Skylar Savarin

Every year in the second week of April, America rejoices in the best sporting event in the nation: the Masters. While the world evolves and changes consistently, the Masters is a constant. Millions of people celebrate the smells of trimmed grass, the overabundance of egg salad and the tune of that graceful piano that reaches the soul every morning broadcast. All of this is to witness exceptional talent and beauty in golf. This year, Scottie Scheffler took home the green jacket (given to the winner of the Masters) for the second time in three years.
Despite the recent golf controversy in the past few years with the emergence of LIV in competition with the PGA Tour, the Masters is separate from the quarrel. The Masters club is responsible for the invitations, so players like Bryson DeChambeau and Cam Smith who defected from the PGA to LIV appeared ready to fight. At the Masters, a cut is implemented to limit the player field after the first 36 holes. This year, over 29 players missed the cut at six over par, including prominent names in golf such as Dustin Johnson, Justin Thomas and Jordan Speith. All three players have many majors between their legacies, with both Johnson and Speith winning a green jacket in the past.
Scottie Scheffler emerged into the Masters as the No. 1 golfer in the world and was favored by Vegas to take home the green jacket. Although DeChambeau fired out a strong seven-under-par performance in round one, Scheffler’s consistently was the unbeatable poison. Shooting six-under in the first round, followed by shooting even, one-under and four-under were mainly uncontested by everyone else. By the end of the tournament, Scheffler had shot 11-under through 72 holes of golf and was four strokes ahead of second place. By now, Scheffler has cemented himself in history as the best golfer in the world since prime Tiger Woods. As of April 22, Scheffler has recently won again at the RBC Heritage Tournament, consistently demonstrating that no other golfer is even close to his game. At this point, the second-best player in the world is Scottie Scheffler without his beard.
The 24-year-old Swedish golfer Ludvig Aberg came in second place at the Masters, shooting seven-under and creating a little pressure for the champion. Initially shooting one-over in the first round, Aberg turned on the heat and shot eight-under for the next three rounds. Recently joining the PGA Tour just last year, Aberg’s impact at a young age is dutifully noted, as fans are patiently waiting for his first major win.
To contrast young success, at the ripe age of 48, Tiger Woods — commonly debated as the greatest golfer of all time — made his 24th straight cut at the Masters despite several setbacks in recent years. Despite squeezing through the cut, Tiger shot five-over par and placed 60th in the tournament. Unfortunately for the great game of golf, Tiger’s age and previous back injuries have fully caught up. It’s time that he hangs up the cleats, and walks off into the sunset in golf history as a legend.
The Masters is among the four majors in golf along with the Open Championship, the U.S. Open and the PGA Championship), though it is by far the most iconic. Started in 1934 by legendary golfer Bobby Jones and investment banker Clifford Jones, the tournament is played annually at the legendary Augusta National Course in Georgia. Widely considered a golf course architectural masterpiece, the Master’s course was designed to be challenging for experts but not impossible for casuals. As the course has evolved throughout the years, the formidable design has meant to fortune the bold who seize an opportunity with an understanding of the risks. Although golf and fairness are difficult to correlate, the oddly simplistic yet amazingly complex system of the Masters is the perfect analogy to the unexplainable we experience regularly.
The annual Masters tournament is poetic. Tradition and evolution clash for one weekend in April, held together by pimento cheese sandwiches and cheap beer, to create one of the nation’s greatest pastimes. History has seen a Master’s champion every year, yet that magical, unexplainable feeling of watching every shot on crisp fairways transmits an uncontainable, incurable disease: golf fever.