AUGUSTA, Ga. – Nobody should ever, under any circumstances, feel bad for Dustin Johnson. The man won 24 times and $75 million on the PGA Tour, cashed out for another reported $125 million or so to go to LIV Golf and takes the private jet back to his $14 million house in Florida where Paulina Gretzky and their two kids will love him whether he shoots 65 or 85.
Life’s probably pretty good.
That’s a decent enough explanation for why Johnson, after finishing bogey-double bogey Friday to finish one shot worse than the projected cut line at the Masters, didn’t seem particularly frustrated about potentially going home early for the third time in the past five years. He was even genial, saying he felt pretty good about the way he was hitting the ball.
“I’m playing better than I scored for sure,” he said after signing for a 73, his 11th straight round here in the 70s.
But to follow Johnson around Augusta National these days is, frankly, a bit of a sad scene.
Here’s a guy who won this tournament five years ago at the COVID-delayed Masters for his second major championship, contended at about half the majors over a 10-year period and was just generally great at golf with a game that traveled to nearly any kind of course, under nearly any kind of conditions. You just assumed you’d see Johnson on the leaderboard because he always seemed to be there.
These days? Even here, at a place he won and once made five straight top-10s, he feels far more irrelevant than he should be.
There was a time not too long ago when you could have plucked two guys off nearby Washington Road, paired them with Johnson and drawn huge galleries anywhere because he was that big of a name and his powerful, majestic game was that spectacular to watch.
But in the context of what Johnson has done since signing with LIV – which is to say, almost nothing of note – Augusta National pairing him with Nick Taylor and amateur Justin Hastings for the first two rounds feels like a statement about his place in the game. And it’s not particularly good.
So the question is simple: Is the old Johnson ever coming back, or is one of the great careers of this century just effectively over from a competitive standpoint?
“All it takes is one good round though and it's kind of right back into it,” Johnson said. “You know, for me, just got to clean up the mistakes a little bit. The game is in good form. Just got to limit the mistakes.”
