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AUGUSTA, Ga. (AP) — Rory McIlroy returned to Augusta National for the first time as the Masters champion without his golf clubs and with high anticipation.
The night after he finally won the green jacket last April, McIlroy climbed the 13 spiral stairs to the second floor of the clubhouse and walked through a door that says, “Masters Club Room. Private.”
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Champions only.
He couldn’t wait to see the most exclusive locker room in golf, intimate and understated, only 27 lockers. Missing that April night was his nameplate, and so his return in December to work on a Prime Video documentary made him eager to find out whose names would be on his locker.
It felt like Christmas morning the way he talked about finding out.
Ben Hogan 1953. Raymond Floyd 1976. Rory McIlroy 2025.
“I was wondering who they were going to put me with,” McIlroy said. “Were they going to put me with another European? I didn’t really know. But having Hogan’s locker? That’s pretty cool, another guy who did the (Grand) Slam. And then Raymond, who I’ve known for a long time and has been a good friend to me in golf over the years.
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“Incredible,” he said. “It never gets old.”
The champions’ exclusive room was created in 1978 and since renovated, but not expanded, which is why lockers are shared (not by active players).
The locker room in the new Players Services Building is more spacious and grander. Masters champions will have a locker there, too, for convenience when they use the fitness and recovery area on the basement level.
But they’ll still be upstairs in their own room, mainly because they can.
“It’s hard to put into words,” Hideki Matsuyama said through his interpreter about returning as Masters champion after his 2021 win. “When I went back for the first time, I knew I could go in, but it just didn’t feel right. It was like, ‘Really? I can go in?’ It’s not that I was nervous or my English. It was just, ‘Wow.’”
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Tiger Woods shares a locker with Jack Burke Jr., who died in 2024. Jack Nicklaus shares with Horton Smith, the first winner of the Masters. Trevor Immelman has Nick…
Source link : https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/masters-26-exclusive-locker-room-130419850.html
Author : DOUG FERGUSON
Publish date : 2026-04-03 13:04:00
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