Culture
Joaquin Niemann had to fight to get to this Masters. Now he wants to stay
MIAMI — It was exactly what he wanted. To be nervous. To back himself into a corner and force himself out. It was why Joaquin Niemann was there in the first place, flying across the world for two weeks in Australia. The Chilean golfer has always been one of the most talented players on any course he walks onto. But he was young. He was relaxed. And then he went to LIV.
He kept backing himself into that corner at the Australian Open. He gave up a two-shot lead in the final holes to allow a playoff. Then he missed a makeable birdie on the first playoff hole that would have won it. Nerves. Pressure. Good. From the fairway on the next playoff hole, Niemann stuck it, the ball five feet from the pin. Made the putt. Won the Australian Open.
That shot probably played Niemann into the 2024 Masters.
Joaquin Niemann is the hottest player in men’s golf not named Scottie Scheffler. He is 25. He just won three tournaments in six starts. He was top-five in three more. He’s got a win at Riviera and five professional wins in total. He shot a 59 at a former PGA Tour course. So you might assume he’s a star, right? But despite being No. 9 in the world on DataGolf (which ranks all players from all tours), he’s No. 91 in the Official World Golf Ranking (which does not rank LIV pros).
Niemann chose two years ago to leave the PGA Tour and captain an all-Latin American team with LIV Golf called Torque GC. He reportedly got paid $100 million to do it. And he struggled. “I didn’t play the best,” he said. He finished just 21st in the 2023 LIV standings and was out of exemptions for future majors.
So Niemann made plans during his “offseason” to go to Australia. And Dubai. And then Oman. It was a long shot, but the plan was to jump from 87th in the world to the top 50 and earn a spot in Augusta. And somewhere in these five months, Niemann might have become the golfer he was supposed to be.
“I feel like you could see a change in him,” Torque teammate Mito Pereira said.
Niemann has dug deep and found a version of himself who thrives under pressure. The question is if he can do it on the biggest stage.
Amid the celebration on the 18th green, the mics picked it up. Niemann had just won LIV’s season-opening event in February in Mexico via a playoff, two days after shooting a 59, and before the interview could even start, Niemann muttered: “But I’m not in the majors.”
Some saw it as crass. Some thought it was awesome. But it started the conversation. Niemann’s offseason trips were noticed, but it was still an under-the-radar storyline. He finished fourth at the Australian PGA Championship. He won the Australian Open. Then in January, he finished T4 at the Dubai Desert Classic on the DP World Tour. It was an incredible three weeks in competitive fields, but he was still only 59th to end the year. Niemann understood that. He figured he had to win both Australian tournaments to move into the top 50.
The greater point was that he was more focused. Pereira, a childhood friend from Chile, said Niemann has always been great but has also always been a relaxed person. The type to never think two hours ahead. But last fall Niemann started to realize he wouldn’t be in the majors in 2024, and suddenly a player who had goals of being world No. 1 had to change something. It wouldn’t matter how good Niemann was if he couldn’t play on the biggest stages. Pereira noticed him working harder, going to the gym more, pushing himself and putting himself in situations where he had to succeed.
“I think I liked that kind of pressure,” Niemann told The Athletic last week before LIV’s pre-Masters tournament. “I feel like it pushed me to be better, in a certain way to be more focused, to prepare better, to have my game in better shape.”
Two weeks after Mayakoba, Augusta National gave Niemann one of three special invitations to the Masters without mentioning his play on the breakaway tour. That same week, he played at an Asian Tour event in Oman and placed third. Niemann won again one week after that at LIV’s event in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. This time, an LIV course reporter interviewed Niemann and suggested he would be one of the favorites to win a major championship.
A sarcastic Niemann dryly said: “How is that possible if I’m like 100 in the world?”
Joaquin Niemann leads the season-long LIV standings after winning two of the first three events. (Lintao Zhang / Getty Images)
If Jon Rahm is the best player at LIV, and maybe Brooks Koepka is the most important, and Dustin Johnson and Phil Mickelson really got the project rolling, and even Cameron Smith won an Open Championship just before coming, then Niemann is the most interesting LIV player entering this Masters. Because Niemann represents something new. He is the first young player to become a top player while playing in the little-watched LIV Golf league. And golf hasn’t figured out what to do with that.
