Welcome to the GQ Sports Cheat Sheet: your just-deep-enough guide to the biggest sports events on the planet.
The particulars
It’s the Masters! The most prestigious (and prettiest) event on the golf calendar. The first round kicks off today, and we’ll have our winner by Sunday afternoon. The locale is steamy Augusta, Georgia—a relatively humdrum town two hours east of Atlanta that, thanks to golfing legend Bobby Jones, club founder Clifford Roberts, and former president Dwight Eisenhower (yes), has for decades served as the gravitational center of the golf universe.
How to watch
If you’ve still got cable, ESPN takes Thursday and Friday, while CBS (cue Jim Nantz’s “Hello, friends”) gets the weekend. Cord-cutters have reason to celebrate: ESPN+ will have plenty of supplementary action, while the Masters app is widely regarded as the paragon of the form. (More on that in a bit.)
Should I try to go to this in-person at some point?
You absolutely should. It’s like Disneyland for C-suite executives, only it’s way more fun than that sounds.
The favorite
That would be Scottie Scheffler, world number one—and winner of last year’s Masters, his first. Repeating will be a tough task, though. Exactly three golfers have gone back-to-back at Augusta: Jack Nicklaus, Nick Faldo, and an old friend named…
The underdog
Eldrick “Tiger” Woods. It might seem strange to call a five-time Masters winner an underdog, but his frightening 2021 car crash has made simply competing worth cheering for. His appearance at the tournament last year marked his first major tournament since the wreck,
Hipster pick
That’s got to be Max Homa, who’s spent the last year or so going from “insanely good golf podcast guest” to “Kobe-style competition-killing alpha competitor.” The California-born chiller is still in search of his first major—and while the US Open, at Los Angeles Country Club in June, might be the most poetic, we’re pretty sure he’d be cool with a win in Georgia before then.
Sam Schube
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