Masters hero Hideki Matsuyama returns to PGA TOUR at AT&T Byron Nelson

MCKINNEY, Texas — In stark contrast to recent weeks back in his homeland Japan, the return of Hideki Matsuyama to the PGA TOUR happened when no one was looking.

In preparation for the AT&T Byron Nelson, the Masters champion first played nine quiet holes Monday morning. He then spent two hours practicing on Tuesday, set up on a lonely lobe of a putting green in low temperatures and an eerie mist with his caddie. It wasn’t all quiet though, as he was interrupted now and again by other players with their messages of congratulations and goodwill.

It has been a month to the day since Matsuyama, 29, became the first man from Japan to win a major championship.

The period has been one of equal parts celebration and solitude. Matsuyama went home after the Masters — a journey documented on social media, which circulated a camera-phone picture of Matsuyama in the Atlanta airport, his green jacket folded over his arm. A two-week quarantine followed. He then relished his accomplishment with his wife, his young daughter, the rest of his family and, really, the rest of Japan.

He rarely gripped a club.

He spent his quarantine in the company of newspapers, magazines, websites and broadcasts documenting his one-stroke victory at Augusta National Golf Club. “Seeing how the Masters win was portrayed in Japan was great, really unforgettable,” Matsuyama said. He admitted Tuesday at TPC Craig Ranch, the new venue for the AT&T Byron Nelson, that he never had spent so much time with so much material about himself.

He barely could believe the volume. All the stories. All the pictures. All the praise.

“A bit embarrassing,” he admitted. “I’m not used to all that attention.”

But attention is what Matsuyama can expect this week, this season and this entire span of time until the Masters in 2022 and beyond.

He got a sense of it at home, when he emerged from quarantine to the salute of a nation.

Last month in Tokyo, Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga presented the six-time TOUR winner with the Prime Minister’s Award. Matsuyama received a Certificate of Commendation, which stated that his Masters championship “conveys the importance of perseverance to our people, and provides dreams and hopes that are truly remarkable.”

Matsuyama is a celebrity of the first order in his home country. Jordan Spieth remembers a tournament in Tokyo in 2019, when the spectators were lined up six-deep along the first fairway to watch Matsuyama play. The lucky ones in front sat patiently on stools. The ones in back used periscopes.

Adam Scott turned to Spieth and said, “I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“It's next-level stuff,” Spieth said Tuesday.

And there’s the Olympics. Even before his final putt fell at the Masters, Matsuyama was being mentioned as a likely candidate to light the cauldron at the summer games in Japan. He knows he will at least get to play for a country that has believed in him so much.

“I will work hard to win a gold medal,” Matsuyama said.

That competition is scheduled to take place at Kasumigaseki Country Club, which, in a way, is where it all began. Matsuyama won the second Asia-Pacific Amateur Championship there in 2010. That resulted in an invitation to the 2011 Masters. He finished as low amateur. He left Georgia with a dream that has since come true.

“I realize now the responsibility that goes with a major championship, especially the Masters,” he said. “I'm honored. I'm flattered by the added attention, but at the same time, sometimes it's difficult to say no. But it goes with the territory and, again, grateful that I have this opportunity and I'll try my best to prepare well for what's to come.”

That starts Thursday in a grouping with Sung Kang and Jon Rahm. The cameras will be on again, the people again watching. It continues next week at the PGA Championship.

Matsuyama is done reading about his Masters and watching himself on TV. He returned to the TOUR with conviction.

“It was a relief, really, to win the Masters,” Matsuyama said. “It had been a while and now, moving forward and looking forward, I still have the drive to want to win more on the PGA TOUR. And hopefully the confidence or the relief. It's kind of an unusual combination of the two feelings of how I look at myself and hopefully I'll be successful in the future.”