Every golfer on the planet, no matter his or her skill level, dreams of one day playing a round or two of golf at the Augusta National course in Georgia. It is, to many players and fans, golfing Mecca. The course is an awe inspiring and beautiful setting for one of the world’s greatest sporting events, the PGA Masters Tournament.
This year the greatest players in the game are all primed and ready to take on the challenge of the Augusta National course with its narrow tree lined fairways and those perfectly manicured greens that seem to get quicker and slicker with each passing year. It’s pretty much every golfers ideal dream golf course.
Tiger Woods will be there. He has only won the Masters four times. Woods has shown signs of returning to his winning ways this season with huge crowds following him around every time he swings a club. That must be both exciting and a bit maddening, especially for a guy who named his boat ‘Privacy’. But he hangs in there, pitching and putting with the best of them and is currently listed as one of the top favorites to win the 2019 Masters with odds of 14-1.
Oddly enough, excuse the pun, Rory McElroy, who has never won at Augusta, is listed as the favorite this year at 7-1 with Dustin Johnston at 10-1 and Justin Rose at 12-1 rounding out the top four at this point.
Rory took home a fat first place prize from the Players Championship back in mid March. The $12,500,000 purse at TPC Sawgrass yielded almost $2,000,000 to McElroy. Not bad for four days work.
As we have seen so many times before, golf is a game where any of the top players, and sometimes an unknown, can ‘get hot’ on any given day and pull away from the field while the rest just watch and wonder. That’s why PGA Golf is such a difficult sport to wager on and such a fascinating sport to watch. You just never know who is going to have the hot putter that day.
Jordan Spieth won at Augusta in 2015 when he was only 22 years old. He also won the U.S. Open and came in second for the PGA Championship that year. Although Jordan has been in a bit of a slump of late, he is still listed at 20-1 and a lot of folks would like to see him make a run at The Masters and another Green Jacket this year.
One of the most interesting new players showing up this season has been Bryson DeChambeau, the guy who wears the funny hat. Bryson and his team have broken down the game of golf into a scientific study like no one else on the course, and he has had quite a lot of success with his cutting edge methodology. DeChambeau is also listed at 20-1 along with Spieth and Tommy Fleetwood. The field is tight.
All of the ‘big boys’ will be there at Augusta this year. We will be treated to four beautiful days of championship golf on one of the worlds’ most beautiful venues featuring those guys plus Justin Thomas, Phil Mickelson, Matt Kuchar, Bubba Watson, Brooks Koepka, Rickey Fowler, Jon Rahm and Jason Day among others. It should be a good one. Enjoy!