No matter how you feel about LIV or Official World Golf Ranking or Niemann’s candid comments on it all, it’s clear that Niemann cares about the majors. He cares about his place in golf. He said multiple times that he doesn’t mean to be antagonistic, and he’s not somebody who gains motivation from beating other players or making enemies. His motivation is internal, and his frustration is with his ambition and concern he won’t have opportunities to reach it. The reality is the majors carry more weight than ever in a divided tour.
“I want to win the majors,” Niemann said. “That’s the message that I want to give to myself, and that’s the approach I want to have going into these tournaments.”
And Niemann at least gains street cred for going out and earning it, while fellow LIV golfers like Talor Gooch — who won the LIV individual title last year — have criticized the Masters for not giving spots to top LIV players. That has not gone unnoticed among Niemann’s old PGA Tour peers.
“(Joaquin) has been chasing his tail around the world to get this, play his way into Augusta or show enough form to warrant an invite. I don’t know if the same can be said for Talor,” Rory McIlroy said in February.
This is the challenge for Niemann and LIV going forward. Niemann, Gooch and the 50 others on LIV made choices, and they knew there would be consequences. It’s why Niemann changed his mind nearly every day in August 2022 before leaving the PGA Tour. On the other hand, Torque teammate Carlos Ortiz told Golf Magazine’s “Subpar” podcast that players were given assurances they would receive OWGR points.
It leaves the career of players like Niemann in a fascinating spot. Most of the other stars and team captains already won their majors, earned their fame and became household names before joining LIV. Their success and acclaim were why LIV wanted them. Rahm could feel more comfortable making his move after winning a Masters and a U.S. Open, giving him exemptions for several years. Niemann’s potential and international reach are why LIV wanted him. Yes, he was once the No. 1 amateur in the world, convincingly won the Genesis Invitational and finished 11th in the Tour Championship after four years on tour, but he was just on the way to becoming a force in golf. Still very far from being one.
While Niemann was able to earn his way into most majors this season (he’s not in the U.S. Open yet but can play his way in, either via his Masters and PGA Championship performance or through open qualifying), there’s no guarantee he’ll be back next year unless he thrives in this year’s majors or takes the same route he did this winter. For reference, Koepka finished second at the 2023 Masters and won the PGA Championship but only ranks No. 31 in OWGR. Cameron Smith is No. 62. Major success doesn’t keep one ranked high forever.
Joaquin Niemann’s first LIV win came earlier this year beating Sergio Garcia in a playoff. (Manuel Velasquez / Getty Images)
LIV CEO Greg Norman withdrew the application for world ranking points in March, ending the hope to change that discussion anytime soon. The expected path for LIV to pursue now is in conversations with the four bodies that govern the majors to provide a certain amount of spots to the top-ranked players in the LIV standings, but there are no indications yet that’s realistic. And while the PGA Tour and the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia (which funds LIV) remain in negotiations to mend the sport, there’s still no actual timeline to do so. And there’s little knowledge of what a deal would mean for unification.
“It’s weird because we’re playing to get better and not for people to say, ‘Hey, you’re really good, you’re gonna get this,’” Pereira said, “but obviously if you’re that good of a player and you’re not getting anything, it’s a little bit unfair.”
The more interesting element with Niemann is simply attention. Eyeballs. Understanding. If a golfer becomes one of the 10 best players in the world and nobody sees it, is he a top-10 player in the world? When LIV had the golf world’s attention to itself in February thanks to a rainout of the PGA Tour’s Pebble Beach Pro-Am, the rerun of the PGA Tour’s third round on CBS still garnered 11 times more viewers than LIV on the CW Network. Niemann is legitimately good, but he’s not earning OWGR points, he doesn’t have a clear path to majors, and his play is hardly being seen.
Golf fans already knew who Rahm, Mickelson, Koepka and Johnson were. How will the casual fans learn about Niemann?
Which brings us to this week’s Masters.
Most of these discussions are broader issues that will be determined over years and years. Right now, Niemann will play the Masters for the fifth time. He ranks No. 9 on DataGolf and has the eighth-highest odds to win at BetMGM. The respect for Niemann is there. And the best way for him to announce himself is with a great week at Augusta.
