Many are recognisable faces, from NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell to former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. And all can lay claim to being part of one of the most exclusive clubs in the US. In short, it’s good to be a Green Jacket. But this year, it won’t be so bad walking around with a Red Jacket there instead. Yep, a Red Jacket. One of these bad boys:

So what’s up with this loud fashion look? Well, as you can probably tell from the crest, the jackets are part of a marketing campaign by Fireball. The makers of the beverage are handing out these custom-made coats — as well as a $1,000 stipend — to 10 patrons attending the tournament.

The jackets come with a Masters-green liner, monogrammed buttons, and a patch on the inside that allows people to claim free drinks for the rest of their lives. Not too shabby.

We can only see a couple possible snags to this aggressive guerrilla marketing campaign. For one, if it’s really hot weather at Augusta National this April, those might get uncomfortable. For another, we’ll have to see how Augusta National reacts to this promo. Keep in mind there was a rumour a few years ago that the club was enforcing a list of banned phrases. Anyway, if you’re bold enough to wear this bold fashion look, there’s a possibility you could end up on the long list of people who have been put in Augusta National’s penalty box. Because as golf fans are well aware, Augusta National take its rules seriously and isn’t afraid to ban people.

But if you manage to get paid $1K to wear a Red Jacket at Augusta, maybe just keep an extra lookout for the Green Jackets — and security — come tournament week.

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By Alex Myers
If ever there were a Masters to wear a green jacket to, it would be 2020’s November edition. The average low temperature in Augusta, Ga., dips into the 40s during that month, making an extra layer (or two) a must. But it sounds like we might see fewer of these coveted coats during this year’s tournament than ever before.

According to the Nov. 3 episode of The Shotgun Shot with Brendan Porath and Andy Johnson, Augusta National Golf Club members won’t be wearing their green jackets around the course.”This year with no fans, they don’t want to stick out like sore thumbs,” Johnson says on the podcast after getting a tip.

That rumoured decision may seem strange, but it actually makes sense when looking at the history of these garments, which were first worn by members in 1937—and first given out to the winner of the Masters beginning with Sam Snead in 1949.

In David Owen’s 1999 book, “The Making of the Masters,” he writes that Augusta National co-founder Clifford Roberts “always referred to spectators as patrons, a term that perfectly expressed his conception of the relationship between ticket buyers and the tournament they financed.”

To that end, members wore there green jackets during the Masters so patrons with questions could easily identify them to get accurate information about the club or the tournament. So with no spectators allowed on the grounds this year, that same need isn’t there—not that ANGC members are quite as approachable as they were in the early, humbler days of the tournament.

In any event, the winner will still get a green jacket at the conclusion of the next week’s tournament. And based on the early weather forecast, if members can’t don theirs to the presentation, they should probably bring some backup outerwear.

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By Alex Myers
As if the fame and fortune that come with winning the Masters isn’t enough, the champ gets to remind everyone else he won for the next 12 months by taking the green jacket off Augusta National Golf Club property. And you never know where you’ll see the coveted coat turn up.

In recent years, Phil Mickelson donned his while picking up doughnuts at a Krispy Kreme drive-thru, Danny Willett wore it to Wimbledon, and Sergio Garcia danced in it at his own wedding reception. And now we know at least one place where Tiger Woods will wear it after winning his fifth Masters on Sunday.

“I’m excited about show‑and‑tell at school,” Woods said to close out his lengthy post-round press conference while his kids, Sam and Charlie, sat in the back of the room.

Before that, Woods was asked several questions about the significance of winning a major in front of both of them for the first time. Woods’ last major win came at the 2008 U.S. Open when Sam was still an infant.

“I think that ‑‑ I think ‑‑ well, I hope, I hope they are proud of me,” Woods said. “I hope they are proud of their dad. So I’ve been very blessed to have two great kids, and just to have them here to see this and witness this, you know, I’ve tried to describe ‑‑ they have never been to Augusta National, so try and describe the slopes and everything. I said, this is a pretty unique event. This is very special. Really hope you guys are able to come. So it all worked out and here they are.”

He won’t have to describe what the green jacket is like to them anymore, either. And now it sounds like their friends will find out what it’s like in person, too. We’re guessing there won’t be many kids staying home from school that day.

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By John Strege
The long arm of Augusta National, apparently not to be reckoned with, recently extended all the way to Cornwall, a small fishing village near the southern tip of England, on the English Channel, the Daily Mail reported.

