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There’s Luke List and his caddie, Jeffrey Willett. They’re stationed to the right of the greenside bunker on the par-5 15th on Thursday at Augusta National. They immediately duck when a stray darts over their heads, their reaction so sudden that Willett topples backward.  

There’s a woman among 50 or so patrons to the right of the bunker. She takes both arms and covers her head as the rocket shoots her way. The ball caroms back, rolling just short of the sand. 

And then there is Mackenzie Hughes. If you’re going to cold-shank one from 84 yards out, at Augusta National, during the first round of the Masters, do it with a smile. Here’s the sequence after Hughes’ third shot into the par-5: 

He nods. 

He looks down. 

He looks up. 

He looks down. 

He looks up. And 15 seconds after hitting the shot he lifts his left hand to growing cheers. 

He then takes his left hand and doffs his cap to the gallery, takes a few steps and lifts his hat again before placing it back on his head. 

Hughes wasn’t done, either. The golf site No Laying Up tweeted out a video of the skull — and a few hours after his one-over 73, Hughes commented twice. 

“Man it looks bad on video, but it looked way worse coming off the club,” Hughes wrote. “Didn’t even have time to yell fore.”

After No Laying Up responded, “Dude. SUPER unlucky,” Hughes wrote:

“Yeah it easily could’ve kicked back on green. Tough break…”

The shank was bad. The response was not.

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After a bizarre incident involving a marshal, and in an unfortunate series of events, Hughes was hit with a two-stroke penalty after playing the wrong ball during Wednesday’s first round of the Farmers Insurance Open — and the damage ended up costing him a paycheck. After rounds of 70 and 72 at Torrey Pines, Hughes missed the cut for weekend play by a stroke. 

It all began after Hughes’ second shot on the par-5 9th on the North Course at Torrey Pines. According to Hughes, he walked up to a flag placed by a marshal that had marked a ball, hit to within a few feet and marked before his par putt — only to learn that that ball wasn’t his, and that his ball was a couple yards from the one he hit with his third shot.

The mishap was a violation of Rule 6.3c, and he was penalized the two strokes and played his ball. According to the rule, “In stroke play, the player must correct the mistake by continuing play with the original ball by playing it as it lies or taking relief under the Rules: The stroke made with the wrong ball and any more strokes before the mistake is corrected (including strokes made and any penalty strokes solely from playing that ball) do not count. If the player does not correct the mistake before making a stroke to begin another hole or, for the final hole of the round, before returning his or her scorecard, the player is disqualified.”

Hughes finished with a double-bogey seven, which also sparked a short back-and-forth between Hughes and a Twitter user. At 5:26 p.m. ET on Wedneday, @mmmumbles wrote: “Wow @MacHughesGolf just ruined a good day on #FarmersInsuranceOpen  with a double bogey 7 on his 18th, now -2 and T48.. http://fairwaysplus.blogspot.com” To which Hughes explained what happened. 

“Well I hit my second shot on the par 5 9th short left of the green,” Hughes wrote at 7:55 p.m. on Wednesday. “I went to where it was marked with a flag and hit my chip to 6 feet. When I marked it I realized it wasn’t my ball. Turns out it was about 8 feet from where the flag was. Went from maybe 4 to 7 pretty quick.”

In another tweet, sent a few hours after he learned he missed the cut, Hughes did not fault the marshal. 

“Not the result I was looking for this week at one of my favorite places, but that’s golf sometimes,” he wrote. “Learned a lot and will be better for it. The wrong ball was unfortunate, but it’s the rule and my responsibility to check, not the marshals. Look forward to being back next year.”

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“It never came down,” another said. 

It’s what you don’t want to hear during the final round of a U.S. Open, when you’re just two shots out of the lead, while in search of your first major championship. Then Mackenzie Hughes teed off on the 213-yard, par-3 11th at Torrey Pines on Sunday.

Hughes hooked it, he dropped his iron on the backswing, then kicked it. His ball bounced on the cart path left of the green and headed toward a tree — and fingers and heads of the fans standing nearby pointed up. 

“Where did that end up?” analyst Paul Azinger said on the NBC broadcast. “That couldn’t have stayed up in that tree, could it?”

“They’re all looking up there like it did,” announcer Dan Hicks said. 

They weren’t wrong. 