But even before the qualification dilemma, Niemann hasn’t always thrived at the majors. He has just three top-25 finishes in 19 majors, and his T16 at last year’s Masters remains his best-ever major finish. Then again, he’s made three straight Masters cuts. This is a place where guys improve over time.
The hope is that this is a different Niemann. This is the guy who went to his friends last fall and said, “I need to get into the majors.” The one who spent more time in the gym, who practiced with more focus, who understood he needed pressure on himself, and once he had it he rose to a new level.
This version of Niemann understands that OWGR No. 1 is no longer the goal it used to be.
“There’s no world rankings,” Niemann said, thinking about how to put it. “If you want to be the best, you have to win more majors than anybody else.”
This week, he’ll approach the first tee at Augusta, and his heart rate will get a little higher. His hands will get a little shakier. He’ll be nervous. And we’ll find out if Niemann is ready.
(Top photo illustration: Eamonn Dalton / The Athletic; photo: Mark Metcalfe / Getty Images)
MAKE BELIEVE: On Telling Stories to Children, by Mac Barnett
Mac Barnett is an irrepressible creator of zany books for younger readers. Breezy, frisky romps, dozens of them. (My favorite is Mac B., Kid Spy, Book 1: “Mac Undercover,” which features the former queen of England and her corgis.) He’s an entertainer at heart. In his fiction he knows how to keep young audiences engaged, with droll characters and deft reversals of fortune.
So what are we to make of “Make Believe: On Telling Stories to Children,” the first book for adults by Barnett, our current national ambassador for young people’s literature? This tidy volume of scarcely a hundred pages serves as a succinct defense of his career choice, which he takes as a ministry. (He notes some of the more common disses that well-meaning citizens fling at children’s writers. I particularly cherish something said to me at a fund-raiser when I was being ushered to the microphone: “I would love to write a children’s book, if only I could clear the weekend!”)
I trust it’s fair to start with the single tonal misstep in the volume, which occurs early, on Page 6. With fanfare and too much white space: “A children’s book is a book written for children.” Carry on.
The rest of the book, presented in three chapters, is compulsively readable and doesn’t require a higher degree to appreciate. It has the chatty tone of a slightly obsessive, over-caffeinated friend sitting in your passenger seat with 90 minutes until the next exit.
You can’t help admiring Barnett’s sympathy with the urgent struggle of the young to unlock the riddle of the world. Here he is describing his son’s first tantrum: It involved an intention to go out the front door and in again, over and over. The patient dad eventually lets his toddler straddle the doorsill, wailing, unable to decide in or out. “My son was experiencing the agony of wanting two things that were impossible to have at the same time,” he realizes. “My son wasn’t being a toddler; he was being a person.”
Barnett’s understanding of his child’s dilemma is crucial to his argument: To care about sharing books with children, we have to care about who they are as people. He makes one of his strongest points by calling out the fact that our culture generally holds children in low esteem. To which I might add that while we give lip service to our cherished young, their teachers are underpaid and overworked, their school and library budgets are slashed, and their food security is threatened. Children with big eyes are served up as an emblem of our caring society before the votes against supplying their basic needs carry the day. Don’t get me started.
“Make Believe” isn’t a history. You’ll find little reference to the many narrative forms that feed into the family tree of what we now call children’s books. No Hesiod, no Ovid, no Homer. No Aesop or La Fontaine. No chansons de geste or Chrétien de Troyes. None of John Newbery’s commodification of children’s stories into printed works, nor any mention of the penny dreadful or the funny pages. The great golden age of children’s literature (the mid-19th century to the end of the Edwardian era) — largely though not entirely British writing — does get its due. But Barnett’s laser focus is the reality of life, and books, for the younger child.
He is incisive in his selection of a few examples. I, for one, have never viewed Richard Scarry’s Busytown books as worth analyzing. Perhaps that’s because I didn’t encounter them in my own long-ago childhood? But I’m corrected, and I’m thankful for it. Meanwhile, Maurice Sendak and Margaret Wise Brown, two midcentury creators fostered by the great Harper & Row children’s book editor Ursula Nordstrom, are given proper pride of place. Barnett tells us what these three godheads brought to our modern understanding of the complexity, if inarticulacy, of the emotional lives of children.