On the last weekend of the year, every year since 1992, “two dozen pub pals,” as the Daily Mail explained it, tee it up at Mullion Golf Club in what was called the Coverack Masters. The winner received a green jacket, “presented in a pub over a pint or two on a cold December day,” the Cornwall News reported.

Note the past tense.

Augusta National, according to the Daily Mail and other news outlets, sent a letter to the club, informing it that was breaching copyrights for using the terms “Masters” and “green jacket” in the context of a golf tournament.

“Club secretary Ray Griffiths is said to have passed the letter on to Coverack Masters organiser Ryan Retallack,” the Daily Mail story said.

Retallack and Augusta National declined to comment, the story said, though the tournament apparently will undergo a name change.

As for now, on Mullion Golf Club’s 2019 calendar, for Saturday, Dec. 28, it simply is referred to as “Coverack Golf Event,” not the Coverack Masters, as it was called on previous calendars.

Maybe had it awarded a green coat instead of a green jacket.

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By Joel Beall
Patrick Reed won more than just the green jacket with his Masters’ triumph.

The 27-year-old sits atop the 2018 U.S. Ryder Cup team standings after his Augusta National feats. With 6321 points to his name, he has locked up on a spot on the American squad; out of the automatic berths on the 2016 club, Zach Johnson had the lowest point total at 4359, while only Jordan Spieth and Dustin Johnson finished the qualifying period with more points than Reed currently owns. Reed has made the last four U.S. national teams and racked up a team-best 3.5 points at the 2016 Ryder Cup.

Behind Reed are Justin Thomas, Dustin Johnson and Jordan Spieth, their spots also essentially secured via point accumulation. All three were at the 2017 Presidents Cup at Liberty National, although Thomas was not selected for the ‘16 team at Hazeltine.

Bubba Watson, Rickie Fowler, Brooks Koepka and Phil Mickelson are Nos. 5 through 8. Mickelson has played in the last 11 Ryder Cup squads, none of which came by captain’s picks. Only Arnold Palmer and Billy Casper have more U.S. points in the event’s history than Mickelson’s 21.5 total.

Tiger Woods, with just six events to his credit, sits in 28th.

The top eight in the point standings after the PGA Championship automatically qualify for the biennial event, held at Le Golf National outside of Paris. Three captain’s picks will be named after the Dell Technologies Championship, the second leg of the FedEx Cup Playoffs, with the final selection coming after the BMW Championship.

Jim Furyk is this year’s American captain and will be assisted by Woods and Presidents Cup captain Steve Stricker. Though the U.S. defeated the Europeans in resounding fashion in 2016, the Americans have not won on foreign soil in 25 years.

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Where, oh where, is Dick Young when I need him? Only yesterday I wrote that it would be wonderful if anyone other than Patrick Reed won the Masters on Sunday. And what happens? Reed is heroic. Reed is unshakeable. Reed clanks when he walks. And now Patrick Reed, an imperfect man, has won golf’s grandest event by playing perfectly when it meant the most.

First, Reed gave Rory McIlroy no breathing room. Then, with Jordan Spieth on fire, Reed stood in the heat and refused to melt. When Rickie Fowler’s 18th hole birdie forced Reed to come up that long, long hill and make a par with golf immortality at stake, Reed left his second in a bad spot—20 feet above the hole—only to do the perfect work of leaving himself a dead-straight uphill three-footer to win.

Reed’s Sunday 71 left him a shot ahead of Fowler, who finished with a 67, and two ahead of Spieth, whose 64, with nine birdies, set off roars all day around Augusta National. McIlroy, needing to win to complete the career Grand Slam, missed a two-footer for eagle at the second hole—it would have drawn him even with Reed, who began the day three shots up—and the poor guy could never make a putt that mattered, trudging in with a 74.

At 15 under par for the tournament, Reed missed the Masters 72-hole scoring record by three strokes. Had he saved a couple shots Sunday, he’d have become the first player ever to score four straight rounds in the 60s in a Masters. At 27, he is a six-time winner on the PGA Tour. In a series of Ryder Cup successes, he has been such a raging, rampaging, in-your-Euro-face competitor that some folks, speaking ironically, have called him what they imagine he would like to be called, Captain America.

He now has a better title: Masters champion. And he earned it not only with earlier rounds of 69, 66, and 67 but with good work on Sunday at the 12th hole, where many Masters dreamers have been awakened by nightmares. Jordan Spieth was three holes ahead doing his Jordan Spieth thing. At the 12th, Reed was facing a 25-foot putt.

