Matt Fitzpatrick still has the notebook he used at his first Masters tournament in 2014, in a pile of them at home. During a practice round that year, Justin Rose gave him a little piece of advice: never go flag hunting on the first hole. “Hit it centre of the green and leave yourself 20 feet every time, you’re never going to go wrong,” Fitzpatrick recalls, speaking at Augusta this week. “That’s still in my book.”
Fitzpatrick just missed the cut, aged 19, and he’s been on a journey to understand Augusta’s quirks ever since. Experience is the key that unlocks Augusta National, as a player begins to understand each green’s intricacies, each knuckle, each wrinkle, each innocent crater that carries the ball away into some impossible valley. There is a reason no debutant has won since Fuzzy Zoeller in 1979, nearly half a century ago.
