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There was one very happy man in Augusta on Monday morning, and there were 52 all in a stew, turning over thoughts of what went right and what went wrong, that short putt on the 6th, that wayward chip on 12, that sliced drive on 15, or whatever it was that cost them their shot at winning the 2025 Masters. While Rory McIlroy can enjoy what was, everyone else in the field is wondering what might have been. Justin Rose will feel it most. Rose, the antagonist in Rory’s story, scored 65, 71, 75, 66 – the last of them, he said himself, “a bogey away from being the greatest round I’ve ever played”.
The second shots during the playoff summed it up. Rose’s was pretty near perfect in the circumstances, and landed 15 feet from the pin, McIlroy’s landed just beyond it, caught the slope, and rolled back down and around, past Rose’s ball, and finished up 5ft from the cup. Sometimes good just isn’t good enough. “Yeah, it hurts,” Rose said, “what are you going to do about it, though?” He was the first to hug McIlroy close in the moments after he had made the winning putt. “Listen,” he told him, “I was glad I was here on this green to witness you win the career grand slam.”
Rose has now written himself into the story of the tournament, it will be impossible to tell the history of the Masters without mentioning him. He has finished runner-up three times, and lost two playoffs. Both times, he was second-best to two of the most popular Masters champions, Sergio García, who won his very first major after 21-years of trying here in 2017, and now McIlroy, who completed the grand slam. Any other year, the European fans would have been thrilled when Rose holed that 20ft putt on 18 to tie the lead, but not this one. Rose understood. “We saw part of history today,” he said. “It’s a momentous day in the game of golf.”
Rose made a little of it himself. He is the first man in history to have led the field through the first two days of competition in three separate occasions, and is now in the extraordinary position of having been top of the Masters leaderboard after 18, 36, 54, and 72 holes, twice, without ever actually winning it.
He is 44 now, and playing as well as ever, but at that age things change quickly, and who knows how many more chances he will get? “It doesn’t get any easier for sure,” Rose said.
When he was young he assumed the game would get easier with age, but if anything he is working harder at it now than ever. “But the reason I’m willing to put in that work is for these moments, like the standing ovation on 18 when I finished, I took a moment just soaking that in. That was obviously a nice moment because it was still what might be, what could be, but you’re still living the dream. Like one day, I won’t be competing this way at this tournament. So you know, for now, the hard work is worth it.”
McIlroy said: “He’s a great champion. He has displayed so much grace throughout his career. I remember watching the playoff in ’17 when he went up against Sergio and that didn’t quite go his way, either. But he’s had a phenomenal record around here, and I feel for him because he’s been so close, and he’s a good friend, and …” McIlroy knows the disappointment better than most, and stopped to swallow a lump in his throat. “Yeah, hopefully he has a few more opportunities.”
Their friendship was forged through all the years of playing together in the Ryder Cup. It was conspicuous that as well as Rose, a couple of other European players, Tommy Fleetwood and Shane Lowry, were among the first to congratulate McIlroy. And even in the thick of all this, the tournament at Bethpage in September was in the back of McIlroy’s mind. “You know, selfishly, I was happy that it was another European in the playoff,” he said. “We’re on a good run at the minute, Ryder Cup year and all that.” It hadn’t been quite clear whether Rose was going to make the team this year or not, but there’s no doubt about it now.
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Rose will be ready: “What do you choose to dwell on? There’s no point in being too despondent about it. You have to look at all the good stuff that got me into this situation. You can’t skip through a career without a little bit of heartache. It’s not going to happen.
“If you’re willing to lift the big championships, you’ve to put yourself on the line. You have to risk feeling this way to get the reverse.” If you can’t be a great winner, you can still be a good loser.
