They’re hot days and hard greens at this year’s Masters. The temperature was up in the mid-80s by lunchtime on Friday, and that was underneath the pine trees with a Georgia peach ice-cream sandwich. Out there on the other side of the ropes it looked a whole lot hotter again. The world’s best golfers sweated away chasing after Rory McIlroy’s lead in conditions which, they all agreed, could yet get as tough as they come at Augusta National. By midway through the afternoon McIlroy loomed over the tournament like the midday sun, and you worried the players who made the mistake of looking directly at the big white leaderboards around the grounds might burn their eyes.
A way up ahead of McIlroy, Justin Rose, Brooks Koepka and Jordan Spieth were all playing together in his shade, each doing their best to just stay within a short-iron’s distance of catching him. All of them, at one time or another in the past, had a claim to be the next best, or even, in Spieth and Koepka’s case, better than the man they were trailing. They have nine major victories between the three of them, not to mention six runners-up finishes at Augusta.
After an hour all three were bunched together on one under par, four shots off McIlroy’s overnight lead. Spieth had made up a shot with an improbable birdie at the 1st after lumping his opening drive into the fairway bunker, Rose and Koepka had dropped one at the same hole after three-putting from the fringe. Koepka then made two strokes back again with birdies at the 2nd and 3rd, which left all three in position to make a run at McIlroy’s lead. By the end of the day Rose was the only one of them who came close. He finished tied for second on five under when he walked off the course.
Koepka was two shots behind him, down near the foot of the first page of the leaderboard. He put a lot of his improvement after his 72 in the first round down to the fact that he finally noticed he’d had the wrong settings on his driver during the opening day’s play. Then there was Spieth, and, well, you needed to keep scrolling away to find him. He finished one over par, and was back among the field’s also-here-this-years. He and Rose had chosen identical outfits, blue cap, blue trousers and a pink shirt, but you could usually tell the difference between them just by looking for the one who was playing his second shots out of the pine straw.
While Spieth zigzagged around the course, Rose just kept plugging away along the fairways. After dropping that shot at the 1st, he covered the next five holes in even par, as if, regretting that early mistake, he was determined not to even attempt anything that might cause him to make a second one until he had steadied himself again. If you needed an idea of just how tough it was out there Rose, usually so imperturbable, ended up tossing his putter after he missed his birdie on the 4th. He tried to catch it, to be fair to him, but it slipped out of his grip.
Rose knows that it pays to be patient at Augusta, and he slowly regathered himself. His first birdie of the day came at the 7th, and after that they came all in a flurry around the turn, kickstarted, it seems, by a long back-and-forth with his caddie about exactly what sort of shot he should play at the 9th. “I really wanted to hit the nine iron in there, and the wind wasn’t fitting that club, and I just didn’t really want to hit the eight iron in there because I felt like it was going to skip through the green,” he explained. “So I was really trying to bide my time and wait for that little moment where I could commit to the nine iron. It was a great moment where I was able to get it quite close to the hole and make birdie.”
He followed it with a pair of spectacular approach shots at the 10th and 11th, both of them to within a few feet of the pin. There was a bogey at the 12th, but he made it back at the 15th.
Given Rose has finished runner-up here in three different years, and lost two playoffs doing it, there are a lot of people pulling for him. There have been so many sentimental bets, at comparatively long odds, that the only people who don’t want to see him get it done are the bookmakers. “Of course I want to win this tournament. I don’t really need to try any harder; know what I mean? I think trying harder ain’t going to help me. So that’s probably the dance I’m doing with myself. I know the intrinsic motivation is there. It’s about execution.”
It’s not going to get any easier over the weekend. “Someone said it’s the first time in 15 years there’s no rain during the four days of the tournament,” Rose said. “So that makes it a little bit different for sure. It feels more like a cricket pitch than a golf course out here.”
