Bubba Golf

This was not a Masters about which we will regale our grandchildren in the decades to come, but strange as it feels to say, it might be a champion warranting such reverence.  I've always taken great pleasure in watching him play, because he's such a throwback to the days of yore when players shaped their shots and played by feel.  But I always thought he was too high-strung to hold up under this kind of pressure, but clearly I was quite wrong on that subject.  Now we have to wait and see how good he is or can really be, but two Masters in three years can't be an accident.

Shackelford saves your humble blogger several hours work with this first-rate clipping service:

Doug Ferguson, AP:

Bubba Watson's second Masters title was nothing like the green jacket he won two years ago.

David Westin, Augusta Chronicle:

Bubba Watson didn’t need a miracle shot from the pines in sudden death to win his second Mas­ters Tournament in three years. The only round in the 60s among the contenders Sunday was enough.

Steve DiMeglio, USA Today:

Bubba Watson will be the first to tell you he has issues, plenty of them, and he'll readily admit he's on the jittery side and self-diagnosed with attention deficit disorder.

Ron Sirak, GolfDigest.com:

Bubba Watson has all the shots -- and more. Sometimes when you watch him on the range it seems as if he is genetically incapable of hitting a golf ball straight.

Bob Harig, ESPN.com:

He swings out of his shoes with a pink-shafted driver, his golf ball traveling distances that are awed and admired. Bubba Golf, it is called, often with disbelief and wonder.

If Shack keeps up this good work, he just might develop a following.  And kudos to him for the green background during Masters week, a very nice touch indeed.

For some reason, Jason Sobel calls Bubba The Grinch Who Stole the Masters: 

The Grinch Who Stole the Masters is a gentle soul. He’s sensitive. He worries. He cries. Oh, he cries all the time. He’s temperamental, too. He can go from groovy to grumpy in a splash, then right back to groovy again. When he’s happy, he’s really happy, and when he’s unhappy, well, he’s really unhappy.

This time, though, he wasn’t in such a giving mood. For everyone who tingles with anticipation for 364 days in hopes of a dazzling back-nine Masters finish, he robbed this place of the roars. He took away your excitement. He turned the greatest day on the annual golf calendar into a two-hour snoozefest before dinner. 

The Grinch is named Gerry Lester Watson, Jr. – but you can call him Bubba.

No question this one was more of a grind on the back nine, but they dazzled us pretty good on the front nine, no?

Matthew Ruddy has a post on Bubba's tee shot on the 13th hole:

The shot that won the Masters for Bubba Watson wasn't the four-inch tap in on the last hole. It was a 360-yard tree-skimming parabola off the 13th tee. Watson had just taken a three-shot lead over Jordan Spieth, and the creek running alongside the 13th (and in front of the green) was probably only thing that could keep Watson from a second coat fitting.

That was a staggeringly amazing tee shot, but in no way did it win the Masters.  And just a reminder, the poo-bahs at ANGC won't let us have a blimp, on-course reporter or Shot Tracker, so those of us watching on television really had little idea of the trajectory and risk of the shot.

Watson could have played it safe and stayed to the right side of the hole, but he hit his best -- and most aggressive -- tee shot of the week, dramatically cutting the dogleg and ending up 144 yards from the flag, in the middle of the fairway. Spieth would later say that when the ball came off the face of Watson's driver, it looked like was headed out of bounds 70 yards left of the hole. Watson hit a 9-iron safely onto the green, made par and sucked all the drama out of the back nine. He cruised to a three-shot victory.

OK, not completely at their mercy, as 144 yards in means he cut his drive some 366 yards.  But as for the first sentence in that graph, I'm not actually sure Bubba could do that.

And Bubba being Bubba, Ryan Herrington confirms that Bubba went to The Waffle House early Monday morning:

Two mystery questions the photo doesn't solve: 

1) Was he wearing his green jacket? (Because that would have made it awesomer.)

2) Why weren't the hash browns on the house?

I do hope he picked up the checks for others in the restaurant.  One endearing thing about Bubba is that he is perfectly comfortable with who he is.

One last Bubba note, I happened to run across this image of the Golf World cover from two years ago:

True that.

Per Dave Shedloski, Jordan Spieth knows he had it in his hands, leading with a great Pete Carril story:

After his 16th-seeded Princeton basketball team narrowly missed registering a titanic upset over No. 1 Georgetown in the first-round of the 1989 NCAA Tournament, coach Pete Carril huddled together his dejected players and told them simply: “As bad as you feel, feeling this bad is better than never getting a chance to feel this bad."

Shackelford in a post at The Loop maintains that it was the sequence at Nos. 12 and 13 that sealed the deal:

Spieth hitting his third into the 12th hole.

Bubba Watson and Jordan Spieth agreed. The complexion of the 2014 Masters changed at the eighth and ninth holes, when Watson's birdies and Spieth's bogey led to a four-stroke swing. 

Still, anyone watching Sunday knows Spieth was still very much in the hunt until the series of events played out the 12th and 13th holes. First it was Spieth dunking his tee shot into Rae's Creek on the former. Then it was Watson laying into his drive on the 13th. These two holes were the true turning point of the final round.

We could argue this for hours and never agree.  The sequence at Nos. 8 and 9 resulted in a four-shot swing, so I'm hard-pressed to look elsewhere for where it got away from the young lad.  And you have to acknowledge his resilience in bouncing back with the birdie at No. 10 and salvaging bogey after rinsing his tee ball at No. 12.

For one who predicted that any Masters rookies in contention would ultimately be undermined by rookie mistakes, you'd think I'd be patting myself on the back.  Instead I feel the need to take Spieth over my knee and scream in his ear, how could you make THOSE mistakes?  Every golfer on the planet knows you take your tee ball on No. 12 over the bunker and who amongst us doesn't have the image of Greg Norman's ball spinning back off the ninth green seared into his memory?  Not even a rookie should make those mistakes...

Spieth also made a few other mistakes that puzzled me.  For instance, most right-handed players hit three-wood off the tee on No. 13, a club that is far easier to draw.  I don't remember what he did on Thursday and Friday, but on both days of the weekend he stubbornly pulled driver and launched it way right. He made birdie on Saturday, but it really hurt his chances on Sunday.  And on the Par-5 eighth he hit three-wood off the tee, but then tried to draw a three wood into the green on his second, a really low-percentage shot.  If you're gonna go conservative off the tee, you need to be playing chess and commit to a conservative second shot to a comfortable wedge yardage, an entirely reasonable play with a two-shot lead.  

I may have some more Masters notes of a humorous and/or arcane nature later in the day, but wanted to get these thoughts up at a reasonable hour of the morning after.