In the book’s central section, Barnett trains his attention on Brown’s classic picture book “Goodnight Moon.” Like a sapper defusing a bomb, he examines those familiar pages in a revelatory and even clinical way. He elucidates the famous double-page spread accompanying the text “Goodnight nobody/Goodnight mush.” Anyone who has ever held a child on a lap at bedtime while reading Brown’s book aloud has encountered the Dadaist conundrum of a blank page to connote “Goodnight nobody” — certainly one of the most potentially frightening concepts for a young rabbit, um, kid, who in falling asleep will be more alone than it is possible to be while awake. That “Goodnight mush” is on the opposite page is a eucatastrophe: “We exist! We are alive! We eat food! What a relief!” It’s “Always look on the bright side of death” for the youngest minds. Barnett’s entire treatise is worth this epiphany — and there are a lot more I could trot out for you.
“Fiction is a kind of game, and reading is a way of playing.” This has the sound of a koan at a poetry workshop, and yet the grateful reader of “Make Believe” can make believe they understand it. And making believe is the first step toward making sense. Kudos to Barnett.
MAKE BELIEVE: On Telling Stories to Children | By Mac Barnett | Little, Brown | 112 pp. | $20
We’ve come to the end of our Poetry Challenge. In four days, we’ve committed the four stanzas of “The More Loving One” to memory, and taken some time to ponder its intricacies and appreciate its meaning. (Just joining us? Start here anytime.)
Now what?
In one of his notebooks Auden observes that “a poem or a novel is a gratuitous not a useful object, like a lathe or an automobile.” He wasn’t being modest or dismissive. The impracticality of poetry is a feature, not a bug. It doesn’t do anything, which may be why, as a species, we can’t seem to do without it.
This is how Auden assessed poetry’s value in his elegy “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”:
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
Poetry is part of everyday human reality, and also one of our tools for taking stock of that reality and commemorating our passage through it, alone and together.
A poem is a gift — a gratuity, you might say, offered for no special reason. Auden’s gifts were abundant, and his generosity was legendary. His biographer Edward Mendelson has documented a pattern of discreet, sometimes secret kindness directed at friends, colleagues and strangers: money lent; hospital bills paid; hospitality offered freely along with food, companionship and advice.
Auden’s later work often operates in a similar spirit. Some of his best verse of the postwar era takes the form of letters, wedding toasts, public remarks and dinner-party witticisms, as if poetry were a grand game of words with friends.
“The More Loving One,” first published in Britain at Christmastime in 1957, is a modest, thoughtful present for the reading public. (A few years later, as it happens, it ran in the Book Review.) At first glance, its intention seems to be, above all, to provide a bit of amusement. Anyone can pick it up, pass it along, tuck it away, find a time and place for it — as we have done this week.
Should we hear it once more, before we go?
As we have seen, there is much more to these lines than clever words and pleasing sentiments. Auden applies the balm of irony and rhyme to matters that might otherwise be too grave, too daunting, too scary to deal with. Are we alone in the universe? How should we love? Why should we care?
Instead of a definitive response, Auden offers a thought experiment. Suppose the worst: stars that don’t give a damn; asymmetrical affections; an empty sky. What are we to do?
The answer — care anyway! — reflects the eccentric, stubborn Christianity of Auden’s later years. Faced with the possibility of nothing, the speaker nonetheless chooses to surrender, to love, to believe. This is not a practical decision. It’s an aesthetic impulse, an entirely gratuitous choice.
It’s also a refusal of solitude. We picture the speaker alone, looking up at the chilly night sky, talking himself through his mixed feelings about it. But of course he isn’t alone. We’ve been here the whole time, accepting the gift and sharing it, standing beside our poet as he beholds the stars.
Fill in the entire poem! Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite it.
Question 1/8
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
The final challenge: You’ve been training for this all week. Now show off what you know.
We’re going to do the whole poem, starting from the top. You’ll have emoji hints for each round.
