Gavin Cooney

But then he's put through the...

pulled through the back of the green, kind of catches on the fringe as like a little parable for stolen momentum.

He makes bogey there.

And I had given up at that point, I have to say, because the body language was so bad and nothing was working.

And then he just found a fairway on seven.

And then all of a sudden that kick started at birdie on seven.

And then he got a lovely, that kind of signature now, whip of a six ironed,

from the eighth fairway into, into make birdie there.

And he was off to the races and he didn't hit another poor shot until the shot into 15, at which point he had a two shot lead.

So, um, to play amen corner as he did was, was magnificent, but I think maybe it's just that kind of stabilizing force of the green jacket already around the shoulders is probably what mitigated against the, the really wild, um,

dramas that might have been possible yesterday that we obviously saw so amazingly last year.

Oh, no, totally.

And I suppose it's when you look at them.

Like, I remember in 2023, he came in in great form.

Like, we thought that this was going to be the year, and he missed the cut.

And he said the mistake he made was, I think Brooks Koepka was the early leader.

He looked at that leaderboard on eight, so Koepka, four, five, six shots in, whatever it was, and then started, oh, my God, I'm way behind.

I need to start making the miracle shot here.

And again, Augusta National is a...

is a test of patience you know you're not allowed it frowns on anything like desperation so you're not allowed to run around the course uh you gotta walk you're not allowed asked to be a member you've got to be selected for it so if you're gonna win the masters you can't be seen to want to do desperately and that was the sin of the 17 odd years of mcelroy's master's career until he finally went and did it um so but you at some point you need to be abreast of the score line to decide on