timeHere are 20 ways to get into the Masters, from winning the Masters or any of the dozen other leading tournaments to breaking into the top 50 in the world rankings a week before the tournament begins.
The official listing will tell you that both Ludvig Åberg and Matthieu Pavon came the same way, namely Route 17, “the individual winner of a PGA Tour event that awards a full point distribution from the previous Masters to the current Masters” . Åberg won the RSM Classic at St Simons Island in November, and two months later Pavon won the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines. Farmers Insurance Open).
Just after 2pm on Friday, the two European golfers at the top of the leaderboard took to the first tee to pair up in the penultimate round. Neither had played in the Masters before, but Oberg was two under and four shots off the lead, while Pavin was one shot back.
However, in fact, up to this moment, the two men had taken completely different paths. At 24, Oberg is just about the hottest young golfer on tour. He turned pro 10 months ago, and in that time he has won two tournaments, been part of the Ryder Cup-winning team and earned as much money as Pavin, 31, has made over the past decade. The same amount of money. Oberg joined the tour immediately after graduating from Texas Tech University, where he was named the best amateur golfer in the world and became the second player in history to win the title, following Jon Rahm. ·Hogan Award winner, awarded to the best college player, twice in a row.
Pavin also won two top-level championships, but it took him 10 years to do so. He turned pro in 2013, played the Alpine Tour for two years, moved on to the Challenger Tour through Q school, and eventually played on the European Tour, where he had a lot of third-place finishes but never won anything . At the end of last year’s DP Tour Championship, he had four birdies in four holes to finally reach the PGA Tour. He is currently France’s best golfer and will be the face of the French game during the Olympics later this summer.
Pavin’s father, Michel, was a professional footballer who played as a midfielder for Toulouse and Bordeaux and later became the latter’s head coach. His mother, a golf instructor, brought Michelle to Augusta in 2009 as a 40th birthday present. Pavin tells a story about how she buried a one-euro coin next to the driving range here and told her son to come and help her dig it out sometime in the next decade. It took him 15 years, but he finally did it. Along the way he almost gave up playing because he kept making cracking noises, until his coach taught him to cross-grip the club to fix the problem.
He looks like a man who has had a bit of a life. He had a beard, a broken nose and chewed tees while waiting to play. He was busy on the court but didn’t get much of a chance to play. He hit a nice slice, putted smart and had “a huge pair of balls,” according to friend and pro Mike Lorenzo-Vera.
Oberg, on the other hand, is a tall, blond, sweatless Swede. The temperature under the sun was close to 30 degrees Celsius, but he didn’t seem to drop a single bead. He has the air of a man who has never made a tougher decision in his life than whether to add syrup to pancakes. His golf is young, brilliant, divine, and when he catches the ball cleanly, like he did on his second shot on Augusta’s extremely difficult fifth hole, you don’t even have to look at the ball Just know where it’s going to go. The sound will tell you everything you need.
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Even his poor shooting doesn’t seem to bother him. When Aberg finally made the mistake of hitting his tee shot into the woods on the long, uphill 8th, he arrived three minutes later and asked blithely, “Nobody got hurt?” with a half-eaten meal in hand. club sandwich. He finished slowly, thinking about what to do next. “A little 5-iron,” he decided. He hit the ball 200 yards into the fairway and used a follow-up shot to trim a few ivy leaves from a nearby tree. Five minutes later, he stood on a 13-foot birdie putt.
Oberg didn’t hit that shot, but he did score four more and briefly topped the leaderboard before bogeying three-putts on Nos. 14 and 15. Pavin, meanwhile, struggled in the Amen corner, missing shots at both the 11th and 12th. The difference is not the score. Oberg has the relaxed confidence of a young man, and he believes that he still has countless such days waiting for him. Pavin has the courage of an older pro who knows all too well how precious his ball is.
