2018 Masters field finalized for Augusta National thanks to Ian Poulter’s heroics

It might be snowing across much of the eastern United States, but the Masters is bearing down on the schedule. The men’s first major arrives as early as it possibly can this year with April 1st falling on a Sunday. “Masters week” will start Monday, April 2nd and the newest green jacket will be slung on the shoulders of the winner Sunday, April 8th. So we’re a month away and the field is mostly formed with precious few opportunities left to play your way to an invite.

UPDATE: Our field is now final, coming in at low 87 players. Ian Poulter punched his ticket late Sunday night with an extra hole playoff win over Beau Hossler at the Houston Open. Poulter had been hovering around the top 50 in the world rankings in recent months, and was told last week he was set to be in thanks to his advances in the WGC Match Play. So he played a match under the impression the different machinations of the world rankings points system would had locked up a spot. Then he was told afterwards someone had made a miscalculation.

It was a tough punch to the gut but Poulter is maniacally competitive and came out the next week and won the last and only invite in Houston. Whatever you think of Poulter, it’s some impressive stuff. Our field is now at 87 players, still on the very small side.

The benevolent green jackets at Augusta, however, went outside the defined parameters for making the field and used the rare “special exemption” powers. This exemption is off the books, so to speak, and not on the list of 19 ways to get in the field. But they use it every now and then and Indian sensation Shubhankar Sharma got an invitation using that special exemption. Sharma is just 21 years old but has been on fire on the European Tour since the end of 2017. He was the 462nd ranked player in the world at the start of December, and is now 66th in the Official World Golf Rankings.

Sharma won the Joburg Open in mid-December, earning a spot in the 2018 British Open, and then got on the board this year with a win at the Maybank Championship in Malaysia. Those two wins made him a known up-and-comer for the Euro Tour watchers, but his introduction to the larger golf world stage came at the WGC Mexico Championship. It was his first ever PGA Tour start and obviously his first WGC, those loaded and exclusive events that could be intimidating for a rookie. Sharma lit it up in Mexico and slept on the 54-hole lead to earn a tee time in the Sunday final group alongside eventual winner Phil Mickelson. Phil became the story at the end, but much of the weekend was spent in the thrall of Sharma Mania. A win at the WGC would have moved Sharma safely into the Top 50 and a coming exemption in a few weeks, but he faded on Sunday.

So Augusta stepped in and offered him an exemption anyway and the 21-year-old will obviously take it and play his first ever major championship next month.

It’s an awesome story. The Masters is made better by extending the invite to Sharma. He obviously also brings a sizable audience and interest in the tournament from his home country.

The Sharma invite bumped the field to (83 it’s now 86) players, which is low, even for the Masters, the smallest, most exclusive major field in the game. The fields of the other three majors top out at 156 players every year. The Masters starts to get panicky if their field approaches triple digits. That approach has happened on a few occasions in recent years but they’ve still steered clear of 100 or more players. This year, however, it’s highly unlikely we even get to 90 by April 1. Unlike the other three majors, there are no alternates if a player drops out or is injured. You’re either in or you’re not and they don’t fill it to a specific number, like 156 at the other majors.

Here’s where the field stands in the last week of March, with Sharma now in the fold. Each player below falls under the first exemption they fulfill as they are listed out by the Masters. Jordan Spieth, for example, is exempt in seven different ways and could be listed under seven different categories below. But he shows up just once, in the first category, as a former Masters champion.

When you win the Masters, you technically earn a lifetime invite. But some of the, ahem, older past champions really started to clog up the tee sheet and slow things down with rounds that sometimes landed in the high 80s. In recent decades, Augusta National would gently encourage these champions to maybe, possibly step aside. Others just decided to bow out and not use the exemption because they knew they weren’t competitive and didn’t want to keep posting. Here are the past champions, who are still invitees, that will not play this year:

Winning the Masters changes your life and triggers all sorts of perks — some of them are fleeting and some of them endure. One enduring perk, no matter how far you fall in the world rankings, is the lifetime invite to play in the men’s first major of the season. The British and PGA extend de facto lifetime invites, while the U.S. Open champion only gets a 10-year exemption.

