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Squint and you will see Justin Rose’s name twice on the tournament record boards at Augusta National. It’s there on the big bronze winner’s list at the water fountain by the entrance, beneath the entries marking Sergio García’s victory in 2017 and Rory McIlroy’s eight years later, both, as it says in the small print underneath, won in a playoff that Rose lost. Only one other player in Masters history lost two playoffs, and that was Ben Hogan, who had the consolation of winning it twice outright, in 1951 and 1953, in between finishing second in 1942, 1946, 1954 and 1955.
Throw in Rose’s second-place finish behind Jordan Spieth in 2015, when he finished four shots back, and he has come just about as close as any man can to the greatest prize in the game. The only player who finished second more often without actually winning the thing was Tom Weiskopf, who was runner-up four times in the space of seven years. “I will win this tournament one day,” Weiskopf said after he missed a birdie putt on 18 to force a playoff against Jack Nicklaus in 1975. He was 33 and it turned out to be the last best chance he ever had.
Rose is 45. This is his 21st Masters and of course there’s no way of knowing whether he will ever get as close again as he did last year, when he watched McIlroy make a birdie putt on 18 to beat him by one in the playoff.
“When you realise you’re that close, you can taste the victory,” Rose says. “You know what it would feel like if it been the other way around. I could see what it felt like, I can see the celebrations, it all played out right in front of me. So I lived it as if I’d have won it, but obviously without any of the real positive emotion that goes with that, but I sensed everything.” It’s as close as he comes to allowing himself to think about the big what-if. “I did everything that I could do. So I can live with that in a way.”
Rose says he has always tried to keep his thoughts on all this squared away. He says it’s how he stays out of his own way. “I’ve realised that when the opportunity presents itself to win a major, you can’t make it too important in the moment. Because you can’t skip through a career without a little bit of heartache and heartbreak, no chance. If you’re going to be willing to win them, you’ve got to be willing to be on the wrong side of it as well. The point is you’ve got to put yourself there. That’s the hard part.”
Rose has a habit of doing exactly that. He has held a share of the lead nine separate times, but he might still end up as one of the tournament’s attendant lords, hovering on the edge of shot during someone else’s moment on the 18th green. Not that he sees it that way. “I think for me I’m very aware that I’ve been close here,” he says. “I’m very aware that I’ve had tough, tough losses here. But I also am aware that I enjoy this place. So I don’t need to create a different sort of feeling for me.
“I hope it only boosts my belief that I can go ahead and do it. I feel like I’ve pretty much done what it takes to win. I just haven’t walked over the line. I feel like I’ve executed well enough to have done the job. From that point of view, I don’t feel like I have to find something in myself to do anything different. I truly believe that.”
To be fair, all the reflective thinking can wait till he is done playing. Right now, Rose is playing as well as ever. It was only a couple of months ago that he broke the course record at Torrey Pines, where he was the first man to win the Farmers Insurance Open wire to wire in 71 years. “I think eight players have won this tournament after finishing second the year before, which probably increases my odds if you look at the field. I can look at that and go, ‘OK, that’s good.’”
The problem is that coming second is a role he plays well. He seemed genuinely pleased for McIlroy last year and was especially gracious in the moments after he lost. He would be a popular winner this year. “A lot of people are wishing me well or thinking it’s going to be my year, just based around sentiment, you know what I mean?” he says. “So I’m going to have to manage that a bit this week, and what’s going to be part of my week this week for sure is people remembering what happened last year. That’s fine, but I’ve got to be aware of that, be ready for that. I’ve got to have my own narrative and not buy into everyone else’s.”
