One of the best ways brands, tournaments and broadcasters can get golf fans to support until the end it is very simple. Give it to us the big players who break everything. Not just the good shots. Not just the ones that fall into the jar. Everything.
We want to hear the way to it play a certain hole. Thoughts that rest on a specific shot with a specific lie. The cacophony of emotions that explode in their heads during tense moments. It’s not just, “What does this win mean?” it’s How the hell did you… but almost didn’t?
Golf content production engineers are under no obligation to do any of this, although the smartest ones do. They break away ever so slightly from the status quo with the thought that, What are fans eager for? And they offer things like the Masters’ Every Hole With series, which released its second installment on Friday, featuring defending champion Rory McIlroy.
Augusta National debuted this series in 2025 with Scottie Scheffler breaking every hole on the famous course. It’s a cozy play in the “Every Hole At” series Golf Digest has created over the years, describing everything you need to know, holes 1 through 18, on famous courses around the world.
Where McIlroy’s video differed from Scheffler’s is that McIlroy ended up breaking each hole through his final round target of 2025, rather than simply explaining the holes in general. This will happen in the wake of your biggest career achievement. It also makes sense for Scheffler to be a little more general in his descriptionsconsidering he had won the tournament twice in the last three years, in dominant fashion no less. He has played twice as many meaningful Masters holes as McIlroy in recent years, but never seemed to struggle with the intensity of that course in win-or-lose moments.
Through that hyper-specific treatment from McIlroy, you learn a LOT here on the eve of Masters week. You learn simple things like why he chose driver on the third hole instead of laying like Bryson DeChambeau. It wasn’t that he needed a bird. It’s that he felt more comfortable with the second hard shot after a pilot than with the fuller shot after a shot.
You learn which pin spots, year after year, drive McIlroy a little crazy, underscoring the fact that — after enough Masters starts — there’s scar tissue. EVERYWHERE in that direction, even in the smallest of ways. You learn how perfectly many of Augusta National’s bunkers are set up — at 1, 2, 3, 5 and 8, for example, for the game’s longest players.
You learn which single shot — more than an hour into the final round — finally allowed McIlroy to settle in and feel more comfortable. The fact that everything comes with exclusive and awesome drone footage is the icing on the cake.
You know there are special walks on that course – from the clubhouse to the 1st, from the 17th green to the 18th, or the 16th tee to the 16th green. But you learn which McIlroy thinks is the second loudest, after the walk to the top.
These revelations aren’t shocking, but they do reveal a bit more about how specific players view specific parts of this very specific country. The same place that everyone tries to understand a little more every year. It’s the funnest version of our annual fact-finding mission in the never-ending Masters quest.
Watching McIlroy’s round, shot by shot, and hearing what he wanted to do with each swing, only to – at times – be at the mercy of gravity, the mounds and the grass, was a reminder of the luck involved in this sport. McIlroy’s ball swerved from the tree branches to the greens and back from the hills to the hazards, all while he made some very good swings during this crescendo of life.
The biggest moment, perhaps, came on the 15th hole, when he pulled in a 7-iron. But you learn that one move DeChambeau made caused McIlroy to do things differently than he intended. All this brings us a little closer to McIlroy himself, to his triumph. It’s hard to overdo it this time of year in Masters content. Especially when it’s this good.
Take a look for yourself here:
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