at stake, makes the challenge even more formidable. In 2015, the last time the Open was held at St. Andrews, the Road Hole ranked as the most difficult hole, with the players averaging 4.655 strokes.Over the course of the entire tournament, there were only nine birdies on 17, while there were 217 bogeys and 32 double bogeys there.“It’s nearly impossible to make a birdie even once in four days,” Graham, the two-time major champion, said. “If you do, it’s a long putt.”Bernard Darwin, the English golf writer and accomplished amateur, perhaps put in best in describing the elusive green on the Road Hole. He wrote that it “lies between a greedy little bunker on one side and a brutally hard road on the other. Many like it, most respect it, and all fear it.” More

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      Masters Invitations Endure as a Signature Detail for the Tournament

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      Follow our live coverage of the first round of the Masters.AUGUSTA, Ga. — The invitations have come his way for half a century, and Ben Crenshaw, now 70 years old, has kept each and every one.“The Board of Governors of the Augusta National Golf Club,” the handsome cards invariably begin, “cordially invites you to participate” in the year’s Masters Tournament.“I’m elated every time,” Crenshaw, who won the Masters in 1984 and 1995, said in an interview. “Every player will tell you that. They get that formal invitation, and it’s there before you, and it’s, ‘Wow, I’m qualified to play in the event.’”Few competitions in sports openly cultivate and savor mystique like the Masters, whose opening round will be played on Thursday. There are the green jackets for winners and Augusta National members, the Tuesday night dinners for past champions and the cheap pimento cheese sandwiches for fans, the manicured rectitude of a course splendid with azaleas and dogwoods and largely, proudly devoid of modern life’s conveniences and intrusions.One of the tournament’s throwback rituals, though, begins months before the field faces Augusta National’s punishing greens, and it usually unfolds in private: the mailing and receipt of invitations to the men who have qualified for the Masters.Augusta, quintessentially Southern, asks the golfers to R.S.V.P. to the invitations, which it has sent since the tournament’s start in 1934.The 2019 R.S.V.P. sent by Tiger Woods, who won the Masters that year.“Good style is always right at the time, good taste is always in taste,” said Gary Player, who won nine major tournaments, including three at Augusta National. “When you get that invitation, if you see it, it’s so exquisitely done with such class. Everything in business is negotiable except quality, and that embraces it to the hilt.”Player, one of the honorary starters for this year’s tournament, added in an interview in January: “I still look at it and I come back to the same conclusion: I’m just overwhelmed at how they do things with class.”The Masters has always been an invitational event, even before it was called the Masters, though its appeal and prestige have swelled since the tournament’s early days. The opportunity to play today is hardly a surprise — Augusta National publishes a roster of clear-cut ways to qualify, from being a previous Masters champion to finishing in the top four at the previous year’s P.G.A. Championship, though it has the authority to ask others to compete. But players aren’t always aware that the storied tournament comes with a physical invitation.Patrick Reed, who earned one of Augusta National’s green jackets in 2018, recalled that he had been tipped off to keep an eye on the mail for his first invitation after he won the Wyndham Championship, but that it was still “unbelievable” when the envelope from the club near the Savannah River arrived ahead of the 2014 Masters. He kept that first invitation, as well as the one from the year after he won.“Both of them are ones I’m going to save and cherish forever,” he said at a news conference in 2019, even though he did not know where his other invitations had wound up over the years. He added, “Just the chills when you’re opening it up, it’s just an awesome experience — even though it’s just a piece of paper that has your invitation on it.”Neither Crenshaw nor Player could recall any other tournament with quite such a habit, or, at least, not one quite so polished. (“I don’t remember getting a letter from the R&A,” Player, who has long described the British Open as his favorite tournament, mused wryly of that event’s organizer.) Many in golf, including Crenshaw, ascribe the enduring formality to Bobby Jones, an Augusta National founder who died in 1971.“To me, it reflects what Bob Jones always retained on nearly everything that’s at Augusta: It’s proper, it has a certain amount of grace to it, there’s a touch of humility,” Crenshaw said. “It’s beautifully done, and the font has never changed, and the seal is on it. It’s the way they do things.”Gary Player sometimes sent warm holiday cards.If the invitations are almost entirely unchanged across the generations, the responses are still evolving. Many of today’s players reply by email. But for decades, pen and paper were the way of Augusta National, and the club recently allowed The New York Times to review a selection of the written responses it holds in its archives — pages of golf history, to be sure, but also glimpses of players’ personalities and changing fortunes.“It will be a pleasure to be there,” Herman Keiser wrote in cursive on “Herman Keiser Golf Pro” letterhead in February 1946, about two months before he won the Masters, his only major victory.“It is with pleasure that I accept your invitation to play in the Masters Tournament,” Claude Harmon said in a Western Union telegram the next year. “It is always a treat. Thanks.”Sam Snead used the letterhead of Miami’s Hotel Dallas Park — players over the years also corresponded from the Sands Hotel in Tucson, Ariz., and a Holiday Inn in San Ysidro, Calif. — to write in 1949 that he would “accept with pleasure,” while Lloyd Mangrum simply declared his intention to play in 1955 on the invitation itself and returned it to Augusta.Tom Watson, Jack Nicklaus and Nick Faldo opted for brief, if warm, letters.Clockwise from top left: Nick Faldo in 1988; Arnold Palmer in 2003; Doug Ford in 1957; Tiger Woods in 1995. Arnold Palmer’s wife often appeared to prepare his replies, Player sent one on a Christmas card and Crenshaw, in 1995, accepted as he wondered what José María Olazábal would choose for the menu at the Champions Dinner. That same year, someone wrote an acceptance and noted that it was from “Eldrick ‘Tiger’ Woods,” who had just turned 19. Then there is Woods’s distinctive signature on a piece of paper that could have been bought in a department store stationery aisle.When Woods told Fred S. Ridley, Augusta National’s chairman, in 2019 that he would play the Masters, the letterhead, emblazoned with the logo and the name of one of his corporate ventures, reflected his new station in life. (Woods’s agent did not respond to inquiries about who wrote the 1995 letter.)Some replies, like Palmer’s, felt formulaic, though he reflected in a 2003 letter that he anticipated “seeing my many friends at Augusta National during the week.” Others said they sought variety in how they crafted their responses, even as they were aware of what Augusta really wanted — simply an acceptance or regrets.“I tried to change it up a little bit,” Crenshaw said, “but they are just needing a response.”This year, in one way or another, 91 golfers accepted the invitation. More

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      Why Are There More Successful Older Golfers Today?

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      They have learned to stay fit and play smarter. And the British Open seems to be their fountain of youth.From the 18th fairway in the final group of the British Open in 2009, Tom Watson, the five-time Open champion, hit a shot that flew right at the pin. For a moment, it looked like Watson, then age 59, would win the tournament for a record sixth time and become the oldest player to win a major championship. More