Redmond: 2026 Masters – The Last Bastion of Sports Civility

The 90th Masters gets underway tomorrow at 7:25 am with the ceremonial tee shots of Jack Nicklaus, Tom Watson, and Gary Player.

The clubs will then be taken out of their hands, and they’ll be shuffled off to a breakfast of bran flakes and Metamucil. They never get to play the second shots. I think they should let them play until they are tuckered out. The weather will be perfect throughout the week, which means the course will be firm and fast.

Expect the best players in the world to be in contention down the stretch. Exacting shots require the highest of skill, so the best players should win. It’s not difficult to understand. It will be tough to top last year’s Masters as Rory McIlroy prevailed in a playoff over Justin Rose to win his first green jacket.

His collapse to his knees on the 18th green will be remembered for years. No athlete in the history of sports ever had more pressure than Rory that Sunday at Augusta. In fact, I’d posit no man has ever had more pressure in the annals of history. Maybe Dwight Eisenhower on D-Day, but what did Ike really do? The planning was done. He just sat in a war room and got updates. Rory had to execute shots with millions watching. You may be thinking, what about Neal Armstrong?

That’s a good call, but the moon landing was fairly straightforward, and a tad overdramatized in movies… he wasn’t all that close to a crash-landing in the West Crater.

That was Hollywood script writing. He had to land the Eagle, but it had become rote at that point with all the training—difficulty level only a 7/10. Rory’s shot around the tree on 15 had to start 50 yards right of the pin and draw back onto the green—difficulty level 9/10. What about Wellington at Waterloo, you might ask. Yes, Wellington had a lot of pressure on him that day, but you have to remember this was in the days before social media, so his blunders wouldn’t have been all over Instagram.

And he had Blucher to shoulder a lot of the responsibility.

Here are some of the interesting story lines people have been talking about this week:

Crowd behavior—we saw the lowest of the low at Bethpage for the 2025 Ryder Cup—complete degeneracy from the New Yorkers. I told you it was coming, and it was as bad as I’d predicted. What some of the European players should have done is get their close friends to go out and round up a group of 50 guys (friends of friends, etc.) and pay for all their trip expenses (tickets, dinners, drinks, hotels, etc.). They would then walk around with the player, roughing up anyone who got out of line in the crowd.

Nothing major- just an intimidation factor. Any of the golfers who bore the brunt of the abuse (McIlroy, Matt Fitzpatrick, Robert MacIntyre) could have remedied the situation for about 500k tops. That’s money they could find under their couch cushions. I tried to tell them to do this, but they didn’t listen. Probably because I have no access to any of them, and they don’t follow me on Twitter. Oh well. We won’t see this terrible behavior at the Masters, where Southern gentility still prevails.

Gary Woodland- what an amazing story. He came back from successful brain surgery and won the Houston Open two weeks ago. Gary has been in the news as he now suffers from PTSD from the surgery. The PTSD manifests itself by making Gary extremely uncomfortable in crowds, which can be a real problem as a professional golfer. He feels like he could be attacked from behind at any point. Amazing resilience to fight through it and win in Houston. He will be a fan favorite this week. His concerns about fan attacks are not all that far-fetched. Gunter Parch was a German guy who absolutely loved German tennis player Steffi Graf. So much so that he wanted to take out her rival, Monica Seles, who was dominating the women’s game at that point. On a changeover during a tournament in Hamburg, he jumped over the railings and stabbed Monica in the back until he was stopped and arrested. Seles was out for two years, and Graf won 6 major tennis tournaments in that time.

Errrr, mission accomplished, Gunter. It’s sort of strange that Seles was out that long because the knife penetration wasn’t that deep, so I’d imagine the respite was due to PTSD. Frank Gifford was out for over 2 years after being demolished on a hit by Chuck Bednarik. I wonder if that length of hiatus had to do with PTSD? Of course, he couldn’t tell anyone back then because they wouldn’t have known what he meant or cared.

Who will win the Masters?

It will be the top players in the world or some guys that just happen to be playing at a high level. The winner will come from this group:

Scheffler, McIlroy, Rahm, Fitzpatrick, Cam Young, MacIntyre, or Bryson DeChambeau.