5 Players Who Need Win At Valero Texas Open to Qualify for Masters

At last year’s Valero Texas Open, Akshay Bhatia outlasted Denny McCarthy in a playoff and one day later was at Augusta National Golf Club practicing for his first career Masters start after earning the final spot in that exclusive field.

Among the hundreds of cool little details about the year’s first major championship is the one where the folks who run things leave a final potential spot open in their field, but only if an unqualified player wins the final tournament beforehand.

There are 119 players in this week’s field in San Antonio who are hoping to claim that final spot in next week’s Masters.

Let’s identify five (OK, six) who would be among the bigger stories if any of them are able to make it happen.

5 Players Who Need Win At Valero Texas Open to Qualify for Masters

Rickie Fowler

Once upon a time, Fowler wasn’t just a lock for the Masters field, he was among the young players believed to have a chance to slide his arms into a green jacket someday. He owns three career top-10s and two others where he was just a stroke out of that range, but suffered a three-year absence from the tournament before returning last year and finishing in a share of 30th place.

While he remains one of the game’s more popular players, his game is no longer what it once was, as he’s dropped to 110th in the Official World Golf Ranking and last week’s T-52 in Houston didn’t even have anyone calculating his potential for getting into the Masters field. Even so, he’s played some of his best golf when his back is up against the proverbial wall, so don’t discredit Fowler’s chances at that final spot, especially in windy conditions. 

Ben Griffin

While Fowler’s chances weren’t being calculated last week, Griffin’s certainly were, as his T-18 finish left him in 51st place in the OWGR – one spot shy of automatically qualifying. On Monday morning, he tweeted, “Thank you everyone for the kind messages after yesterday’s round. Unfortunately the media was a bit misleading about a top 28 qualifying me for The Masters.” While I obviously don’t see, hear and read everything out there, it’s tough to pin this one on “the media,” but Griffin might’ve gotten some bad intel as to where he needed to finish. In any case, he’s now playing for a 13th week in a row, a streak which began at the Sony Open back in early January. For a guy who’s never before played in the Masters, finishing 0.0098 average points out of the final spot and then qualifying with a victory would be the sweetest way to make it happen.

Gary Woodland

As I said on the SiriusXM PGA Tour Radio postgame show Sunday evening, if the PGA Tour was like high school and voted for Homecoming King and Prom King each year, Woodland would probably win in a landslide. As if to exemplify just how classy he is, during his interview with our radio team after his runner-up finish, he deflected initial praise of his game in order to first commend Min Woo Lee on his long-awaited first PGA Tour victory. The fact that Woodland is not only playing golf at a high level, but contending for tournament titles just 18 months after surgery to remove a benign brain tumor is remarkable in itself. If the 2019 U.S. Open champion is to make his way back to Augusta National this Sunday, there won’t be a dry eye in the house.

Alejandro Tosti

I probably could’ve gone with three-time major champion Padraig Harrington or sweet swinging Jake Knapp or big-hitting Aldrich Potgieter in this spot, but I chose the combustible Tosti because, well, he’s combustible! Playing in the final grouping at last week’s Texas Children’s Houston Open, he was either complaining about his playing partners’ slow pace of play or slowing things down himself in an obvious maneuver to keep from winning friends amongst his peers, even if the behavior didn’t make too much sense from an outsider’s perspective.

Even if you’re not a fan of his antics, Tosti’s game is admittedly so much fun to watch, as he pulls driver on nearly every drivable hole and relentlessly fires at flagsticks. That strategy might not work at Augusta National, but if he’s already got a trophy to his name this week, he might not care and freewheel it anyway.

Ben James/Preston Summerhays

There are five amateurs in next week’s Masters field, as Bobby Jones’ imprints are still all over the tradition of allowing such up-and-comers to stay in the famed Crows’ Nest and compete at Augusta National. They are largely not, however, the best of the best. U.S. Amateur champion Jose Luis Ballester is ranked fifth in the World Amateur Golf Ranking, while Evan Beck is 15th, Justin Hastings is 22nd, Hiroshi Tai is 44th and Noah Kent is 143rd.

Luke Clanton and Jackson Koivun, who are ranked 1-2 and the two most celebrated ams in the game, won’t be in the field. Neither are James, who is ranked third, or Summerhays, who’s 11th, but a Nick Dunlap-like triumph as an amateur could mean someone needs to bunk together high atop the clubhouse, providing both an unlikely and unbelievable story entering next week.