AUGUSTA, Ga. — Masters patrons applaud all good shots in relation to their difficulty. Heckles are not tolerated. As far as style, it’s the most homogeneously well-dressed crowd in sports. So how to tell what beats inside the hearts of the thousands following the final pairing on an epic Masters Sunday?
You ask them. And what you hear might surprise you.
Justin Rose was the ultimate challenger, but the foil for most of Masters Sunday was Bryson DeChambeau. Before he rinsed his approach shot at No. 11 during golden hour and fell out of the tournament, there were a lot of patrons—frankly, more than I expected—rooting for the story of the day to end differently than Rory McIlroy becoming the sixth male golfer to achieve the career Grand Slam.
Many of them were very nice people. In fact, when you’re standing a dozen deep, waiting for a roar or groan to indicate the action, you’ll find the Bryson supporters welcome conversation. They like to explain their affinity. They recognize the need to justify. The Rory folks tended to be terser, as if the answer was too obvious to talk about. “We want to witness history.”
I heard only one “USA!…USA!…USA!” chant, which DeChambeau rode on their wings, leaving the range after a mythic head-to-head warmup against McIlroy, which turned into a long-drive contest to those watching, giggling. McIlroy chose the right fairway and DeChambeau the left, and so their shots described an X like the thunder of crossed swords. Recalling the almost incessant jingoistic cries for DeChambeau at last June’s U.S. Open, this seemed like an important clue. We weren’t in Pinehurst anymore.
Foreigner vs. American is a classic dividing line in Masters lore, but it did not seem to be the case in 2025. Maybe a Northern Irishman living at The Bear’s Club in Jupiter, Fla., is basically accepted as American these days. With LIV’s global schedule, we’d have to scour the jet logs to see who spent more time out of the country last year anyway. Indeed, nearly every identifiably bilingual person I spoke with was rooting for McIlroy, but the sample size wasn’t large enough to be significant.
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What about age? As the best golfer on YouTube, surely most of the children were for Bryson. Keeping scientific tally marks in my notebook, my count among people who didn’t look old enough to buy cigarettes was 15 to 11 in favor of Shambo. Reflective, but not exactly a landslide. And the theory was quickly invalidated when consecutive retirees, one male and one female, gushed over Bryson’s emotive tendencies. “He’s just so animated. He started as a stoic golfer like all of them but then he started showing his feelings. I just love him!”
Indeed, emotional fragility was top of mind. Some version of “I want Rory because it’ll be too painful for him to lose this” was heard from folks both north and south of the Mason Dixon line, physically attractive and less so, all kinds.
Bryson enjoys interacting with his fans.
Sleeves of beer cups being carried like leaning Towers of Pisa? Inconclusive. The primary focus of this group was triangulating routes between concessions, the gentleman’s room and optimal vantage points for Game No. 27. All in, the drinkers were 65/35 in favor of Rory, but this roughly matched findings across demos.
Good players? I do claim a sixth sense for identifying golfers with handicaps of less than five. Don’t ask me to explain further, but it’s a combination of calf tan, forearm muscle, face wrinkles and a 200-yard stare that you know when you see it. Surely, this group would lean Rory-heavy in the way that low-handicaps have almost always preferred Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus over Phil Mickelson (vintage version) and Arnold Palmer. If there’s such a thing as the Golfer’s Choice and the People’s Choice, high-fiving DeChambeau belongs with the latter. Yet, it was from this group that I heard the most interesting theory of the day: This scratch golfer from Arizona wanted Bryson to win for the greater good of the game. The way he saw it, the PGA Tour was too confident with its current momentum to acquiesce to any deal with LIV. A Masters victory by Bryson would reapply pressure so all the greatest golfers in the world could get back together quicker.
Three or five years ago, the two factions cleaved more neatly. DeChambeau was a PGA Tour problem-child who at turns blamed his equipment sponsor, cameramen and Brooks Koepka for being mean, and his exit to LIV Golf was regarded as a welcome fresh start for all parties. McIlroy was the vocal conscience of the pro game, sacrificing his time and well-being to be the figurehead in the fight to save golf.
Rory fans had a bumpy ride on Sunday, McIlroy’s highs and lows being felt by his supporters.
If you rooted for DeChambeau, you were a contrarian. You liked the way he poked the establishment by calling Augusta National a “par 67.” His creatine-fueled weight gain of nearly 50 pounds and distance assault on Winged Foot Golf Club at the 2020 U.S. Open challenged golf’s entrenched class even before he took a $125 million signing bonus from LIV.
If you rooted for McIlroy, you were a traditionalist. Although he drove the ball about as ridiculously far, he did so with an aesthetic that warmed the cockles. He never claimed to have golf figured out or wore a lab coat. But somewhere along the way, he started to lose some admirers. The whispers under the big tree this week expressed some ennui over his flip-flopping perspectives. Untangling who should root for who had become as complicated as separating the lemonade from the grenadine in an Azalea cocktail.
One last attempt at golf profiling: Hats with one word in block letters and a rope. SKIP IT, PIMENTO, CROW’S NEST, PATRON, AZALEA, CADDIE, top-sellers all on the grounds at Augusta National. Believe me when I say 9 out of 12 were Bryson fans. Eureka! What does R-squared mean in a regression analysis?
I think it means this is how you spot a Broditionalist.
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
