AUGUSTA, GEORGIA | Masters history is filled with great duels and charges and collapses. With leaders making heroic shots ingrained in our collective memories and calamitous mistakes you can’t unsee. With moments that make you shout in wonder and cry out in anguish. With roars and groans.
In an historic 89th Masters Tournament, we had the rarest pleasure of all – seeing all of those things delivered by the same man on the same Sunday.
Rory McIlroy’s green-jacket triumph was the zaniest madcap adventure any champion has ever taken us on, filled with wonder and horror and terror and elation seemingly all at once. From day one he rose and fell and rose and soared until he found his way into the lead on Sunday. Then he fell and rose and soared and plummeted and rose and fell and finally rose again one last time above Justin Rose only to crumble to his knees in an emotional release of 11 years of pent-up frustration.
Making history isn’t easy, and McIlroy sure didn’t make it easy on himself. But as we all say when we steal a par from the jaws of double bogey, they don’t draw pictures on the scorecard. They don’t draw pictures on the green jacket, and this one is McIlroy’s forever and his place in the pantheon of golf’s major giants is secured.
It sure was something to see.
BIRDIE: Rory McIlroy. How does somebody who mis-hits the easiest little pitch on 13 into the creek or the wedge into a bunker when he absolutely has to hit it just anywhere on the green on 18 pull off those shots from the trees on 5 and 7 or the towering daggers under intense pressure he delivered on 15, 17 and 18 in the playoff? Rory is a wondrous riddle.
DOUBLE BOGEY: McIlroy. Craig Stadler won the 1982 Masters in spite of making three doubles during the week. McIlroy is the first to do it with four doubles – two Thursday and two more Sunday – that all seemed to signal failure that he refused to succumb to this time.
BIRDIE: Justin Rose. At 44 years old and nearly 12 years removed from winning the 2013 U.S. Open, Rose has now finished runner-up in consecutive majors and three times at the Masters. His brilliant 66 in spite of four bogeys on Sunday caught McIlroy. His 20-footer for birdie to end regulation was clutch, but his short miss on 17 ultimately doomed him. Rose has now held at least a share of the Masters lead after 18 holes (2004, ’07, ’08, ’21 and ’25), 36 (2004, ’21 and ’25), 54 (2017) and 72 (2017 and ’25) without winning.
TRIPLE BOGEY: Ludvig Åberg. The young Swede finished runner-up in his major debut at Augusta last year and held a three-way share of the lead with McIlroy and Rose with three to play only to miss his birdie chance on 16 and stumble home with a bogey-triple finish. He sure looks like the next “sure thing” to win a green jacket someday.
EAGLE: Patrick Reed. The 2018 champion lurked under the radar all week with four under-par rounds and pounced to claim solo third with a hole-out eagle on 17 Sunday. He analyzed his opening 71 as “piss poor” or he otherwise might be hosting another Champions Dinner.
BIRDIE: Scottie Scheffler. Despite never having his best stuff all week, the world No. 1 still made a valiant title defense, finishing fourth, and might have featured more prominently if he hadn’t got the worst side of the draw that challenged him with the most difficult conditions late Friday.
BOGEY: Bryson DeChambeau. Next to McIlroy, DeChambeau is the player most impossible to take your eyes off of. He’s equal parts dazzling and mystifying. He riles up the patrons (a feature Rose didn’t seem particularly fond of) and his “rematch” with Pinehurst victim Rory in the last group Sunday was the most anticipated matchup since the last time two multiple major winners were paired together on Sunday in 1996 (Nick Faldo and Greg Norman). The showdown fizzled (and Bryson pouted that Rory didn’t talk to him), but it was great theater.
OTHER: Nick Dunlap. Nobody wants to invoke the name Charlie Kunkle, who holds the official record for the highest score turned in at the Masters (a 95 in 1956). Dunlap’s opening 90 included a triple, four doubles and seven bogeys. Kudos to him for bouncing back with a second-round 71.
