Matt Kuchar carries early wins into Masters

Matt Kuchar has played in a dozen Masters Tournaments, but it’s been a long time since he came into Augusta National Golf Club with a PGA Tour victory under his belt in the previous year.

More than four years, to be exact. He won the 2014 RBC Heritage, the week after the Masters that year.

Now the former Georgia Tech star comes here with two wins in the past past five months. He won the Mayakoba Golf Classic in Mexico in early November and the Sony Open in mid-January. Since the 2018-19 PGA Tour season starts in early October, that’s two wins this season.

The win at the Mayakoba ended a winless streak of 116 tournaments on the PGA Tour.

“Time goes by fast out here,” said the 40-year-old Kuchar. “I don’t think my wife realized it had been four years since my last win. When she heard that, she said, ‘Holy cow, I can’t believe it’s been four years.’ I was probably a little more aware than she was.”

It has been a return to form for Kuchar, who had a rough 2018. He finished 76th in the FedEx Cup last season after being in the top 20 for eight consecutive years, failed to qualify for the Tour Championship for the first time since 2009 and did not make the Ryder Cup team. He had played on eight consecutive Ryder Cup/Presidents Cup teams.

“It was really tough,” Kuchar said.

He couldn’t even get it going at one of his favorite events, the Masters. He tied for 28th at Augusta National, where he has had some high moments in his career. His best run came from 2012-14, when he finished tied for third, tied for eighth and tied for fifth.

“To have two wins in four or five months, that’s a fantastic run,” Kuchar said of his start this season. “There is a lot of the year left and a lot of great things that are out there to be done.”

After being stuck on seven PGA Tour wins since he took the RBC Heritage in 2014, Kuchar is now one win away from double digits in PGA Tour victories.

He’d love for it to come at the Masters, where he made a splash as an amateur in 1998, finishing in a tie for 21st and being low amateur. He also made the cut the following year as an amateur.

“I feel more confident than I have in previous years, for sure,” he said of his game coming into the Masters. “It’s a tricky thing. Anybody who plays golf knows if you’ve had a great month, a great six months, it doesn’t mean you’re going to have a great tomorrow. You can have a great day on Thursday and go to the course Friday and say, ‘What happened?’ I think I understand the game I play, it’s not something that you own. Because I won in January doesn’t mean I’m going to win in April. There is still a lot of work to do.”

Two months after the Mayakoba victory, Kuchar faced adversity off the course for the first time in his career. The drama, which played out for more than a month, centered on what Kuchar paid his caddie after that victory.

With Kuchar’s regular caddie, John Wood, taking the week off, Kuchar used a Mayakoba resort caddie, David Giral Ortiz.

For the victory, Kuchar won $1,296,000. A player’s full-time caddie normally is paid 10 percent, which would be $129,000.

Kuchar later said he and Ortiz struck a deal before the tournament in which Ortiz would be paid $1,000 if Kuchar missed the cut, $2,000 if he made the cut, $3,000 for a top-20 finish and $4,000 for a top-10, but nothing was said in the event of a victory. Kuchar paid Ortiz $5,000 after the win.

In mid-January, Ortiz told Golf.com he was entitled to a total of $50,000.

On Feb. 13, the day before the Genesis Open, Kuchar said he and Ortiz “had an arrangement” before the tournament started and he was sticking by it.

Two days later, he apologized and said he was paying Ortiz the $50,000 he requested.

“Listen, I was stubborn, hard-headed,” Kuchar said in a statement. “In my mind, I had it as a deal is a deal, but after I won the tournament, a deal wasn’t a deal. Not a good deal. Any transaction, all parties should come out feeling like they’ve won, and certainly in David’s case, he did not feel like he won in that situation, and I needed to make that right. It’s as simple as that.”

For the first time in his career, Kuchar heard it from some hecklers at the Genesis Open before he issued his statement.

“The other stuff, the negative feelings, has been completely different to me,” Kuchar said at The Players Championship in mid-March. “Never have I had people holler out anything other than my last name. It’s been different.

“Thankfully, I’ve had a bunch of great support as well,” he added. “You get a handful of people that are hollering something out.”

He doesn’t expect to encounter any problems at the Masters, where the galleries are among the most courteous in the game.

He said because of his Georgia Tech connection, the Masters is “to some degree a hometown event.”

“Those have been great weeks, great support from the fans at both places,” he said.

“My whole career I feel I’ve had great support. I think people can enjoy seeing me come up the fairways and hollering ‘Koooch’ out. It has been kind of a welcoming reception wherever I’ve gone.”