There was a point during Tiger Woods’ opening round at Augusta where he audibly remonstrated with his ailing body. “Come on leg,” he said before letting out a four-letter expletive.
And at moments when he bent down to size up a particular putt or simply walked from one hole to the next, there were glimpses of the pain he was encountering.
But through 18 holes of golf that mixed some vintage Tiger with some occasionally rusty-looking shots, he found himself one-under par on his comeback and just four shots off the lead when day one reached its conclusion.
Now, comes the next question of how the body recovers. Woods talked of the painstaking process of getting back to walking and playing golf, so too the routines he must undergo before and after any round. Last night was spent with ice baths and massages on the damaged right leg which surgeons had, at one stage, talked about amputating.
He has about the longest recovery available to him having been paired in one of the last groups today, teeing off at 6.41pm BST, and readily admitted the start of the day would be tough. But crucially, he is still in the hunt.
“I was able to finish up in the red,” he said. “I am right where I need to be.”
But he is also long enough in the tooth to realise that 18 holes do not decide the destination of the Green Jacket.
“This is only one round,” he said. “We’ve got three more to go. There’s a long way to go and a lot of shots to be played.”
The 46-year-old knows better than anyone that Augusta National will only get tougher over the course of the next three days and, as a five-time winner – most recently in 2019 - he is well versed in how to tackle it.
“The golf course is going to change dramatically – cooler, drier, windier,” he said. “You can hear the SubAirs on out there. This golf course is going to change, and it’s going to get a lot more difficult. There is a long way to go. It is a marathon but it is nice to get off to a positive start.”
At times Woods made his return to Augusta and his first properly competitive round since the 2020 Masters look easy, but made the point himself that the golf was the easy part. It is the walking that was a struggle and will continue to be so.
Wearing bright azalea pink, as if the spotlight on him needed to be any brighter, Woods talked with all the awestruck enthusiasm of a newcomer to Augusta.
“I’m very lucky to have this opportunity to be able to play,” he said, “and not only that, to play in the Masters and to have this type of reception. I mean, the place was electric.
“I hadn’t played liked this since 2019 when I won, because in 2020 we had Covid and we had no one here, and I didn’t play last year. So, to have the patrons fully out and to have that type of energy out there was awesome to feel.”
As he dissected his 18 holes of golf, he made it sound like it had been him that had cajoled his team into believing he could return at Augusta rather than the messaging being the other way round.
All week he said he had told them “come game time, it will be a different deal”. He talked of the adrenalin kicking in, getting in his own little world and “getting after it”.
He was true to his word despite what he described as a terrible warm-up in which he struggled to find his rhythm or range at any point. But it proved a false indicator of what was to follow.
And he readily admitted those 18 holes were all the more memorable for what he had encountered: “If you would have seen how my leg looked to where it’s at now. Some of the guys know. They’ve seen the pictures and they’ve come over to the house and they’ve seen it. To see where I’ve been, to get from there to here, it was no easy task.”
