Who's Going to Win The Masters? A Prediction Like No Other

In my humble estimation, one of the hardest feats in all of professional sports is being one guy beating out a field of 100 or so peers over four days and winning a professional golf tournament.  Any tournament.  Equally difficult, is predicting who that one guy will be in any given tournament.  So I am going to go a slightly different route in making the call for the the 2012 Masters (A Tradition Like No Other).

• A European will not win The Masters, and that includes Rory McIlroy.
• An American will win The Masters.
• The winner will come from the following group: Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Keegan Bradley, Webb Simpson, or Hunter Mahan.

If a prediction like that seems like a cop-out, so be it, and let me propose the following wager:  I will bet $5 on this five man entry, and give you the rest of the field to win the coveted Green Jacket. 

I will make this bet with only the first four people who respond by 11:00 PM Thursday (yes, you get to see how the first round plays out). Again, I will make this bet with only four people. I'm not a complete idiot, after all.

What I would really like to see is a battle between Woods, Mickelson, and McIlroy duking it out going into the Second Nine (not the "back nine"; not at Augusta) on Sunday.  Now THAT would be drama.

Enjoy The Masters, A Tradition Like No Other.  Remember, no running and no unseemly shouting, yelling, or other unsportsmanlike behaviour on the grounds of The Augusta National Golf Club.