DUSTIN JOHNSON won the Masters on Monday because he stopped being a choker.
Four times he was that, bungling 54-hole leads with weird last-round collapses. All majors.
It happened through an assortment of bizarre reasons.
He led by three with 18 holes left in the 2010 US Open and lost.
He was on his way to winning the 2010 PGA when he ran afoul with rules, grounding his club on a bunker.
He three-putted the 18th to miss a playoff in the 2015 US Open.
Just three months ago, he held his fourth 54-hole lead but lost it again—in the 2020 PGA.
With his Masters victory this week, Johnson would have had six majors now, adding his US Open win in 2016.
He would have been nine off the haul of Tiger Woods, whose fifth Masters victory last year was his 15th overall—three shy behind Jack Nicklaus’ all-time best of 18.
You know who placed second behind Woods in the Masters last year? Dustin Johnson.
Three years before in 2017, Johnson won three tournaments in a row heading to the Masters.
But one day before the Masters teed off, Johnson fell down on the stairs of his rented home, hurting his back. There was nobody to blame but Johnson: He was wearing socks.
Three years later, Johnson, 36, was a changed man. One big change was he got his brother, Austin, to carry his bag.
But the Masters still seemed to cajole Johnson. Last month, he was Covid-19 positive. He recovered in the nick of time.
Holding a four-shot lead going to the last round of this year’s Masters, Johnson’s demons started showing up again early in the day.
Playing without a bogey in his first 57 holes, Johnson found the bunkers on 4 and 5 for bogeys to see his lead down to a precarious one over South Korean Sungjae Im.
If there’s one game that tells us nothing but the truth, that’s golf. It makes ourselves our own enemy or friend. Like, when danger lurks, the game tells us either to sink or swim.
Johnson chose to swim. And how he swam.
Facing his next hole—the par-3 6th, a 180-yard downhill, Johnson pulled out an 8-iron and planted it 6 feet right of the pin.
With his first birdie of the day—and Im bogeying the hole—Johnson’s blowout win took shape as he would next go on a demon-demolishing mode, birdieing the 8th and the remaining three par-5s. Plus the 14th, too.
Unmindful of his opponents’ scores—or even his—Johnson, when he landed safely on the 18th and final fairway, asked Austin: “Where do I stand?”
“I told him he had a five-shot lead,” Austin said.
“I think I can handle this one,” Johnson said.
He did, proceeding to win by a record 20 under par 268 on 65-70-65-68, breaking Woods’s mark of 18 under in Tiger’s first Masters triumph in 1997.
After completing his routine par on 18, Johnson was embraced and kissed by the teary-eyed Pauline Gretzky, his partner and the mother of their two kids. Pauline is the daughter of hockey legend Wayne “The Great One.”
Suddenly, the bearded Johnson, he with the languid, cat-like walk, finds himself as among the golf giants. His 5-shot victory over Cameron Smith and Im was the most since Woods’s 12-stroke win in 1997.
Likewise, Johnson’s four bogeys in 72 holes was better by one in the Masters 84-year history.
And, in victory, Johnson did not only win $2 million but also end 14 seasons of being tagged a choker.
In golf, indeed, winners, mostly, are products of failures.
THAT’S IT After playing 23,789 holes as a pro, Tiger Woods made his first septuple bogey 10 on the par-3 12th in the last round of the just-ended Masters. The 12th of Augusta National is the shortest but most treacherous, with the sloping green guarded in front by a pond and bunkers at the back. But despite that tragedy—him going thrice to Rae’s Creek and once to the sandtrap—Woods fought back with a birdie-par-birdie-birdie-birdie-birdie finish in his last six holes for 76 and 1 under 277 for 38th place. Such a fightback is a typical Tiger trademark. Idol pa rin.