NBC cameras would show a ball stuck between two branches, and Hughes would use one of the cameras to identify that it was his. By doing so, he unlocked two additional options of relief under the rules: lateral, under rule 19.2c, and back-on-the-line, under rule 19.2b. If he couldn’t have identified his ball, he would have been forced to take the much more penal stroke-and-distance relief option, under rule 19.2. 

From there, Hughes took his penalty stroke, dropped nearby and pitched to 13 feet before two-putting for a double bogey. He had started the hole two shots out of the lead. He’d leave it four back. 

“Incredible odds against a ball sticking in a tree like that,” Azinger said.  

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There are major goodies associated with a top-30 finish, too: In addition to FedEx Cup winnings (which are significant), all 30 players at East Lake will qualify for the 2020 U.S. Open, the 2020 WGC-HSBC Champions, the 2021 Tournament of Champions (whether they won or not) and all four major championships in 2021. To some of these guys, that’s a major promotion.

Some golfers in the field were on the Korn Ferry Tour last season, while other names on the list might be wholly unfamiliar to a casual fan. Here are the five players in this week’s field who seemed least likely to get there.

5. Lanto Griffin

Brendon Todd emerged as the unlikely hero of golf’s fall season when he emerged from the depths of the yips to win back-to-back titles, and he’s actually now garnered enough attention to disqualify himself from this list. But because Todd worked his way onto everyone’s radar, a couple other golfers who got off to hot starts slipped through the cracks. 

Enter Lanto Griffin. A year ago, Griffin was playing in the Korn Ferry Tour Finals and grinding to regain PGA Tour status. Once he got a taste of the big Tour, there was no turning back. Griffin, ranked outside the world top 200 at that point, finished 13th in his first start of the season at the Greenbrier, kicking off a run of four consecutive top 20s before he took the biggest step of all in a career-changing victory at the Houston Open. 

It’s hard for any Tour pro to match that start to the season — six consecutive top-20s, including a win — so it’s understandable that Griffin came back down to earth in 2020. Still, he added three top 10s in the new year, including a T10 finish at this week’s BMW Championship to remind golf fans that yes, he’s still very much here.

Tour Championship starting position: 2 under

4. Cameron Smith

A year ago, Cameron Smith was dejected in wrapping up his 2018-19 season. The promising Aussie had so much success so early that a rough patch left him searching for a consistent 2019-20 season.

Well, he didn’t necessarily get that sort of consistency — but he got just enough to punch his ticket to the Tour Championship. What makes Smith’s trip to East Lake feel so unlikely is that he recorded just two top-10 finishes this season: A win at the Sony Open and a T3 at the CJ Cup last fall. Talk about making ‘em count!

“I’ve always been quite good at not giving up,” Smith said after his win. That’s a good quality to have in his line of work.

Smith, 27, is one of six members of the International Team from last year’s Presidents Cup to crack the top 30. That’s just one fewer than the American team, which saw seven of its 12 members make the field at East Lake.

Tour Championship starting position: Even par

3. Sebastian Munoz

Speaking of the Presidents Cup team, one player who wasn’t even seriously considered for that team was Sebastian Munoz, the 27-year-old Colombian who made his hay in the fall. After playing a mixed Korn Ferry/PGA Tour schedule in 2018-19, Munoz seized his earliest opportunities in the fresh season. He finished T7 at the Greenbrier and then won the Sanderson Farms the following week, instantly catapulting to the top of the FedEx Cup standings. A solo 3rd at the RSM Classic closed out his calendar year in style.

Munoz had such a strong fall, in fact, that his work was basically done by the time 2020 rolled around. Before the playoffs, he notched just one top-15 finish in 16 starts but was comfortably through, anyway. When he finished T18 at TPC Boston, he punched his ticket to East Lake. And when he finished T8 this past weekend — his best result of 2020 — he even picked up a couple extra shots for the Tour Championship.

Munoz enters the Tour Championship 15th in the FedEx Cup standings. For a guy who has never made a cut in a major championship, that’s a pretty huge season.

Tour Championship starting position: 3 under

2. Scottie Scheffler

Even casual golf fans have likely heard Scheffler’s name by now, but it’s worth hammering home just how good the PGA Tour rookie has been of late. When it comes to stars under 25, the trio of Morikawa, Hovland and Wolff usually get all the attention. That’s not the case anymore.

