It was raining when Larry Mize came to the 18th on Saturday morning and if that wasn’t exactly how he had pictured it when he was thinking about the end of his 120th, and final, round here in the Masters, he may reflect it was for the best anyway. If nothing else it meant you couldn’t quite tell whether or not those were tears he was brushing off as he stood in the tee box.
Mize watched as his playing partners, Min-Woo Lee and Harrison Crowe, each clobbered mighty drives up the hill, then wiped his club on his calf and set himself for one last tee shot … which he sent skittering into the trees 150 yards away. “There’s a reason why this is my last Masters,” Mize said.
Mize followed it up with, in his words, “a chunky five iron up the middle and then a thin six iron on the green, so how about that?” He was so nervous, he said, that he couldn’t stop his clubs shaking.
He finished with a one-foot putt that rattled around the lip and back out again to leave him one last tap-in for a double bogey. Not that any of that was what mattered. Mize, 64, is the only man born in Augusta to win the Masters. He used to come here as a spectator when he was a kid and spent his teenage years working the scoreboard behind the 3rd green.
Mize walked on to the green alone, while Crowe, Lee and the three caddies lined up behind him on the fairway. The crowd clapped and cried out thank yous. Mize doffed his cap and clapped them back. “To get a reception like that, I didn’t expect that, I didn’t expect that at all,” he said.
Which is typical of him. Sandy Lyle, who succeeded Mize as Masters champion, in 1988, had just finished his own farewell appearance here and was waiting by the side of the green. Lyle raced out to greet him and presented him with a tissue to use. “That was special,” Mize said. “Sandy is a great friend and a great champion.”
He’d never say that about himself. Mize is the most modest major champion you could meet. But then he would tell you that next to the company he keeps at the annual champions dinner here he has plenty to be modest about. Mize knows exactly who he is and what he achieved. “I don’t belong in the same sentence as most of these guys,” he said, cheerfully.
Mize won one major and had a handful of top-ten finishes. But what he owns is one indelible moment, one of the greatest in the tournament’s long history, his 140ft chip to win the playoff against Greg Norman on the 11th in 1987, one bounce, two bounces, three bounces, off across the green and all the way in.
“It was the greatest shot ever,” the grand old caddie Carl Jackson told the Augusta Chronicle. “People talk about Tiger’s chip or Sarazen’s double eagle but neither of those won the tournament. Mize walked ’em off.”
Someone asked Jackie Burke, who won the tournament in 1956, whether Mize’s shot was the best played here. Burke has just turned 100. He played his first major before the war and not the Vietnamese one. “You’re damn right it is,” Burke told them.
Mize’s life turned on the bounce of that ball. An inch either side and everything since would have been very different. Same goes for Norman. He had hit his own approach to the right side of the green, leaving himself 45ft, in the belief two putts would win it for him. “I didn’t think Larry would get down in two and I was right,” he said. “He got down in one.”
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Mize still seems to feel bad about it. “I know he hated it. There’s nothing against Greg. I’m sorry it hurt him so bad. It sure wasn’t my intent, it wasn’t my intent at all.
“I don’t think it changed me as a person,” Mize said, although it would have done plenty of others, “but other than that, it changed a lot. It gave me and my family opportunities to do plenty of things we wouldn’t have otherwise done. The recognition I’ve gotten, I mean, it’s amazing to win the Masters and then to do it in that fashion kind of just enhanced it. It’s hard to put into words. It’s been a tremendous blessing, and it has changed my life for the better, no doubt.”
Asked if he wished he could play that second nine one last time, Mize sighed, then replied “No, I’m good. I’m good,” and walked off to join his family, who were waiting for him under the old oak tree in front of the clubhouse.
