Justin Rose's name has been at the top of the leaderboard all week at the Masters.
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AUGUSTA, Ga. — A Yes or No question faced Justin Rose Friday afternoon in the Augusta National media center, probing to see if he views pro golf the same way we do.
Many of us bucket pro golfers into generations, I asked. Do you look at your contemporaries in terms of generations?
Rose answered the question — “Yes” — answered the obvious follow-up — which generation are you in? — and then kept going, detailing his battle with age on the PGA Tour. A relative old, at 44 years (young), Rose can punch back at aging every once in a while. He’s doing it at the Masters, where he leads after 36 holes.
“All the young guys are coming up super quick,” Rose said of these generations. Jordan Spieth and Justin Thomas were “young bucks” not too long ago, he added. Now those young bucks are in their prime, leading to a new generation of young bucks like Ludvig Aberg and Rasmus Hojgaard.
There are always new young bucks, he continued, a fact that has greyed the hair along his ears. Rose clearly sees golf generationally, which means he sees his existence in contention delicately.
There’s one old man on the leaderboard, and he’s on top. How long can he hold it?
IT’S FUN TO THINK ABOUT GOLFERS in these generational buckets because the ebb and flow of achievement spans decades. Players arrive on the scene without any choice over their pro golf siblings, and they play out a lifetime of tournaments to see who was the best. On Friday, Rose immediately volunteered two golfing brothers he considers his generation: Adam Scott and Sergio Garcia.
“Still doing it, still competitive, still willing and able,” Rose said of the three.
Of the bunch, Rose was the first to flash as an amateur but Garcia was the first to pop as a professional. Scott won the Players Championship in 2004, and then Garcia won it in 2008. Scott was the first to win a major, in 2013, but then Rose won the very next major, two months later.
Garcia and Scott were both born in 1980, preceding Rose who arrived to English parents living in South Africa that July. It’s a reminder that these generations often come down to “What year were you born in?” or “Which year did you graduate high school?” But the other commonality between Scott and Garcia is that they both eat at the club on Masters Tuesday night, and when they arrive for a round of golf, they lace up their spikes in a special locker room at Augusta National. They’re both owners of green jackets.
Rose is not.
Garcia would be the first to tell you — of all the golfers walking this earth, no one deserves one of those jackets more than his pal “Rosey.” Rose has now held a post-round lead in the Masters nine different times, the most of anyone who didn’t eventually win one. One of those leads came on Saturday night in 2017. The next day, Garcia beat him in a playoff.
Their careers diverged that day in obvious ways, many of which we knew when Garcia got to hoist the trophy and select the appetizers for the following Champions Dinner. But the end game of that evening eight years ago — when Rose surrendered a one-shot lead on the 71st hole — arrived in 2022, when LIV Golf began chasing after major champions with multi-million-dollar handouts.
Garcia, like many of Rose’s fellow European contemporaries, graciously accepted that late-career subsidy, as well as the reputational consequences that have followed. (There’s been plenty of that.) Ian Poulter, Lee Westwood, Henrik Stenson and Paul Casey all joined Garcia — forming a bloc of many of Rose’s closest European-born contemporaries. The group of Garcia, Poulter, Westwood, Stenson, Casey and Rose bonded together as members of Team Europe at the Ryder Cup. They’ve bonded together by long trips across the Atlantic. And they’ve bonded together in the shouts of Premier League scores heard on tee boxes across professional golf over the last two decades. All of them left Rose for LIV, mostly thinking he’d join them.
Rose zagged when you’d least expect it. His game was trending down when those millions were being bandied about. But he saw a bit of the future no one else could. That without access to major championships, what is there to play for? “That’s where my childhood dreams lay,” Rose said in the wake of his stunning 2023 Pebble Beach Pro-Am win. The majors. He’s played every single one of them since. The quartet of Poulter, Westwood, Stenson and Casey have played a total of two.
Rose has been calling this era of golf his Indian Summer for almost a year now, ever since he inexplicably launched himself into contention at the big ballpark of Valhalla at the PGA Championship in May. He was surprised at how comfortable it felt to be in contention again, and then surprised himself again when he finished T2 at the Open in Troon two months later. He’s towed a recovery trailer from Tour stop to Tour stop in recent years to help his body feel a generation younger. Cold plunges, hot plunges, infrared saunas.
“Chronologically, yeah, he might be in his 40s,” his swing coach Mark Blackburn said in July, “but I think biologically, the way he looks after himself, he’s probably in his 30s.”
Rose said he wants to “steal” a major or two in these final years of a career, and considering he arrived in Augusta with 110-to-1 odds, his name atop the leaderboard has him halfway to a heist. Max Homa paid witness for 36 holes, and called it “Total package type of golf.” Twelve birdies over four bogeys and putting better than anyone in the field.
What does he get for it? He gets to start his weekend with a tiny lead over three of the best golfers in the world. He gets to be the last man off Saturday afternoon at a major championship, playing alongside a 30-year-old who could pick him up and carry him to the 1st green.
But he also gets a chance at something that seemed like it was lost a long time ago — something that might really be lost for men of his generation. Frankly, Rose gets a chance to insist that generations don’t really matter. And that the sun shines plenty warm during an Indian Summer.
Sean Zak is a writer at GOLF Magazine and just published his first book, which follows his travels in Scotland during the most pivotal summer in the game’s history.