Although Morikawa has ascended to another level with a major championship win, Scheffler (No. 17 in the FedEx Cup) is ahead of Hovland (27) and Wolff (35) in the points list. (Sungjae Im and Joaquin Niemann, it should be noted, are each also in this age group and in the field at East Lake.)

In his last five starts, Scheffler has notched five top-25s, shot 59, posted a top 5 in a major and ascended to No. 36 in the world. That’s heady stuff for the 24-year-old, who was still on the Korn Ferry Tour a year ago this time.

Tour Championship starting position: 2 under

1. Mackenzie Hughes

What if I told you that a golfer who started the year with the following stat line somehow made the playoffs?

MC-MC-MC-T55-MC-T65-MC-MC-MC-MC-MC

An inauspicious start, right? But the great thing about the PGA Tour is that one hot week can change everything. Eleven starts into the PGA Tour season, Mackenzie Hughes had missed nine cuts and generally shown zero signs of life. He arrived at the 2020 Honda Classic low on hope and low in the world rankings — he’d slipped outside the top 300.

Then he finished solo 2nd.

It took a while for Hughes to back that result up; the Honda was his last start before the Tour’s hiatus. But since the restart, he notched a T3 at the Travelers and a T6 at the Memorial, sending him skyrocketing up the points list. The soft-spoken Canadian is hardly a household name, but he arrived in the playoffs knowing he needed two top finishes to make it to East Lake. A T13 at the Northern Trust advanced his case, and 71 strong holes at Olympia Fields left him on the cusp of qualification this week, too.

Long story short, Hughes arrived at No. 18 needing a par; a bogey would leave him outside the top 30. After his approach shot found a greenside bunker, he knew just what he had to do.

“If this was just a Wednesday practice round, nine times out of 10 he’d get it up and in,” said NBC analyst Paul Azinger.

This was a Sunday tournament round, though, and one with major implications.

“Yeah, that was some of the most pressure I’ve felt in a long time,” Hughes said. A solid bunker shot left him with a slippery five-footer for par, and he rolled in the putt and punctuated it with a big-time fist-pump — the kind you rarely see in a T10 finish.

“You know, I’ve contended to win some tournaments this summer, and that kind of felt like the same kind of intensity on that putt,” he said after the round.

Tour Championship starting position: Even par, 10 shots back

The Tour Championship kicks off Friday at East Lake.

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Mackenzie Hughes leads 

Mackenzie Hughes, starting on 10, birdied 11, 14, 15, 16, 17 and 18 for an opening-nine score of 6-under 29, then birdied 2, 6, 7 and 8 on his second nine for a 10-under 60 and a three-stroke lead after the first round. Hughes had a 40-foot putt for a 59 on the 9th hole, but he two-putted for par. 

Hughes would have had to shoot 58 to tie the course, set by Jim Furyk in 2016.

“I kind of joked walking off there that 59 wasn’t even the record because Jim’s 58. I mean, it’s probably not even that special around here,” Hughes said of shooting 59. “But for a personal milestone, it would have been really, really neat. You just don’t get very many chances in your life to do it.”  

The big names

As the third tournament after the PGA Tour’s three-month hiatus due to the coronavirus, the Travelers attracted many of the world’s best, and many were among the top of the leaderboard. 

Three shots behind Hughes were world No. 1 Rory McIlroy, Xander Schauffele and Viktor Hovland. Six golfers were four shots behind, including Phil Mickelson and Sergio Garcia, and Bryson DeChambeau was among the six golfers five shots back. 

In all, 125 of the 156 players shot par or better. 

Nifty Ph-ifty

In his first round since turning 50 last week, Phil Mickelson shot a bogey-free, 6-under 64. Mickelson, teeing off 10, birdied 13, 14 and 18, then tacked on birdies on 2, 3 and 9.

Mickelson played with McIlroy and DeChambeau, and the pairing was a combined 18-under.

“I love trying to play and compete, and I really enjoy playing with guys like Rory and Bryson, who are just tremendous talents and trying to compete with those guys,” Mickelson said. “Rory has got one of the most beautiful golf swings this game has ever seen, and Bryson has got a unique style of playing that is fascinating, and he plays at the highest level. I enjoy kind of watching and learning, but I also enjoy trying to play my game and compete regardless of age.”  

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