Mason Howell is the youngest player in this year’s Masters at Augusta. He is only 18 and qualified after winning the US Amateur in 2025. Howell says that on Monday night he experienced the most difficult and embarrassing moment of his life. Tradition dictates that he had to give a speech during the amateurs’ dinner, that he already knew, what he could not imagine was that it would be in front of more than a hundred people. It must be the only thing that has taken by surprise a youngster for whom the jacket of the chosen one fits perfectly
The story of Howell and the Masters seems to have been written a long time ago. It’s predestination and the rest is nonsense. It turns out that when he had just turned four, the boy could think of no other Halloween costume than that of Bobby Jones. As you are reading. He dressed as the great legend, as an old-fashioned golfer, with the plus-fours and all his accoutrements. He dressed as one of the greatest players of all time. As the gentleman who one day, after winning everything in golf, would decide together with Clifford Roberts to create a tournament they would call The Masters. Today, 14 years later, Howell is playing in Bobby Jones’s tournament
The first logical conclusion is that Howell’s father was something of a golf geek. But not so. He liked it, yes, and he played it, yes, and the PGA Tour was watched at home, yes, but the sport to which he devoted his best years, standing out especially at college, was tennis. However, the boy didn’t dress as Fred Perry, but as Bobby Jones. Of course, a few months later they gave him his first set of plastic clubs
If this seems to you like a planetary alignment, wait, there’s more. Be careful, more than one head might explode. Howell was a very restless child. He liked all sports. He excelled at tennis, baseball, table tennis and, of course, golf. However, it wasn’t until he was 12 that he devoted himself entirely to the 14-club sport. One of the things that helped him decide was that when he was only nine he went to a Tour Championship in Atlanta and Rory McIlroy gave him a ball. It was in 2016. The Northern Irishman won the tournament. That day, he has admitted, he wished to become someone like Rory in the future
Well, it turns out that on Thursday and Friday they will play together in the first and second rounds of the Masters and Howell has prepared a surprise for the reigning Green Jacket champion. When they greet each other and show the ball they are going to play with, Mason will show him the one Rory gave him at that 2016 Tour Championship, a Nike with the inscription Rors. It will be a joke because he is not going to play that ball, but you will agree that something like that can only happen to a chosen one. Not only does Rory give him a ball, but he keeps it for nine years and now brings it out at the Masters while playing with him… Like a movie
Howell’s young history is full of extraordinary situations. At 14 he carded a 59 on the Glen Arven Country Club course. You have probably never heard of this course. Well, it is one of the oldest in the United States. It opened in 1892 and is in Georgia, of course, the same state as Augusta National, although each is at opposite ends. President Eisenhower, who had a tree with his name at the Masters venue, often played at Glen Arven and even its clubhouse resembles it. As if it had been an inspiration, though that’s not documented anywhere
Howell will be one to watch because his story seems to have already been written and it is a success. Last year he won the US Amateur by a crushing 7 and 6 in the final and a few weeks later he played and came out unbeaten from the three matches he played in the Walker Cup. That said, he has played three professional tournaments, including the 2025 US Open, for which he qualified by winning his qualifier, and he has not yet made a cut. That should be his primary objective this week, although given his pedigree who knows what he might surprise us with
