2021 Year of Golf for Japan

(ATR) 2021 could well be the Year of Golf for Japan. Hideki Matsuyama is a national sports hero following the first ever Masters championship for a Japanese professional.

Matsuyama, 29, won by a single stroke Sunday after beginning the final round with a four shot leadat the Augusta National Golf Club.

His victory follows by one week another triumph for Japan at the fabled golf course in Georgia. Tsubasa Kajitani won the Augusta National Amateur Women’s championship on April 3. The 17-year old took the championship on the first hole of a playoff with Emilia Migliaccio. The tournament debuted in 2019 but was cancelled in 2020 due to the pandemic.

The 2021 Masters is Matsuyama’s tenth. At his first in 2011, Matsuyama was the lowest scoring amateur, congratulated in the Butler Cabin ceremony for Masters winners by then Augusta chair Billy Payne, former president of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.

Matsuyama and Kajitani will likely now enter into the picture for spotsat the Olympics tournament inJuly and August at Kasumigaseki Golf Club. Each country is limited to two men and two women for the competition, the second since golf returned to the Olympics at Rio 2016. Kajitani will be competing against established Japanese pros for a Tokyo slot.

Along with the possibility of playing on home turf, the pair may well may find themselves mentioned as candidates to light the Olympic cauldron during opening ceremony July 23, postponed by one year by the coronavirus

British golfing great Nick Faldo, now a commentator for CBS at the Masters suggested as he watched Matsuyama march toward the championship that the cauldron lighting would be an appropriate honor.

Reported by Ed Hula.