Peter Hanson knows what it is like to get close but not quite get it done. He tells you about 2012, the year he led overnight into the final round, the year he hit eight birdies on the Saturday and was paired with Phil Mickelson in the final round.
He can recall the frustration of that day too. He and Mickelson were both so struggling to fire up their games that the two opponents actually started supporting each other. Yet they could never quite get it going; they finished joint-third and left Bubba Watson to fight it out in a play-off.
The way Hanson describes it is: “I had one arm in one sleeve of the jacket.” He was recalling his 2012 experience on Saturday on the mound behind the 6th tee, overlooking the 5th green where his compatriot Ludvig Aberg was lining up a three-footer for birdie.
“Now,” Hanson said, “we are hoping to get both arms in the jacket.”
He said this looking on as Aberg sunk the putt. He was hoping, he said, that Aberg can “finish the job” that he could not quite complete.
Advertisement
For this is his life now. He retired from playing professional golf two and a half years ago and took up being a professional mentor instead. If you are wondering how it is that Aberg can look so extraordinarily at home on his first Masters, Hanson is part of the reason. Only a part of it, mind.
The debutant’s lot at the Augusta National is a most curious subject. Every time we come here, we yack on about the importance of experience. The stats tell you that over the past 20 Masters, the man who walked off wearing the Green Jacket was playing the tournament for, on average, the ninth time. In his pre-Masters press conference, Tiger Woods was asked how many shots he thought his 25 years at this event were worth to him in his 26th. He mulled it over, thought about offering a number but then declined.
Plenty of rookies have come close. Three times in just the last decade, rookies have finished second. Two of them, Jordan Spieth and Jonas Blixt, tied for second in 2014. Yet no one has won the Masters first time out since Fuzzy Zoeller 45 years ago.
Some come in under the assumption that they can break the duck. “Stats like that are meant to be broken,” were the words of Wyndham Clark before the tournament. He was a rookie and also No 4 in the world. “I know it’s a tall task,” he said. “It’s a challenging golf course. And I like my chances.” And yet he was back home by Saturday morning.
You are also entitled to wonder if we have got all this stuff too heavily entwined in what we take to be our understanding of the Masters. There were 17 rookies who started on Thursday and eight of them were going home on Friday night. That said, seven former champions were beaten by the cut too. What did they learn?
Advertisement
Either way, when you have a talent like Aberg, you invest thought and effort into this conundrum. How do you break the rookie’s curse?
Some of Aberg’s answer is in the team he put around him. Hanson for starters. Then, late last year, he sacked his caddie, a cold-blooded decision that does not quite tally with the gentle, smiling Scandi, but he only did it so that he could take on the experience of Joe Skovron who had been on Rickie Fowler’s bag for 13 seasons and had completed over 50 majors.
They have actually got the whole Aberg team here at Augusta. Aberg likes to have his family around him, and if you were following him on Saturday, you would find yourself within a cacophony of Swedish accents and quickly able to identify his mother, father, his sister and his coach, Hans Larsson. When you are in a new environment and your name is Ludvig Aberg, you bring as much of what is familiar to you as you can.
They have also educated Aberg here as well as they possibly can. Hanson, who played in four Masters, played here with Aberg last month, showing him the ropes. On Tuesday, Aberg got nine practice holes with Rory McIlroy which afforded him the opportunity to ask the question: what is the one overriding lesson you have learned in your years here? McIlroy’s answer was patience, “don’t be too aggressive”. These past three days would suggest that the pupil has learned quicker than his tutor.
Yet however deep you drill down into the equation, the key factor here is the one that is innate: the mind. For an Augusta rookie, you could not have had a more testing examination than the first two days here. On Friday morning, Aberg resumed his first round, bogeyed 14 and then double-bogeyed 15 and with the wind gusting, strong and unpredictable, anyone could have spiralled.
Advertisement
Larsson was not worried though. His boy is impervious to such slings and arrows. At Torrey Pines, earlier this year, when he four-putted and turned an eagle into a birdie, he laughed. Enough said.
I asked both Larsson and Hanson what worried him and they both said Liverpool Football Club. He hated it when Jürgen Klopp announced that he was leaving. He has a Mohamed Salah signed shirt as one of his proudest possessions.
And what motivates him? “Ice cream,” Larsson said. Before Saturday’s round, he told Aberg that he had a tub of mint choc chip waiting for him if he played well. “His eyes lit up,” he said. And look at what happened next.
What happened was steady and nerveless. That birdie on five was his second and by the time he had got through 13, he had nailed two more and was sitting solo at the top of the leaderboard.
Then 14 and 15 came, the same holes that tripped him up the previous morning. After he had bogeyed 14, he had an eagle chip into 15 that ended up as another bogey. It was kind of Torrey Pines revisited.
Advertisement
So it was natural, then, to wonder if it would be a test of his temperament. Larsson, however, gave immediate assurance that it was not. He did not see it remotely as a problem. His reading of it was that Aberg had played good shots into both greens, both of which had just got unlucky.
More importantly, he was convinced that Aberg would see it that way too – and indeed he was right. Aberg then glided through the next three holes utterly unperturbed and rather than toy with further trouble, he was inches away from birdie on each.
The classic thought process for athletes when they are this close to victory is to maintain a mental discipline and shut out any thought of the bigger picture. Aberg does not see the need for such psychological rigour. “I think about it all the time,” he said afterwards. “I’m OK with thinking about it.”
So maybe we will see a rookie in green this evening. Aberg was not the only rookie to rise to the top of the leaderboard on Saturday. Just briefly, Nicolai Hojgaard, the Dane, floated up there too, though he then fell away too far.
Aberg has two shots on him. He is three off Scottie Scheffler. That is not even one arm in one sleeve of the jacket, but it is certainly a glimpse of green.
