Woods is no stranger to pain and physical disability. 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. Realistically just making the cut, which he’s done in every professional appearance at Augusta, might be the limit of his ambitions. 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. 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. There is more hope than expectation about Woods’ game these days. 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. It’s one of the things every daytripper wants to cross off their list. 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. 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.Īfter all these years, Woods is still the only man in the field here who draws a gallery like that. 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. 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.
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