Danny Willett insisted “fate” played a crucial part in him becoming the first Englishman since Nick Faldo in 1996 to win the Masters and only the second ever to wear the green jacket.
A stunning afternoon at Augusta National saw Willett upstage the long-time leader and defending champion Jordan Spieth. The Yorkshireman won by three shots at five under par, having trailed Spieth by five when the Texan took to the 10th tee.
After winning his first start of 2016, at the limited-field Tournament of Champions in Maui, Spieth did not post a top-10 finish in his next five stroke-play events leading up to his first major title defense. His struggles off the tee were magnified in the fishbowl that is the year’s first men’s major.
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As Spieth, a Dallas native, packed his green jacket in his suitcase for the trip here, which followed tournament stops in Austin, Tex., and Houston, it dawned on him that the garment might never again hang in his clothes closet. “I was like, Wow, there’s a possibility that I don’t have this back at my house anymore,” Spieth said earlier in the week.
“It kind of fired me up a little bit,” he added. “So yeah, just the jacket itself provides a little motivation — which is cool, but at the same time, it’s not easy. It’s not easy to get.”
It was hard to give away the jacket after giving away the tournament. Spieth tried to put on a happy face, but his smile did not reach his eyes.
“It was, as you can imagine — I can’t think of anybody else who had a tougher ceremony to experience,” he said. He added that he was happy for Willett and said, “More important than golf, he’s had a lot of cool things happen in his life.”
As Spieth was speaking, Willett was being whisked away in a cart farther down the hill from the scoring room for the dinner phase of his surprise coronation.
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