Matsuyama becomes first Japanese player to win the Masters

Hideki Matsuyama has won the 2021 Masters Tournament, becoming the first Japanese man to win one of golf’s four major championships.

Matsuyama shot 10-under par over the four-day tournament held at Georgia’s Augusta National Golf Club, finishing one shot ahead of American Will Zalatoris.

Minutes later, Matsuyama, ranked 25 in the world, donned the fabled green jacket awarded to Masters winners. A decade earlier, he had finished as the lowest-scoring amateur in the 2011 event as a 19-year-old.

Matsuyama, 29, had already established himself as the best Japanese golfer in history with five victories on the US PGA Tour, and had risen as high as second in the world rankings, in 2017. His form suffered thereafter, however, and he failed to win a tournament for almost four years.

His win came just a week after Japan’s Tsubasa Kajitani won the Augusta National Women’s Amateur, a top competition that the club inaugurated in 2019 for non-professional women’s players.

Matsuyama seized control of the tournament on Saturday afternoon, when he shot six-under par on the back nine of the third round to take a four-stroke lead into the final round.

Solid play and mistakes by competitors allowed him to increase his lead to as many as six shots by the middle of Sunday’s round. But his margin shrank when Matsuyama found greenside water at the long 15th.

His playing partner, Xander Schauffele of the US, came within two shots with a birdie — but blew his chance at the very next hole with a triple bogey after watching his tee shot slip agonisingly into the lake on the short 16th. Despite two more late bogeys, including on the 18th, Matsuyama clung on, leaving him with the slimmest margin of victory over Zalatoris.

“Hopefully, I will be a pioneer and many other Japanese will follow,” said Matsuyama through an interpreter during the presentation of the green jacket in the Butler Cabin. “I’m glad to be able to open the floodgates, hopefully, and many more will follow me.”

The Masters was played just days after Georgia Republicans enacted an election bill that critics said targeted black voters. In response to outcry over the law, Major League Baseball moved this summer’s All-Star Game to Colorado.

Augusta National chair Fred Ridley declined to condemn the law but said that “[n]o one should be disadvantaged in exercising that right [to vote]”.

Ridley also rejected calls for boycott, saying “those actions often impose the greatest burdens on the most vulnerable in society”.

The Masters and elite golf circles have long been dogged by accusations of exclusion based on race and sex. The 2021 tournament began on Thursday when Lee Elder, who in 1975 became the first black man to play at the Masters, was invited to join the ceremonial tee-off alongside six-time winner Jack Nicklaus and three-time champion Gary Player.

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