JOURNAL SPORTS
AUGUSTA, Ga. – Sam Burns made a splash at The Masters Wednesday.
The challenge is to do so over the next four days.
Burns, the Shreveport native and Calvary Baptist product, starts today at 12:45 CDT in the final threesome of the day off the first tee in the opening round of golf’s first major championship of 2025. He will play the first two rounds with Sahith Theegala of the USA and Sepp Straka of Austria. They go off Friday at 9:37 a.m. in Round 2.
Wednesday, Burns provided one of the most adorable images during the traditional Par 3 Contest when he kneeled and dangled his almost 1-year-old son Bear over the edge of a pond and let the baby kick his toes in the water as wife Caroline, also a native Shreveporter, watched happily.
Bear was born just after last year’s Masters, on April 22. His dad missed the cut last year, the second time in three starts at Augusta National he hasn’t made it to the weekend.
Burns, who now lives in Choudrant and plays out of Squire Creek CC, finished 29th in the 2023 Masters at 1-over par, opening with a 68-71 but struggling to a 78 on the third round and finishing at even-par 72.
This year, Burns has started slowly, missing the cut in his last three outings, including last week at the Valero Texas Open. The 28-year-old opened 2025 with an impressive eighth-place at The Sentry in early January, but since his best finish among eight starts is 24th in mid-February at The Genesis in Los Angeles.
While uncharacteristically struggling off the tee, Burns remains one of the game’s premiere talents on the greens. He is fourth on the PGA Tour with an 0.839 Strokes Gained Putting rate, 24th in Putts Per Round at 28.10, and despite an overall mundane start, ranks 12th by breaking par 25.74 percent of the time.
After collecting $1 million last September with a 12th-place at the Tour Championship to cap a strong late summer charge, Burns played well while helping the USA team win the Presidents Cup competition.
Burns, a five-time winner on the PGA Tour, Burns, joined the PGA Tour in 2019 and has won just short of $29 million in official money.
He was a star at LSU in his two years (2015-17), winning four times as a sophomore. He was named a first-team All-American and was the NCAA Division I Jack Nicklaus National Player of the Year for the 2016-17 season.
This will be his 20th start in one of the four major tournaments. His best performance came in last year’s U.S. Open, when he tied for ninth.
He is a two-time member of winning Presidents Cup teams (2022, 2024) and played on the United States Ryder Cup team in 2023.
The first two rounds of the Masters will be televised over-the-air on ESPN from 2-6:30 p.m. and on Saturday and Sunday from 1-6 p.m. on CBS. There will be select coverage of holes and groups on Masters.com all weekend, and ESPN+ for the first two rounds. Coverage of the final two rounds will begin on Paramount+ from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
