Justin Rose’s eagle chip-in with 3-wood is the Shot of the Day
Written by Paul Hodowanic
AUGUSTA, Ga. – There’s an unquantifiable weight that comes with a green jacket. The weight is present as golfers chase it – a burden felt by the game’s best to reach a status that cements them among the legends of the game. A Masters champion. It’s an anvil that has weighed down some of the greatest stars of the sport, snakebitten when they step on these historic fairways. Rory McIlroy. Ernie Els. Tom Weiskopf. Greg Norman.
The cruel twist of fate? For many, finally winning the Masters doesn’t free you. You reach the highest mountain peak the sport has to offer, and you’re greeted with a new challenge: living up to it, validating the greatness you sustained for those four April days.
If Justin Rose won the Masters in 2017, when he finished runner-up in a playoff to Sergio Garcia, he believes that weight would’ve followed him. Now he’s convinced he would enjoy it, unburdened by any questions of “what’s next?”
See Rose, 44, has entered a sweet spot that few golfers reach. He’s simultaneously a few years too old to garner any additional expectations a win may bring, but young enough to rightly believe Scottie Scheffler could slip a coat over his shoulders on Sunday night. You don’t have to squint to imagine it, either.
After a Thursday-best 65, Rose backed it up with a 71 to take the clubhouse lead midway through Friday. The likes of Rory McIlroy, Scottie Scheffler and Bryson DeChambeau are right on his tail.
“That’s the company that I expect to keep,” Rose said.
They are all two rounds away from Masters immortality. And they are all chasing Rose.
Rose is already one of the best players without a green jacket. He’s making his 20th appearance, first arriving as a 23-year-old Englishman in 2003, sporting jet-black hair, a chiseled jawline and an eagle-eyed stare. The hair has grayed, his face weathered from the years of traveling the circus that is pro golf, but the stare of a man convinced he can contend has remained. Rose has six times finished in the top-10, with a pair of runners-up (he finished T2 in 2015, along with the close call in ‘17). As Rose said Thursday, “I feel like I’ve played well enough to win this tournament. I just feel like I don’t have the jacket to prove it.”
Rose hasn’t dwelled on that fact. It’s proof, not scar tissue. A win is possible. History is evidence. And Friday’s round was the latest testimony. Rose battled his swing at times, but missed in the right places, got up-and-down more times than he didn’t, and limited the damage when a big number was possible. It was the round of a man befitting Rose’s Masters resume. He birdied the two par 5s on the first nine, offsetting a lone bogey at the fifth, and converted on several pivotal par saves after wayward approach shots.
He timed his best iron shots of the day well, stuffing his approach to 4 feet on the perilous par-3 12th and 7 feet at the par-3 16th. He converted both for birdies, which helped buoy the score with a pair of dropped shots at 14 and 17.
“Sometimes it’s hard to follow a low round with another one,” Rose said. “Just the nature of it sometimes. But I feel like if you’re playing good golf, you’re playing good golf, you know. And I feel like I wasn’t pinned to yesterday’s round and I wasn’t pinned to the leaderboard and I wasn’t pinned to leading this golf tournament. Yeah, I was pretty focused on the job at hand.”
Rose’s mind hasn’t wandered to the bigger picture, but it’s fair for others to. His place in the sport is secure. He won the 2013 U.S. Open at Merion, the first Englishman to win the U.S. Open since Tony Jacklin in 1970. Three years later, Rose won a gold medal in golf’s return to the Olympics. He reached No. 1 in the world. He won the FedExCup in 2018.
Those accomplishments have been a useful distraction to this fact; twelve years is a long time to wait for major No. 2. The list of players who have gone decades between majors is slim. To even entertain the possibility means you’re part of an elite club of longevity and excellence. What would a second major mean? Rose is past the segment of his career where he expects another one to be coming, but he’s far away from believing No. 2 isn’t possible.
That’s getting hard to say for the rest of the peers in Rose’s generation. The list of those who are still playing at an admirable level has been whittled down to a small few. There’s Adam Scott and Sergio Garcia and not much else. Both Scott and Garcia are stuck at one major, like Rose, but neither is anywhere to be found on this leaderboard or any recent major championship. The last top-six for Scott or Garcia in a major came in 2018. Rose’s was last spring when he finished T6 at the PGA Championship. Then, he very nearly claimed that long-awaited major at Royal Troon last July, finishing runner-up to Xander Schauffele by two. Rose said afterward he was “gutted,” but with time has absorbed it and grown from it, as further proof that his good golf is good enough.
That belief will be put through a stern test this weekend on the most famous golf course in history, and a loaded leaderboard chasing him. But unlike the rest, Rose feels free.
