OK, I lied. I knew I lied. You knew I lied.
My 13 thoughts from earlier this week were not the final thoughts I had on the 2026 Masters. These — I promise this time, along with two quick notes on LIV (which we’ll absolutely dive deeper into at some point) — will be my final Masters thoughts.
Oh, and off the top, I need to congratulate Sean T. for winning our first major fantasy contest of the year with the following team …
I think his strategy was “make the best seven picks possible and then deke everyone with the highest score in the field.” It worked.
Name drops today: Davis Love III, Henri Rousseau (!!), The Miz, Peter Thomson and Rory Gilmore.
A huge thank you to ShipSticks for sponsoring today’s newsletter. We are giving away a $250 gift card from them to one person who comments on this tweet about your lasting memory from the 2026 Masters.
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OK, now onto the news.
1. Let’s start with the LIV takes so we can get those out of the way. Obviously the last 48 hours have been a total roller coaster, and it would be easy (and fun) to drag out all the old tweets and statements and photos and everything they’ve done over the last four years that defied belief.
However, instead I would encourage you instead to listen to Joel Beall in this episode of the NLU pod from Wednesday evening. The TL;DR here is that LIV will no longer be funded by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia (the crown prince and co.), which was reported all over the place on Wednesday. I believe the Financial Times had it first.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that LIV is over, though. It could conceivably receive funding from other sources, which Joel smartly points out in his segment on NLUn and which LIV CEO Scott O’Neil insinuated on Thursday.
My prediction: Some entities flirt with funding LIV but ultimately WD, mostly because LIV’s balance sheet is messier than Haotong Li’s 13th hole on Sunday. I think LIV probably ends up playing out the season and closing up shop after the Crushers beat Legion XIII or whatever for the team championship in August.
2. As Soly correctly pointed out in that NLU episode, the fact that we have to understand how the Strait of Hormuz affects the 2027 U.S. Open is the most normal sport thing imaginable.
LIV was started for probably several reasons, but one of them was almost certainly an opening into a relationship with Donald Trump, who, at the time LIV began, was hunting for a pro golf event to host (which he found in LIV, which led to Doral getting back in the mix on the PGA Tour side).
So it is ironic that Trump starting the Iran war four years later coincides with (or possibly even caused?) Saudi Arabia’s focus on “more domestic objectives.”
Also, I am shocked that a government funding a golf league it never cared about, whose operating agreement was drawn up by a man who allegedly lost $100 million betting on sporting events somehow didn’t work out financially and doesn’t make sense as an entity to be sold. Shocked!
As Beall notes, however, it’s incorrect to say that none of this worked, technically, because the point all along was not to get the Cleeks valued at $1 billion as much as it was an exercise in Yasir and friends consolidating soft power at a global level.
Again, normal sport.
3. OK, that’s enough (probably too much) about LIV. I want to get to a Masters take that’s been percolating for me since being there last week.
As background: I’ve been going to the Masters since 2007. My grandfather had badges back then, and I went with my dad and then with both parents and then friends and eventually with my wife and a variety of people along the way. I missed 2013-2015 because I was covering it from CBS Sports but we didn’t have a credential (?). Then I started going again in 2016 (cool) and have been every year since then.
I have watched the evolution of that place with my own eyes. The first year I went with my dad, we parked in somebody’s yard just off of Washington Road. A yard that has been taken over by ANGC’s crazy real estate growth over the past nearly two decades.
You could make a good case that the Masters has expanded and exploded more in the last 15-20 years than it did even in the first 70-75 when it grew from nothing into the most important golf tournament in the world.
Every year in golf there is more fanfare about hats and less critical thought about what goes on them. In the words of Gary Player, “Where are we going?” April 14, 2036 the year that Jim Nantz retires and Augusta retires the golf hats in favor of golf stickers.
4. I say all that to say that last week the Masters felt less like the Masters than any of the 17 I’ve attended. I am sure that some of that is me getting older and more curmudgeonly.
But I suspect that’s not all of it …
In his presser on Wednesday before the tournament started, Fred Ridley said inviting Dude Perfect to play frisbee at Amen Corner may have been a mistake.
Over the next 24 hours we saw …
• Kevin Hart hitting shots on the Augusta National driving range.
• Somebody called The Miz on ESPN as a possible cross-promotion for a WWE event.
• Jason Kelce running around the par 3 course in a caddie jumpsuit.
• The explosion of Masters merch haul videos and an insane gnome black market.
To be honest, Dude Perfect seems like the least of our issues here.
