» Can Tyrrell Hatton win Masters looking stupid with his ‘worst scores’?

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AUGUSTA, Ga. — Tyrrell Hatton has a love-hate relationship with golf, but he’s still seems to be looking for something he loves about it.

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He might be the only golfer in the Masters field who can step into the painting that is Augusta National and see nothing but brush marks.

Hatton was asked earlier in the week if he likes the famous course.

“Do I like any golf course?” he replied.

Like it or not, the expressive 33-year-old finds himself in the hunt on the weekend at the Masters, and listening to him after Friday’s round, he’s accomplished it in spite of a lot of tough luck.

“I have four dropped shots today and probably three out of the four shouldn’t really have happened,” Hatton said. “Yeah, I mean, 17 is just ridiculous. Obviously tapping in there and hitting a little mark and goes straight left and lips out left and all of a sudden you look stupid.

“But I don’t really know what to say about that. When you hit a decent putt from a foot, you expect it to go in.”

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Hatton was referring to a missed tap-in for par that caught the edge and jettisoned more than six feet from the hole.

“It’s late in the day and there was rain last night, and when the sun gets to a certain height, you can kind of see more of the blemishes,” Hatton said of the most immaculate putting surfaces in the world of golf. “Yeah, that green had a ton of footprints, and it’s just one of those things that you’re never really going to get around. Sometimes they bobble in for you, and obviously that time it bobbled a miss for me.”

Much of the powder-keg Englishman’s charm on the golf course is that he always seems ready to blow, and frequently looks more exasperated at good shots than bad. After Friday’s round the LIV golfer threw a full-fledged pity party for himself despite being firmly in the hunt at 5-under and earning a late afternoon pairing with defending champ Scottie Scheffler.

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“I just don’t hole putts from that 15 sort of foot range,” Hatton said of Augusta National. “I just struggle reading them, and that’s been the consistent theme for the nine times that I’ve played it. I’m a good putter, and I just don’t get these greens.

“So it’s frustrating to come off the course and feel like you kind of have shot the worst score that you could every time,” he said. “It was very easy to look stupid.”

Somehow, his “worst scores” this year have him gunning for a green jacket. Hatton has played in eight previous Masters, finishing a career-best T9 last year. He was asked how he would have handled Friday’s adversity as a younger man.

“I feel like I probably would have handled it pretty much the same way as I did today,” he said. “But yeah, I mean, that’s just me.”

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