A roar from the 15th suggested, correctly as it turned out, that Spieth had made birdie there and stood at 13 under for the tournament, at last tied for the lead with Reed. For those observers with a bias against Reed—I’ll explain mine shortly—the moment gave hope that we would be spared seeing Sergio Garcia, last year’s winner, drape a green jacket over a pink shirt, Reed’s choice for the most important round of his life.

And what does Reed do at the 12th?

J.D. Cuban

Made the putt. Kept his lead. “Turning point,” he said later. “To make that one seemed to kind of give that momentum and just really that belief going into the last couple that no matter what the throw at me, I can do this and have a chance.” He felt comfortable then because he had the lead and the back nine’s two par 5s lay ahead—on which he had made two eagles the day before.

My bias? Stories of Reed’s troubles at two colleges—kicked off one team, despised by another—seemed credible. In a game of honour, it doesn’t get much worse. More than once, too, he seemed to be cocky without good reason, as on a day four years ago. That day he had won for the third time, a fine achievement, but he had yet to play in a major championship and here’s how he summed up his career at age 24:

“I just don’t see a lot of guys that have done that, besides Tiger Woods, of course, and, you know, the other legends of the game. It’s just one of those little things. I believe in myself and—especially with how hard I’ve worked—I’m one of the top five players in the world.”

And now, the proud owner of a green jacket, he heard a reporter ask, “Looking back, do you regret in any way saying you were top five, making that comment, orl did you just validate it today?”

Reed said, “I don’t ever regret anything I really say. … I feel like I’ve played some golf that I need to play in order to get to where I want to be, and that’s to be the best golfer in the world. You know, but the way you’re going to do that is perform in these big events and to win these big events.”

So, an imperfect guy played perfectly, and somehow I am reminded of an old golf joke. An angel and a devil are playing. The devil curses a missed putt. The angel warns him not to take God’s name in vain. The devil does it twice more. The third time, lightning strikes the angel. And a voice comes down from the heavens, “Damn, I missed.”

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By Shane Ryan
AUSTIN — Kyle Stanley just accomplished what Shubhankar Sharma, Dylan Frittelli and Xander Schauffele could not—he actually held on to a lead against Sergio Garcia. The Spaniard is finally beaten in the WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play, but he didn’t go easy. Not in the group stages, where he trailed each match as late as the 11th hole, and came back to win all three. And not Saturday, where he turned a 3-down deficit into 1-down with five holes to play, and nearly made Stanley the fourth straight victim of a late comeback.

It was Sergio’s short game that finally let him down on the 14th, when he and Stanley both drove over the green. Stanley’s pitch was solid, stopping six feet from the hole, but Sergio misjudged his own effort and ended up 20 feet away. Stanley made his birdie to win the hole, and though Sergio won the 15th to return to 1 down, another iffy pitch on 16 left him with an 11-foot birdie putt that he missed by inches. When Stanley buried his 10-footer, the match—and Garcia’s tournament—was effectively over.

This weekend was not exactly a unique situation for Sergio, who has a long career of playing close matches that come down to the wire. He’s been successful, too—it would require about 10 hours of research to find out how many true back-nine comebacks he’s had, but with a little shorthand, we can establish without much difficulty how he fares in close matches. In singles duels that went to the 18th hole or beyond, Sergio has amassed a record of 14-8-1. For what it’s worth, his career record in the same scenario in pairs matches is 12-8-1.  

What is it that makes Sergio so adept in these situations? It would be easy to reach the simple conclusion that he’s a clutch player, but before last year’s career-defining Masters win, he was known as anything but a reliable pressure performer—at least in stroke play events. I caught up with him in the parking lot after his loss to Stanley this afternoon, and posed the question two different ways. Unfortunately, the answers to these mysteries sometimes don’t sound especially profound, and often it’s because the truth itself isn’t very profound.

“No, it’s quite simple,” he said. “You just keep at it. You just keep pushing and keep believing that you can do it.”

Okay, but is there something special about his particular style that makes him more resilient than many of his peers?

“No, don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I don’t enjoy that. I’d rather be 2- or 3-up on the front and play the back like I’ve been playing it, and win 5 and 4, but unfortunately I didn’t manage to do it all week.”

