Masters week preview

The Masters starts Thursday, April 9, at Augusta National, and this year’s first surprise is not on the leaderboard. It is in the absences. Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, two players who have defined the place for a generation, are both out of the 2026 field. Golf.com reported that neither man will be at Augusta during tournament week, which gives this Masters a strange gap in the middle of its usual theater (golf.com). Woods is stepping away to focus on his health, according to reporting cited by Yahoo Sports, while Mickelson said he would miss the tournament because of a family health matter after already missing the first four LIV events of the year (sports.yahoo.com) (espn.com). That absence matters because Augusta is built on continuity. The tournament sells itself as a ritual as much as a competition. The same course. The same green jacket. The same ghosts. Woods last won here in 2019. Mickelson won three times, most recently in 2010. Their names still sit close to the center of the Masters story, even when their games no longer do (pgatour.com). So when both vanish at once, the tournament stops feeling like a reunion and starts feeling like a handoff. That handoff now belongs to Rory McIlroy. He returns to Augusta as the defending champion after finally winning the Masters in 2025 and completing the career Grand Slam, a feat only six men have achieved. He did it the hard way, in a playoff against Justin Rose, after another Sunday that threatened to slip away from him before turning into the biggest win of his career (pgatour.com 1) (pgatour.com 2). Augusta has spent more than a decade asking whether McIlroy could ever finish the job. Now the question has flipped. What does this place look like once the burden is gone? The field around him is good enough to make that question uncomfortable fast. ESPN lists 91 players in the field, with Scottie Scheffler again near the center of the betting and form conversation, alongside major winners and LIV stars who still know how to handle Augusta’s slopes and nerves (espn.com). The PGA Tour’s field breakdown shows how little room there is for sentiment here. Late spots were still being decided last week, with Gary Woodland playing his way in by winning in Houston and others grabbing invitations through the top 50 in the world ranking (pgatour.com) (golf.com). That is where Cameron Young enters the picture. He arrives as one of the few players whose recent trajectory actually feels steeper than McIlroy’s. Young won the 2026 Players Championship with a closing 68, a birdie at the island-green 17th, and the longest drive ever recorded on the 18th hole at TPC Sawgrass in the ShotLink era. That victory pushed him to a career-best world ranking, and his official OWGR profile now lists him at No. 3 (pgatour.com) (owgr.com). Young is not being watched just because he is hot. He is being watched because Augusta has already started to make sense to him. WRDW’s Masters week coverage noted his recent top-10 finishes at the tournament, which is usually the clearest sign that a player has moved from talented visitor to real threat on this course (wrdw.com). The first-round groupings underline how directly the tournament wants to stage that comparison: McIlroy and Young are paired together on Thursday with amateur Mason Howell, scheduled to tee off at 7:31 a.m. PDT, or 10:31 a.m. in Augusta (usatoday.com). The rest of the week will unfold in the usual places. ESPN and CBS have the main television windows, while streaming coverage runs across Masters.com, the Masters app, ESPN+, Paramount+, Prime Video, DirecTV, and the ESPN app. Golf.com’s viewer guide lays out the now-familiar sprawl of feeds, including featured groups, featured holes, and every-shot coverage that can make Augusta feel both more intimate and more overproduced at the same time (golf.com 1) (golf.com 2). The tournament still begins, though, in the oldest way possible: with a few players walking onto the first tee Thursday morning, and one of them wearing last year’s green jacket.