For Ben Martin, this Masters is for real

The last time the Martin clan from Greenwood descended en masse on Augusta National Golf Club, there were a lot of wide eyes.

“In 2010, it was completely surreal to have Ben in the Masters,” said Jim Martin.

It’s a business trip this time. Jim’s son, Ben, is making his first appearance as a professional in the Masters, four years into a pro career that is on a dramatic upswing for the former Clemson golfer.

“He was a pretty polished amateur. He had the ability to make the cut and play well, but you really weren’t expecting him to just because of the stage he was on,” Jim Martin said. “Now, Ben has become a pretty polished professional. Now you go out there and say, ‘Hey, if Ben brings his A-game, which he is very capable of, he could actually be in contention in this thing.’”

Ben Martin did not make the cut in that first Masters, shooting rounds of 75 and 80 and then embarking on a professional career that saw him earn more than $300,000 on the PGA Tour in 2011 and then spend two years on the Web.com Tour before hitting his stride this year back on the PGA Tour.

The 27-year-old is ranked No. 66 in the world and is 13^th in the FedEx Cup rankings entering this week. He won the Shriners Hospitals for Children Open in October and has pocketed more than $1.6 million in prize money this year. He is coming off a fifth-place finish at the Arnold Palmer Invitational at Bay Hill in March.

“When I was an amateur, I was a little bit out of my comfort zone, and I was really just soaking it all in,” he said. “Now I compete against most of these guys every week. It’s fun to play against the best guys in the world, and hopefully I keep moving up that list.”

Ben Martin attended the Masters every year from 1995 until he graduated high school, thanks to two tickets from his grandfather.

“I think my junior year or senior year of high school, I was on 18 when (Phil) Mickelson won for the first time so that was probably my most memorable, watching him get all that air on his leap,” he said.

This week, he played practice rounds with two-time Masters winner Bubba Watson and U.S. Open winner Webb Simpson on Monday and with former Masters champion Zach Johnson and Ben Crane on Tuesday.

“It was by chance,” he said of his practice round schedule. “I try to treat this like the normal week, and normally I don’t set up practice rounds. I just show up to course and whatever happens, happens.”

Playing with three major winners was some help, he said, but he got the most simply out of the time on the course.

“As much as anything, you have to get out there and see it for yourself,” he said. “Guys can try to help you out, but you can’t really beat getting out there and seeing it with your own eyes, but it can’t hurt to play with guys who have won here before.”

He will play Thursday and Friday with fellow Americans and friends Robert Streb and Cameron Tringale, teeing off Thursday at 11:25 a.m.

“Those are two guys my age. It’s almost like a normal PGA Tour event with those guys,” he said. “If you had asked me who I wanted to play with, those two guys would have been at the top of the list.”

Playing with Streb and Tringale will help Martin with his goal of keeping everything as normal as possible this week.

“My goal this week is like my goal every week and that’s to prepare as well as I can, focus on the things I can control and be committed to my process of how I think I play my best,” he said. “I think whenever I do those things well, the results just follow. The weeks I have had success have not necessarily been the weeks I thought I was playing great, it was just when I am doing the little things that give me a chance to play well.”

Meanwhile, it’s nothing like a normal week for his father, who is making the one-hour, 15-minute drive from Greenwood to Augusta each day and trying to handle all that comes with his son playing in golf’s biggest event so close to home. Mostly that means fielding requests for Masters badges.

“I have gotten a lot, I don’t know how to say, not so subtle messages,” Jim Martin said. “People will send me emails and I’ll let my wife read it and say, ‘What do you think that meant?’ She says, ‘You know exactly what that meant.’ Without asking, they were asking. We have had quite a few of those.”

This story was originally published April 8, 2015 at 4:54 PM with the headline "For Ben Martin, this Masters is for real."