The Masters has long been a place to see and be seen for folks in this region of the country. A place to collect merchandise for yourself and your buddies, who beg for a polo or a pullover. A place where, yes, you might buy a hat or a mug as a conversation starter.
But as long as all of that was a byproduct of the tournament, it felt like it was OK. Maybe not as pure as it was 30 or 40 years ago, exactly, but a reasonable trade off.
Now? It feels like the tail is wagging the dog a bit.
There were moments last week when it has felt like the actual tournament was incidental to all the hoopla, especially early in the week. Moments where the red carpet felt more important than the show.
That flipped on the weekend, and it was all about the golf. But for a few days there, it seemed as if the tournament was being held as an excuse for gnome brokers to gather.
I don’t really believe this is Augusta National’s fault exactly. It is a place run by golf sickos, many of whom I’m sure roll their eyes at a lot of the extracurriculars. Certainly you cannot control how other people act toward and react to your business product.
But I’m also not totally sure it’s not Augusta National’s fault either.
They approve ESPN’s coverage. They control everything. And what makes the event — the product, the thing — feel cheap is when other celebrities and people are clearly using it as a mechanism to elevate their own station within this ridiculous online world.
5. One thing I love about the Masters is that nobody can get inside the ropes here other than players and caddies. Well, when I’m there I hate it because I love being inside the ropes at major championships, but it speaks to the truth of the Masters: No one and nothing is more important than the 72 holes of play of this event.
It is starting to at least a little bit less like that’s the case.
I’m sure that commercially, the event is more successful than it has ever been and more lucrative than anyone could have ever imagined. But it does feel like we’re at a bit of a tipping point with this event and that week.
It’s a difficult line to walk. You want to be innovative but also cling to what made you great. You want to try new things but not lose sight of what your core audience wants.
Two things happened over the last 20 years as the Masters exploded.
1. Everyone now uses social media to show off their experience of moments and events. Daniel Kahneman says it like this: The ‘Instagram Generation’ now experiences the present as an anticipated memory. Case in point here.
Twitter tweet
This is gross and ridiculous and … I’m not sure if anything can be done about it?
2. There is now a need to fill up a lot of programming hours across a variety of platforms. Probably too many ……
The beauty of the Masters since I have been attending (and long before that) is in its restraint. No phones. Concentrated coverage. No digital leaderboards on the property.
(I realize that all of us always complain about not having enough coverage, but honestly, given how ubiquitous everything is these days, I think having less coverage would be kind of a cool marker of your brand).
The phone policy is honestly the best thing in sports. With each passing year — as we get more and more addicted to our phones — the policy becomes better. But the policy doesn’t exist because Augusta National’s members hate phones. It exists because they want you to be present. To enjoy where your feet are at. To look around and delight in their property and the people who are there.
The more this event becomes about who is shown on TV and who is creating “buy 10 items from the merch store for under $500” TikTok challenges, the more vapid the whole thing becomes.
At that point, the phone policy doesn’t even matter because everyone is just thinking about what they’re going to do on their phone when they leave the property anyway. Tweet about who they saw. Instagram about what they got. It’s just like everything else.
We don't know where Masters merch will go, but we are always available to help.
This is a difficult problem, to be sure. A societal problem that no single organization should be asked to figure out. Probably an impossible line for the club to walk. But Ridley’s reaction to a question about gnomes in his presser (normal sport) said everything I need to know.
Jamie Weir asked him, “I apologize in advance if this question appears somewhat trivial … there's a rumor circulating this could be the final year of the now iconic Masters gnome. Are you able to quash that rumor and allay fears?”
Ridley said, “Number one, the question is not trivial.” He said it in such a way that it’s clear that all of this — with the gnomes being the physical manifestation of it — is something the club is being thoughtful about.
I’m interested to see what they do and where they go. Because while I’m certainly not advocating for exclusivity within major championship golf or specifically at Augusta National, I also don’t believe that being inclusive means you have to have something for everybody at all times.
That dismisses the discipline and restraint that have marked this event forever.
The Masters, like the property Augusta National has gobbled up, is certainly getting wider. But is it getting deeper? Going deep — not wide — is what made this event great.
And it is what will continue to make it great in the future.
This post will continue below for Normal Club members (all 1,055 of them) and includes Rory’s new goals, a fabulous Rory-Scottie debate, a fabulous Rory-Rory-Rory tweet, meandering with Haotong on No. 13 at ANGC and my new favorite spot on the golf course.
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