Different strokes of Ludvig Åberg and Matthieu Pavon tell their stories | Andy Bull

There are 20 ways to make it to the Masters, from winning the thing, or one of twelve other leading competitions, to reaching the top 50 in the world rankings the week before the tournament starts.

The official lists will tell you that Ludvig Åberg and Matthieu Pavon both came the same way, via route No. 17, “Individual winners of PGA Tour events awarding a full points allocation, from previous Masters to current Masters”. Åberg did it by winning at the RSM Classic on St Simons Island in November, and Pavon by winning the Farmers Insurance Open at Torrey Pines two months later.

They stepped onto the first tee together at just after two on Friday afternoon, two European golfers high on the leaderboard, and formed a duo in the penultimate round. Neither had ever played the Masters before, but Åberg was two under, four shots off the lead, and Pavon was one shot further back.

But in reality, the two men had taken very different paths until now. Åberg, 24, is just about the hottest young golfer on tour. He turned pro 10 months ago and in that time he has won two tournaments, been part of a winning Ryder Cup team and earned as much money as Pavon, 31, has in the past decade. Åberg joined the tour right after graduating from Texas Tech, where he was ranked as the best amateur golfer in the world, becoming the second man in history, after Jon Rahm, to win the Ben Hogan Award, which was twice awarded to the best collegiate player. queue.

Pavon has also won two top tournaments, but it took him ten years to do so. He turned pro in 2013, competed on the Alps Tour for two years, worked his way through Q-school to the Challenger circuit and eventually made it to the European Tour, where he had a bunch of third-place finishes without ever winning anything. He finally made it to the PGA Tour after scoring four birdies in four holes at the finish of the DP Tour Championship last year. He is currently the best golfer in France and will be the face of the game there during the Olympic Games later this summer.

Pavon’s father, Michel, was a professional footballer, playing in midfield for Toulouse and Bordeaux, later also becoming the manager of the latter. His mother, a golf instructor, brought Michel to Augusta in 2009 as a 40th birthday gift. Pavon tells a story about how she buried a one-euro coin here at the driving range and told her son to come dig it up for her sometime in the next ten years. It took him 15 years, but he finally made it. Along the way, he almost stopped playing because he had the chipping yips, until his coach fixed it by teaching him a cross grip.

He looks like a man who has lived a little. He has a beard, a broken nose, and he chews his T-shirts while waiting to play. He runs around the course, but he doesn’t have much game. He hits a neat little fade and is a good hand with his putter, and he has, according to his friend and fellow pro Mike Lorenzo-Vera, “a huge pair of balls.”

Åberg, on the other hand, is a tall, blond, sweatless Swede. It got to 30 degrees in the sun, but he didn’t seem to drop a single bead. He has the air of a man whose life does not contain many more difficult decisions than whether or not he wants syrup with his pancakes. His golf is young, beautiful and godly, and when he catches the ball cleanly, as he did with his second shot on Augusta’s terribly difficult 5th, you don’t even have to look at the ball to know where it’s going. The sound tells you everything you need.

Even his bad shots hardly seem to bother him. When Åberg finally made a mistake and hit his tee shot into the trees on the long uphill 8th, he arrived three minutes later with a light-hearted query of “no one hurt?” and a half-eaten club sandwich in hand. He finished slowly, while also thinking about what to do next. “A little 5-iron,” he concluded. He clipped it 200 yards down the fairway and with his follow-through clipped a few ivy leaves from a nearby tree. Five minutes later he was over a birdie putt from 13 feet.

Åberg didn’t make that one, but he did pick up four and briefly reached the top of the leaderboard before making back-to-back bogeys with a pair of three-putts at 14 and 15. Pavon, meanwhile, struggled around Amen Corner, where he dropped shots on both 11 and 12. Åberg eventually scored 70, Pavon 73. But the biggest difference between them wasn’t the score. It was because Åberg had the easy confidence of a young man who believes he has countless days like this ahead of him. Pavon had all the nerves of an older professional who knows all too well how precious they are.