AUGUSTA, Ga. — Golf is famously a game of inches.
And as Tyrrell Hatton learned the hard way on Friday afternoon at the Masters, it is sometimes also a game of feet.
Hatton was in the thick of contention as he stared down a 20-footer for birdie on the 17th hole on Friday evening. He was 6 under for the tournament, and just two shots off the mark set by Justin Rose. When his birdie putt nestled up a foot from the hole, a par was such a foregone conclusion that CBS broadcaster Ian Baker-Finch said as much out loud.
“That’ll be a par for him,” Baker-Finch said matter-of-factly.
But then something shocking happened. Hatton stepped up to his 1-foot tap-in, pulled back his putter … and missed, watching in disbelief as the ball horseshoed around the hole and deposited itself some eight feet from its home.
Hatton looked on in disbelief. But impressively, the famously hot-headed player managed to keep his temper, rolling in the comebacker to save a brutal — but not tournament-ending — bogey.
After the round ended, he was asked about the experience, and did not mince words.
“Yeah, I mean, 17 is just like ridiculous,” Hatton said. “Obviously tapping in there, and [the ball hits] a little mark and goes straight left and lips out left and all of a sudden you look stupid.”
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Indeed, it was an egg-on-face moment for Hatton, but he seemed to suggest the situation was slightly more nuanced. Were the course conditions at least partially responsible for the miss?
“Well, I mean, it’s late in the day and there was rain last night, and when the sun gets to a certain height, you can kind of see more of the blemishes,” he said. “Yeah, that green had a ton of footprints, and it’s just one of those things that you’re never really going to get around. Sometimes they bobble in for you, and obviously that time it bobbled a miss for me.”
Augusta National is unquestionably the most pristine golf course in the world, but even utterly perfect golf courses can suffer blemishes during a 95-player golf tournament. Hatton’s early-late draw meant he got the best of the golf course conditions on Thursday, but it also meant he had to deal with the wear and tear coming down the stretch on Friday.
It helps to have the golf gods smiling in your favor — on Friday at Augusta National, though, Tyrrell Hatton most definitely did not.
“I don’t really know what to say about that. When you hit a decent putt from a foot, you expect it to go in,” he said. “Yeah, 17 is the one that kind of hurts the most, really.”