This year, it would appear we’re on track to have four-time champ Tiger Woods finally play the Masters after a two-year hiatus due to injury.

This is the friendly handshake each major gives to the other. There’s a 5-year exemption that kicks in across the board when you win one of the four. The three-years Players exemption is also standard at the majors, but the Masters gives no such love for the Euro Tour’s BMW PGA Championship, which is often cited as The Players equivalent across the pond.

The Masters will always hold the amateur player in high regard, as a nod to its founder, Bobby Jones, the greatest amateur of all time. They carve out a swath of this limited, exclusive field for the Ams. Augusta has also done a commendable job of creating new amateur titles across the globe in the past decade in an effort to bring the game to different corners of the world. It makes the field more diverse and is a worthwhile effort of trying to “grow the game” in different populations around the world. Here are your amateur qualifiers for the 2018 Masters.

If you play well enough, you get an invite back the following year. All the majors do this in one form or another and Augusta has made the top 12 the cutoff for a return trip. Ryan Moore is the only player from this set that’s relying exclusively on this exemption, riding the gravy train of his T9 finish in 2017.

If you make a run, or even backdoor it (looking at you Rory), at the other major championships, you also get a ticket to the following year’s Masters. That’s not a bad perk. All these players would have qualified via another exemption.

If you win a full FedExCup points event on the PGA Tour schedule, which runs almost every week and month on the calendar these days, then you get a Masters invite. This is one of the few remaining ways to get in the field — win one of the PGA Tour events left in March and you’ll get a last minute ticket to Augusta.

This is also an exemption that the other majors use to build their fields. If you make the fourth and final FedExCup event, the Tour Championship in Atlanta, then you also get a boatload of invites for the following year. That Tour Championship field is the smallest of the season, only 30 players deep, so getting there is not easy. You have to have won or played your ass off all year and then through the Playoffs. Adam Hadwin is the only player below solely using this exemption right now.

The world rankings are a flawed system but it’s the best we have right now. There are also portions of the calendar that give the Euro Tour and international tour stars an advantage. This exemption is used to beef up the international mix. If you move into the top 50 in the last official world rankings at the end of the year, you are safe for the following April. Here are some of those Euro Tour and Asian tour heavyweights.

There are two ways left to get into the Masters. The first is winning one of the remaining PGA Tour events, up to and including the Houston Open played on the eve of the Masters. The second is moving inside the Top 50 in the Official World Golf Rankings the week before the Masters (so that Monday of the Houston Open, 3/26/18). There are a few names who look like they’ll slot into the top 50 by the cutoff, and a significant bubble of players not already in the field hovering just outside that top 50. Satoshi Kodaira, Chez Reavie, and Dylan Frittelli are all inside the top 50 and not yet exempt, while Cam Smith is the closest player on the outside at No. 52.

Update! All four of the above mentioned players are in the field. Kodaira and Frittelli moved into the top 50 early in the year and stayed there to clinch their spot. Reavie lit it up on the West Coast swing and moved his way above the threshold. And Smith spent the past month hovering right around the 50 mark before the WGC Match Play, where he advanced out of pool play. Smith had to do to that to stay inside the top 50 and he came through. The run moved him to No. 44 the week before The Masters. A few others, such as Ian Poulter, spent the week trying to figure out how far they had to advance only to come up short. In Poulter’s case, he was misinformed and told he had done enough and was in the field, only to lose his match and be told otherwise afterwards.

The addition of four more names brings the field total to 87, with one more potential addition at the Houston Open (if that winner on Sunday night is not already in the field).

On a rare occasion, the Masters will just go off the books and use their discretion to hand out a special exemption. In recent years, it’s been used to invite an international player, perhaps on the rise, that they want to include in the field. The choice usually also brings a sizable interested audience, or targeted audience. Ryo Ishikawa received this special exemption three years running and now it’s India’s golden boy, Sharma, who gets the nod.

So that’s your field and breakdown of how everyone can get that coveted invite.

We’ll keep this updated through that final Sunday in Houston but it looks like that list of 83 exempt will only grow by five or six by the time Masters week starts.