And the winner is ...
Masters 2025: Our idiot prognosticator with his latest failed attempt to pick a winner—and bridge golf's great divide
Stephen Denton
Why is everyone so angry? (I mean, I know why I am, having correctly picked the winner of the Masters exactly the same number of times as I’ve eaten pimento cheese ... but I digress.)
No, I ask this in light of the current malaise that sits front and center in every discussion of the game, shrouding everything in its path like a relentless strain of existential crisis oobleck. Sure, golf has its good news (better TV ratings, compelling leaderboards, growing participation numbers, and among other things, the national treasure that is a Billy Horschel fist pump in a made-for-Gen-Z pretend version of golf). But somehow the game always finds a way to regress to its mean. (And by “mean,” I’m not referring to “average.”)
Golf is awash in existential maelstroms (ball rollback, slow play, post-round interviews, etc., etc.). But its biggest and most debilitating is the schism that is the PGA Tour and LIV imbroglio. The two sides really don’t like each other with a new nastiness that seems reinvented with each passing press conference. Especially noteworthy was the PGA Tour rejecting a $1.5 billion investment from LIV’s primary source of cash, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. I don’t know what it’s like to turn down the GDP of the Solomon Islands (look it up), but that’s Mean Girls level of hatred.
Cast against all that rancor is the one thing that all of golf gobbles up like sweet tea and a peach ice cream sandwich. The Masters is a dependable respite of joy in a world too often so angry it forgets what the original argument was about. The Masters dissolves discontent, like a Mary Poppins cleansing of the soul. It is a golf tournament invented by Disney, back before Disney became intent on ruining classic children’s movies.
The Masters restores order, and like spring or a three-day juice cleanse, brings with it a resounding hope for better days. Still, while the two best players in the world and a handful of other conversation-starters all seem poised for an electrifying four days in Augusta, something still seems not right. Like a Sun Day Red logo on anyone not named Tiger Woods.
We know Scottie Scheffler and Rory McIlroy are the betting favorites factually, but we don’t know that in our hearts. We cannot find our footing because all things LIV have broken our golfing spirit, or maybe just our golfing minds. Is LIV a real thing (27 major titles on its collective roster) or a pathetic, slightly sick joke (Anthony Kim)? Heck, last week’s LIV winner isn’t even driving down Magnolia Lane this week.
You could make the case that LIV golfers winning majors in each of the last two years has gone a long way to getting them more respect. But don’t confuse yourself: These weren’t like the Jets beating the Colts in the 1969 Super Bowl. Brooks and Bryson were major champions when they left for LIV. What LIV really needs is a home-grown kind of anti-hero to claim professional golf’s most meaningful event. In a venue that is all about coming together, all about the elements of the game we hold dear, at a time when the game is awash in vitriol and anger, it seems more appropriate that we find someone just as disgruntled as the times to take the title that means the most in the sport.
To get there, and finally correctly pick the winner of the Masters in my colossally crooked math, I decided I must be as belligerent as the moment. So, I broke my statistical ranking rule and considered stats from LIV as a kind of equal to PGA Tour Shotlink numbers. This is the equivalent to saying a LEGO version of Starry Night is just as good as the original, maybe even better. Because it sort of is and, of course, it most decidedly is not. But hear me out:
Based on Scheffler’s Masters winning performance last year, I took his rankings in four Masters week stats (driving distance, greens in regulation, scrambling and putting). Then, I added those ranks (13th, 7th, 10th and 1st, respectively) to get the number 31. Then, I looked at the rankings in those categories for the most recent meaningful events on both the PGA Tour (Players Championship) and LIV (I obviously couldn’t find any meaningful events on LIV, so I chose Singapore because, well, the name of the host course translates to “peace and tranquility”). The player whose statistical rank in those four categories most closely aligns with Scheffler’s in last year’s Masters clearly should be my choice. No one on the PGA Tour really came close (J.J. Spaun was at 50, McIlroy at 80, Scheffler at 101).
But on LIV there was one soul who was right there, ranking 11th in distance, fifth in GIR, 1st in scrambling and fourth in putting). He is the very picture of anger and defiance with just a frisson of poutiness. He exudes the kind of “does not play well with others” attitude that reflects our current stormy times, and he even recently suggested, “Masters, obviously the first major of the year. It's just another golf tournament.” Anger without purpose. Perfectly regretful. Like most LIV team names.
Still, LIV holds our ideal and most necessary Masters winner this year. Joaquin Niemann, the current No. 1 player on LIV and a guy who shrugs with disdain when he shoots 59, has to win the Masters this year. While he's famously grumbled about the unfairness of the world rankings, he also was wise enough to say at last year’s Olympics, “I feel like right now, there's a little bit of a crisis and things have to be fixed.”
Joaquin Niemann on the fourth tee at the 2024 Masters.
Andrew Redington
At the same time, while he’s droppped nearly outside the top 100 because he rarely plays in sanctioned tournaments (also known as "tournaments"), he has not only all of his LIV brethren calling him one of the best players in the world, he also has the actual best player in the world singing his praises, saying “his World Ranking obviously doesn’t come close to reflecting how good he is.”
We don’t know how a Niemann Masters win might recalibrate the angst that surrounds all of golf, but it’s interesting that both sides seem to agree he’s a kind of poster child for everything that’s wrong and everything that’s right. Still, given golf’s current emotional dyspepsia, we think it’s even money that when they slip on the green jacket, he just might rip off the sleeves. That has to be good for the game. Or at least a laugh. And we could use one about now.
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