👀👆✨🤓🧠🙂↕️4️⃣🫂🏃🏻😈
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
Here we are on Day 4 of the Poetry Challenge, looking up, again, at the sky. (If you’ve just arrived, click here to catch up.)
We’ve considered “The More Loving One” as a witty, teasing love poem, and also peeked into the life of its author, W.H. Auden, to see what it might have meant to him. But maybe it’s time to take this poem at face value, as a meditation on our place in the universe.
You can read the whole poem here, but to recap: We start by admiring the stars even though they don’t feel the same way (or any way, really) about us. Then we wonder … do we care about them all that much? At last, we imagine them extinguished, leaving an emptiness that we tell ourselves would be just fine. Eventually.
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
Tracy K. Smith, poet
The poem resolves with a sigh that seems to linger, as if the poem didn’t quite want to end. Unlike the concluding lines of the previous stanzas, all of which clocked in at precisely eight syllables, the last line of the last one extends to nine. That may sound trivial, but we know that Auden counted his syllables carefully.
And it isn’t hard to identify the extra particle, the one tweezed in among the others. Auden could just as well have written, “Though this might take a little time.”
That would have maintained the pattern without altering the meaning. The “me” is implied. Adding it might seem redundant. Which is exactly why Auden does it.
Though this might take me a little time.
W.H. Auden, poet
That scant word makes the poem last a little longer. It also emphasizes the human presence of the speaker, a person whose perceptions and feelings are what this is finally all about. He is asking for patience, for grace, as he adjusts his eyes and heart to a stark new situation.
But how much time is “a little”? The split second it takes to utter that extra, unstressed “me”? However much is needed to heal all proverbial wounds? Or are we thinking in astronomical measures, as those stars invite us to suppose? In that case, it might take our poor stargazer more time than he has. Millions of years. Hundreds of millions!
What does it mean to exist as a solitary being in such a vast, incomprehensible cosmos? This may have been an especially timely question when this poem was written; early versions date from 1957, the year the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, marking the beginning of the space age. But poets have been looking at the sky for a very long time.
Some find comforting news of heaven, like William Wordsworth:
The stars are mansions built by Nature’s hand,
And, haply, there the spirits of the blest
Dwell, clothed in radiance, their immortal vest’
Others, like Ada Limón, see the projection of our own curiosity:
Arching under the night sky inky
with black expansiveness, we point
to the planets we know, we
pin quick wishes on stars.
Occasionally a poet (Stephen Crane in this case) will hear an answer that makes Auden’s silent stars seem kind:
A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
Auden himself came back to the subject a dozen years after “The More Loving One,” in a poem called “Moon Landing,” which ambivalently hailed the Apollo II mission as a “phallic triumph,” “a grand gesture” of male self-regard. And while he acknowledges the spirit of adventure behind the mission, he doesn’t admire the moon enough to want to see it up close:
Worth going to see? I can well believe it.
Worth seeing? Mneh! I once rode through a desert
and was not charmed
He’d rather contemplate the moon above him — one who “still queens the Heavens” — than tread like Neil Armstrong on its dusty, lifeless surface. The feats of NASA and its astronauts belong to a world of science, politics and media spectacle; Auden prefers the realm of mythology and aesthetics.
He’s in good poetic company. In “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” Walt Whitman, at a lecture, finds himself “tired and sick” of charts and diagrams and scientific discourse.
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
He did not give a damn if they gave a damn.
For Auden, as for Whitman, demystifying the stars risks stripping them of their poetry. A sense of wonder flickers through “The More Loving One,” along with the wit and the romantic weariness. The poem concludes with an almost defiant commitment to awe, the search for sublimity in the heavens.
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
Matthew McConaughey, actor and poet
Stars or no stars, what matters is the attitude of the person below: receptive, yearning, more in love than he may be willing to admit, even if — or indeed because — he doesn’t quite know what it is he’s worshiping.
As we approach the end of the poem, our own feelings might be in a bit of tangle: admiration, amusement and something else that’s harder to pin down in words or themes. A feeling that, having spent time with a poem largely about solitude, we are less alone.
Let’s nail down those tricky last lines, and come back tomorrow to talk about the whole thing.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the final stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
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