The 'Absolute Magic' of Jose Maria Olazabal at the 2026 Masters

I have found a salve for the parasitic pop culture barnacles attached to the beloved Masters Tournament. It is watching 60-year-old Jose Maria Olazabal at one of the few places that can still exhibit the genius of one of the greatest sets of hands the game has ever known. It should make you fall in love with the Masters more than any merch haul to show off to your friends on social media.

Olazabal will not win this 2026 Masters. He had no chance before he ever struck a ball, but that does not make his place in the field any less significant and his golf any less worthwhile. Olazabal was “absolute magic” as one instructor following his group put it on Thursday morning, holding the Masters lead at 2 under for a lengthy stretch before the real contenders took over and the speed bumps of reality intervened on his red number round. 

A case has been forming this week at Augusta National that the essence of the Masters has been whittled by overeager influencers and inauthentic appeals for new audiences. It’s an undercurrent, and my colleague Joel Beall outlined it well on Wednesday, describing the attempts, either direct or imposed, by others to manufacture growth and Masters interest instead of standing on and promoting organic strengths. 

MASTERS HUB: Course insights, tournament coverage, and more from Augusta

Ollie at Augusta is an organic strength, one that the most discerning golf fan and curious newcomer can both appreciate. Pushing 7,600 yards, the modern-day Masters setup has to look foreign at times to the 1994 and 1999 champion. He hit only five of 18 greens in regulation on Thursday, not because he’s now some poor iron player, but rather irons are not even coming out of the bag. The Spaniard is frequently just trying to send lengthy approach shots with fairway woods somewhere up around the green and then let that legendary short game go to work. In some instances, such as No. 11, he is not even attempting to put it on the green, comically sending it out way right and then going to his strength. 

The first hole exemplified this approach by necessity, as Olazabal hit his drive just 215 yards, leaving 230 into the green. He sent some lumber up there and then pulled off a gorgeous chip to three feet for his basic par. This would be the playbook over and over again. It’s an almost incomprehensible approach in modern golf, and he has only one of the few sets of hands in the world that could pull it off. He is next to last in driving distance and greens in regulation.

The disadvantage is massive given the distance deficiency, as he comes into greens with trajectories that feel half the height of his competitors. Augusta, like many golf courses, is a place that can reward towering iron shots. Olazabal played it more like that “inland links” design, with the ball frequently running to places by design. 

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Due to the distances needed to cover, the aerial game is simply not available like it is to his competitors. At the par-3 sixth, he’s hitting a 5-iron, simply trying to skirt it over the fronting bunker and have it run up the green to a back left pin. His playing partners, Aldrich Potgieter and Rasmus Neergaard-Petersen, by contrast, sent high lofted clubs into the sky, trying to land their shots on top of the pin. Potgieter and RNP’s combined age is still 13 years younger than Olazabal, who won his last Masters before either was born. The Spaniard was three shots better than RNP and 10 shots better than Potgieter, the speedy South African 21-year-old who Olazabal said was the longest player he’d probably ever played with. 

Neither Potgieter nor Ollie could get home at the fifth, a monster of a hole. Potgieter because he was in the trees again. Olazbal because he needed lumber just to run it up 30 yards short of the flag in front of the green. Facing one of the trickier greens on the course, he entranced the crowd with a low chip shot to six feet that preserved the par. He landed the ball just onto the green and let it run all the way up toward the hole. 

“I'm not going to hit a flop shot if I do have plenty of green to work with,” he said after the round when asked about his technique of letting balls release as opposed to pitching with spin. “That's my nature. I try to use it the best I can.”

Over and over, this kept happening in an extraordinary three-hour run. When I saw a colleague some five hours after his round in the media center, he simply shook his head and said, “I’m still thinking about that Olazabal show.” At the third, an experienced coach called his approach “next level stuff” for “banking it from 100 yards” out off the slope of the front of the green for a birdie chance. “Who does that?!” the coach exclaimed. By the 14th hole, another traveling coach told me, “I’ve seen a lot of golf and this is the best short game display I’ve ever seen.” Included were a stout bunker shot at No. 7 that rolled out for an easy par putt, an incredible chip to just a couple of feet at the ninth, and an all-world up-and-down from behind the green at the 12th. Time and again, he was in spots off the tee that seemed like doom for players with even more speed and power, and he kept walking off with pars.

The pictures from those first three hours did it so much more justice than simple statistics. It’s the pictures, watching the craft and the ball slowly roll, that pull you in and make you romantic about the whole experience. But if stats are your thing, Jamie Kennedy dug this up:

Even for the dilettante just curious about the magic of the Masters, this can do more to pull them into the boat for good than collecting gnomes or Jason Kelce eating a sandwich. The oohs and ahhs went up around the 13th when Olazabal, who was miles from that famous corner, had to rip a low runner and make the turn the old-fashioned way. At one point, an onlooker said it was “magical” to watch him kneel, not AimPoint, to read a putt with his old slant neck MacGregor, adding that “it felt like he’d been dropped in 1989.” 

To watch him battle to make another cut, and the way he does it around the greens, fills up the cup for the golf nerd and will be a must-see on Friday afternoon. Even after 37 years of doing it here, it is still a thrill to watch. It came a day after Augusta National Chairman Fred Ridley, in a rollback boosting monologue, said, “As for professional golf, we hold firm in our belief that the greats of the game are defined not merely by how far they hit the ball, but their extraordinary skill in all aspects of the game.”

Olazabal has to play a different game, but that does not mean he is not competing. He’s hit more practice balls than anyone this week based on the Masters driving range data. He barely plays much competitive golf, even at the Senior level, but showing up, making this cut, and confronting the challenge this modern Augusta presents to his old man game is deeply meaningful. This throwback round came on Seve’s birthday. Most of his contemporaries and former Ryder Cup teammates no longer play, and even some of the legends his junior, like Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, are absent. Olazabal is not a dying breed, but certainly a rarity in this current Masters era with fewer and fewer multiple-time jacket winners still competing in their older years. A bogey-double bogey-bogey stretch that felt inexplicable rather than expected based on the first three hours brought him out of the red but still inside the cut line with a day to go.

Watching Ollie came at just the right time for me. I must admit, I had been beaten down by reels and videos of merch hauls every time I opened my phone the last four days. I was off put and I just wanted to watch golf, and Ollie at Augusta is some of golf at its best. Coverage of the Masters can be rightly accused sometimes of being too much treacle, overdone tradition, and reheated stories of fathers and sons. But sometimes the romanticism can really just be about the golf that’s allowed to shine on one of the greatest courses ever created.