So he didn’t quite see what I was after, and it’s never easy to badger a player after he’s just lost—two questions was about the extent of what I could get away with before he and his agent and the other reporters would start to look at me with more than just a hint of annoyance. Nor could I ask Kyle Stanley, who like most other winners in the morning session declined all media appearances in favor of eating and preparing for his quarterfinal round against Justin Thomas. But even if the atmosphere wasn’t conducive to that type of discussion, it may be that the answer he gave was about as deep as it gets. Sergio is a natural fighter, and it may even be that he unconsciously gravitates toward dramatic situations. The flip slide of his skill under pressure in match play singles is his inability to make things easy, and we’ve seen the consequences of that in the majors for the better part of two decades. Maybe the minimized damage of a bad hole in match play is a sort of comfort—a disaster can only cost you a hole, not a tournament, and therefore it’s easier to maintain a sense of optimism and even aggression.

That said, Sergio broke through the final barrier by winning the Masters last season, and that removes a significant pressure blockage from his brain. Never again will he have to listen to a Ryder Cup crowd heckle him for never winning a slam, and never again will we have to wonder on the back nine if he’s about to blow another opportunity. It should give him a measure of freedom in 2018, and as we’ve seen over the past month, his form is solid. Top-ten finishes at the Valspar and WGC-Mexico, a win in Singapore, and now a gritty fight to make the knockout stages in Austin all bode well for Augusta. Tiger Woods was the last repeat winner at the Masters, 16 years ago, but though Sergio has walked in the predictive shadow of favorites like Phil, Bubba, Spieth, Rory, and Tiger himself, there’s a better chance than many think he’ll win his second green jacket next month.

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The 38-year-old Spaniard captured the ‘Breakthrough of the Year’ gong at the Laureus World Sport Awards, 18 years after winning the World Newcomer of the Year title.

It was a long but worthwhile wait for Garcia who went on from winning the 2017 Omega Dubai Desert Classic to claim his breakthrough major at Augusta National before rounding out his season with victory at the Andalucia Valderrama Masters.

As the video link in this tweet from Garcia shows, he actually received the silverware, from Ryder Cup pal Ian Poulter, during January’s Desert Classic.

Tremendous honor to win another @LaureusSport award after the one in 2000! Such an special award, thanks to @TheMasters win and the great year I had. #Laureus18 #Breakthroughoftheyear https://t.co/dMPQQxwYQI

— Sergio Garcia (@TheSergioGarcia) February 27, 2018

A nicely kept secret from El Niño who is otherwise engaged in this week’s WGC-Mexico Championship.

Related: WGC-Mexico first round tee-times and viewing guide

“The Masters was a dream come true for me, amazing victory, and to receive another Laureus Award trophy, after receiving one in 2000, is a tremendous honour,” Garcia said.

For the record, tennis superstars Roger Federer (Sportsman and Comeback), Serena Williams (Sportswoman), F1’s Merceses-AMG Petronas (Team) and athlete Edwin Moses (Lifetime Achievement) won the other major aways in Monaco.

Garcia tees it up in the opening round in Mexico at 10.03pm on Thursday with Race to Dubai champion Tommy Fleetwood and Alex Noren.

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The 28-year-old missed last year’s Omega Dubai Desert Classic with a rib injury that would eventually force him to take a prolonged winter break following October’s Alfred Dunhill Links Championship.

But rounds of 69-66-65 and 70 last week has his comeback ahead of schedule as he prepares to peg it up for a tilt at a record-tying third Dallah trophy.

“Yeah, it was above expectations for me to be honest,” McIlroy said of the Desert Swing opener.

“I thought if I could have shot four rounds under par and just saw some good, positive signs in my game, I would have went away happy, played four rounds and felt no ill effects of the week.

“So yeah, I did exceed expectations. I guess that has changed the way I view this week a little bit because of how I played last week. I know that my game is in good enough shape to contend and try to win.

“I feel like I’ve got a bit of a spring back in in my step because of what happened last week and very confident in myself. Again, it’s a golf course I know how to get around and I know how to shoot good scores on. Looking forward to that, yeah.”

The early-season momentum is indeed matched by historic happiness at Emirates G.C. The Northern Irishman claimed his first European Tour victory here in 2009 and has not finished outside the top 10 in six visits since, with a second win coming in 2015.

“I have a lot of good memories here at the Majlis Course, first win,” he said. “Played as an amateur in 2007 and I remember after that week I got to world No.1 amateur.

“Won here twice. Dubai is a place that I’ve gotten to know very well. I’ve gotten to know a lot of the people very well here. You know, it’s a place I love to come back to.

“I’m looking forward to getting going again. I missed it last year and I missed having a chance to win and having a chance to compete.

“It’s always one of the highlights of the year for me to come and play here with the memories that I have. Looking forward to getting back out there on Thursday and trying to give myself another chance to win.”

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