BIRDIE: Max Homa. He’s been mostly lost in the wilderness since his career-best major finish (T3) in last year’s Masters, falling from No. 9 to No. 81 in the world. The affable Californian found enough spark in his Augusta return to finish T12 and guarantee another Masters start next year.
BOGEY: Matt McCarty. The poster boy for the FedEx Fall event winners whose automatic invites might be in peril was high on the leaderboard until his Saturday 75. But it’s his finishing bogey on Sunday that cost him a guaranteed top-12 return in 2026.
BIRDIE: Bernhard and Freddie. Langer made his final Masters start at age 67 and his bogey on 18 Friday kept him from breaking the record as the oldest player to make the cut. It only came to that because his “perfect shot” with a wedge on 15 spun back into the water and led to a double bogey. Couples, 65, already owns that senior cut record from when he was 63½, but he couldn’t make the birdie he needed on 18 and missed the weekend as well.
BOGEY: José Luis Ballester. Some things can’t possibly be lost in translation, and one of those things should be that you don’t stop along the tributary of Rae’s Creek on 13 and urinate into the water during the first round of the Masters. The U.S. Amateur winner from Spain did just that and drew applause from patrons when he finished. It’s safe to say the green jackets didn’t share the same enthusiasm.
BIRDIE: Poppy McIlroy. Before her famous dad could take any meaningful putts in the Masters, his 4-year-old daughter lit up the Par-3 Contest with perhaps the putt of the week – a 30-footer down the hill on the ninth that took about 20 seconds to make its way into the cup while Shane Lowry and Rory coached it on and erupted in celebration. Lowry’s daughter, Iris, scooped Poppy up in her arms.
BIRDIE: Tom Watson’s revenge. Eleven years after Phil Mickelson threw his Ryder Cup captain under the bus in a loser’s press conference for the ages at Gleneagles that ushered in the infamous “Task Force” that still hasn’t helped the U.S. team win on the road. On Thursday morning after the honorary starters convened, Watson got to return the favor and scold Mickelson and his fellow LIV defectors for “making their choice” and being banished from the PGA Tour.
DOUBLE BIRDIE: Jack Nicklaus. Piling on, he was asked if he’s surprised Mickelson is still competing at this level while Tiger Woods is not: “I don’t know what level Phil is competing at. I guess he’s still playing. He’s playing the LIV tour, is he? I don’t know if he’s playing or not. I don’t know, you never see that anymore.”
PAR: Nicklaus Miller. Destiny can be cruel. Johnny Miller’s grandson had the boys’ 12-13 division of the Drive, Chip & Putt National Finals all but sewn up before Hudson Justus swooped in and buried both putts on the 18th green to clip Miller by 1 point. Shades of 1975 Masters when namesake Jack Nicklaus made the big putt on 16 while grandpa Miller missed his birdie chance on 18.
BIRDIE: The little things. When Emma Xu, the girls’ 7-9 third-place finisher in the Drive, Chip & Putt, checked out of the merchandise building carrying her trophy, every one of the checkout workers stopped and delivered sustained applause as Xu walked out of the building.
BOGEY: Suzy Whaley. The proud North Carolina golf team alum caddied for niece and Duke grad Phoebe Brinker in the Augusta National Women’s Amateur. Asked about carrying around that Duke Blue Devils golf bag for two days, the first female president of the PGA of America (who in 2003 qualified to compete in the PGA Tour’s Greater Hartford Open) said: “It’s horrible; HORRIBLE! I would only do this for family.”
BIRDIE: Eugenio Chacarra. The ex-LIV golfer and newly minted DP World Tour member after winning last month’s Hero Indian Open came to Augusta to watch his little sister Carolina Lopez-Chacarra compete at Augusta National and finish ninth at the ANWA. “I needed to have motivation every morning when I wake up to work toward those goals … like one day being here and teeing it up here at Augusta National,” he said. “I just thought the best thing was for me to get away from [LIV] and I’m glad I did that. I’m way more happy and way more motivated.”