Singaporean golfer Hiroshi Tai’s long journey to the Masters

In the early years of this century, a young boy gets special permission to use the range at the Singapore Island Country Club. He’s five years old, but his immediate love of golf is quickly advertised in his persistence. He won’t leave the range, just hitting bucket after bucket of balls till a blister appears and his finger bleeds.

That boy is now two days away from

his Masters debut.

Hiroshi Tai is 23, ready, his putter polished, his golf balls marked with a black line, his ball marker from the East Lake Golf Club where the legendary Bobby Jones, co-founder of the Masters, came from. He is also no longer a boy.

Just ask Georgia Tech’s assistant coach Devin Stanton, a former baseball player from the university who will caddie for him in Augusta and is impressed by his stint in the Navy.

“He did the two years of military service right out of high school,” says Stanton. “And without a doubt, he was the most mature freshman I had ever seen. He came in and he was a grown man.”

In Augusta are Tai’s sister Yoko, a plus-two handicap golfer, and his parents Yukiko and Jacky. He’s Singaporean and she’s Japanese and if Hiroshi can’t speak her language he can understand it. “He knows,” smiles Yukiko, “when I am scolding him in Japanese.”

But the language this family speaks is sport. It runs richly in their collective veins. His mother did gymnastics, played tennis, volleyball and ice hockey; his father preferred badminton and racket sports. Fittingly they met on a tennis court in Hong Kong. Love between the lines.

Rickie Fowler hasn’t made it to Augusta this year, but Yukiko’s boy has. The young man may not have a Wikipedia page yet but he’ll soon have a Masters invitation framed on his wall. Think of it as a page in Singapore sports history.

Before they left for Augusta, Yukiko and Jacky met The Straits Times at a cafe in the Marina Bay financial district. As with any journey, this has been a tough, long one. It began partly with Andrew Welsford, a golf coach, suggesting Tai should play all sport. “Let them decide what to pick up,” the parents remember him saying. And so Tai played rugby, football, tennis, swam and did track.

But golf wouldn’t go away.

At seven he was entered into US tournaments and the family would tag along. Competitions became family vacations. The parents of other kids would suggest he stay in the US but deciding on a child’s future is a delicate thing. Yukiko and Jacky talked, they read books recommended by Welsford such as Geoffrey Colvin’s Talent Is Overrated, and eventually they enrolled Tai in an academy in the US at 12.

This is a familiar tale. It is the story of Joseph Schooling, Andy Murray, Alex Eala and a thousand others, all young athletes living some distance from home, learning self-sufficiency, building toughness and putting dreams before loneliness.

From the start, Tai had a hunger. Yukiko remembers days when he was around 12-13 and had nose bleeds during rounds, such was his intensity. “After a bogey he must make a birdie,” she remembers. “Now he has calmed down.”

The arena is its own classroom, yet the oldest dilemma in sport in Asia is how far to let a kid go. Tai’s parents value sport and what it brings a person and thanks to astute advisers he started his university recruitment process early. Many colleges were interested but coaches had to be convinced that national service wouldn’t seriously interrupt his growth as a golfer.

Eventually Tai joined the Yellow Jackets (as all Georgia athletic teams are known), who have produced a line of Major winners from Jones to David Duval to Stewart Cink to Larry Mize, who danced after he won the Masters when his 140-foot chip bumped and rolled and fell in during the play-off with Greg Norman in 1987.

Tai is unlikely to wear a Green Jacket this year, but Stanton has the wisest advice for him. “You’re only gonna play the Masters as an amateur once, so just enjoy every bit of it... (I will) encourage him to ask questions and talk to the pros that are out there. He gets a first-hand look of how they go about their business. And it’ll be a huge learning experience for him.”

The Masters is a severe golfing examination, but Tai brings some polished tools to this test. “His wedge game is incredible,” says Stanton. “You get him in the fairway 140 yards and in and he’s pretty dangerous.”

What does Tai want to be? Just better, says Stanton. “He wants to see how good he can get. You can tell he doesn’t play for accolades. He’s had some incredible wins, obviously, winning NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association title in 2024), but he’s just on a mission to see how good he can get in this game which is awesome.”

And so here he is, taking his first Major steps in the same field as Rory McIlroy and Scottie Scheffler. Where Yukiko and Jacky’s boy will go, who knows, but the five-year-old boy with the blister has made it to the big man’s game. As journeys go, well, it’s masterful.

Tai’s distance

Driver: 300 yards (carry)
3-wood: 260
4-wood: 220
5-iron: 210
6-iron: 200
7-iron: 185
8-iron: 170
9-iron: 155
PW: 145
SW: 115

His equipment

Clubs: Titleist
Putter: Titleist
Covers: Georgia Tech
Marker: East Lake Golf Club, Atlanta

His habits