It’s an odd truth that if you’ve got to ask someone who it is you’re watching at Augusta National then you already know the answer. At a quarter-to-ten, half an hour before Tiger Woods was even due on the 1st tee, the crowd was packed four or five deep down the length of the fairway, and three times as thick again up by the clubhouse. So anyone who arrived hoping to see him afterwards needed to be awfully comfortable up on their tip-toes, or else try to find a vacant pine tree root to perch on so they could peer over everyone else’s heads.
After all these years, Woods is still the only man in the field here who draws a gallery like that. Catching a glimpse of him has become as much of a Masters tradition as buying a pimento cheese sandwich or posing for a photo out round the back of the clubhouse. It’s one of the things every daytripper wants to cross off their list. They don’t much mind whether they’ve caught him playing a particularly good shot or not, his five-foot pars earn the same sort of roars as other people’s ten-foot birdies.
There is more hope than expectation about Woods’ game these days. Listening to him talk before the championship about how his perspective has changed since he nearly lost his leg in that car crash two years back, you wondered if he feels the same way about it himself. Woods was the greatest competitor of his generation, but it feels like just being able to play here is a victory for him these days. Realistically just making the cut, which he’s done in every professional appearance at Augusta, might be the limit of his ambitions.
Woods’s body simply won’t stand up to four days of walking up and down Augusta’s hills, let alone the hours of practice and tournament play he needs to keep his game in its best shape. Woods is no stranger to pain and physical disability. The second half of his career was defined by his ability to play through it, from the time he won the US Open on one leg in 2008, while he was suffering with two stress fractures and a torn ACL, or the way he reinvented his swing after having spinal fusion surgery before his victory here in 2019.
He’s trying to do it again now. His swing is different, shorter and choppier, more in his shoulders than his hips and his body has changed accordingly. He is stiff-legged and square-shouldered, like a tailor’s dummy. But you sense that he’s in such a bad condition that even he can’t force it to do what he needs it to. Woods admitted afterwards that he is in “constant” pain.
There were plenty of good moments, little splashes of the old razzle-dazzle. He outdrove both Viktor Hovland and Xander Schauffele on the 1st with a shot that flew flush down the middle of the fairway. There was a 20ft birdie putt that slipped just by the lip on the 2nd, a brilliant tee-shot to eight feet on the 6th, and a stunning chip over a swale that left him a 6in putt for birdie on the par-five 8th. And the gallery relished every one of them. But the good things were outnumbered by the mistakes he made in between.
There was nothing egregious, no big misses, just an accumulation of little slips and forgivable inaccuracies. There was an approach that landed short and rolled back down the bank in front of the 3rd green. Then he took three putts on the 5th, and three more on the 7th. At the 11th his second shot flew way over the green and his third slumped into the bunker. Both strokes left him doubled over in disappointment. It meant he was three-over through Amen Corner. He clawed two shots back with back-to-back birdies at the 15th, where he made a fine putt from 27ft, and the 16th.
Even one-over didn’t look too sharp given the way that Schauffele and Hovland were playing. By then they’d both run away from him into the far distance. Hovland made an eagle at the par-five 2nd, where he followed a 350-yard drive with a putt from 25ft, followed that with birdies at the 6th, 8th, 9th, 11th and 13th, and finished with the clubhouse lead at seven under. After reaching the turn in two under, Schauffele picked up three birdies in four holes, before he dropped a shot at the 17th, which left him three shots off the lead.
There was a time when Woods wouldn’t have been too worried about either of them, but this year the contrast between the three wasn’t flattering. Hovland and Schauffele looked sharp and in trim, where Woods was well short of tournament form. Of course. Because he was forced to do most of his preparation for this championship in his garden.
It’s true he has an entire practice course out there, so it’s not like he’s putting into a flowerpot on his back patio. But still one last bogey on the 18th, where he suffered from an awkward lie that left him playing his second shot with one foot in a bunker, left him two over par, nine shots back, and talking simply about “hanging in there” over the weekend.
