AUGUSTA – Usually when a guy named Bubba is this deep in the woods, he is covered up in camo, hunched in a deer stand and waiting on an appointment with a nine-point buck.
Gerry “Bubba” Watson had another agenda Sunday. He found himself in the Georgia pines that guard the right side of the 10th hole at Augusta National. His pink driver had put him there, on the second Masters playoff hole, the kind of predicament that usually costs a fellow dearly.
As he was walking the downhill slope of that fairway toward the crooked drive, his caddie Ted Scott told him, “If you got a swing, you got a shot.”
Watson had a swing. The ball was in a little clearing and before him was a window of gloaming through which to reach the green.
The rest, Watson would later boil down to this: “I got in those trees and hit a crazy shot that I saw in my head and somehow, I’m in a green jacket.”
Watson hit one of those parabola balls for which he is semi-famous, a wide arcing wedge from 164 yards that argued all the way against the dull logic of straight-line golf.
“I had no idea where he was,” said his playoff opponent, Louis Oosthuizen. “When the ball came out, it looked like a curve ball, just an unbelievable shot.”
It landed 10 feet from the hole, allowing the 33-year-old Watson the luxury of two-putting his way to his first major championship. Oosthuizen, the game South African, had run out of answers. His approach fell well short of the green and he was unable to get up and down from there.
Watson was left all weepy and weak-kneed afterward, crying first on the shoulder of his caddie and then his mother, Molly, and then a host of friends and relatives who staged an impromptu reunion on the 10th green. He is the newly minted father of an adopted son and now a first-time Masters champion. Plenty of good excuses to lose it.
Sunday was a highly charged day all around. Roars erupted all around the grounds, some of the loudest reserved for two holes-in-one (by Bo Van Pelt and Adam Scott on the par-3 16th) and a shot that would go down in lore, had only the playoff result been reversed.
Oosthuizen staked his claim to this Masters with a historic swing on the par-5 second. Standing 253 yards from the hole after his tee shot, he hit a low, driving 4-iron to the front of green.
The ball had plenty of roll left as it landed. It motored onto the putting surface, caught the slope and took a hard right turn, needing to cover nearly the entire width of the kidney-shaped green. Each revolution of the ball seemed to turn up the knob on the crowd noise a quarter of a turn, until with its very last turn, the ball fell into the hole and bedlam ensued.
Even Watson, paired with Oosthuizen, was moved. “I just wanted to run over there and give him a high five,” Watson said. “It was amazing to watch a shot like that. The crowd roared forever and I got to see it from the front row.
“Then I saw the leaderboard and said, "Wait, that was a double eagle. He’s leading now.”
With that one swing, only the fourth-ever Masters double eagle, Oosthuizen went from one shot off the lead to two up.
That remarkable shot was like a large deposit on which Oosthuizen would draw on the rest of that day, hoping it would somehow get him to the end.
“It was tough after that double eagle,” he said. “Something like that happens early in the round and you think this is it. It was tough the next five holes to get my head around it and just play the course.”
Oosthuizen gave two of those strokes back over the next seven holes but was only joined at lead twice -- once briefly, by Matt Kuchar after his eagle on No. 15, and then, very seriously, by Watson after a fourth consecutive birdie on No. 16 tied him with Oosthuizen at 10-under.
By then, the double eagle was teetering on the brink becoming but a footnote. Oosthuizen would not be the next coming of Gene Sarazen. More like the next Jeff Maggert and Bruce Devlin, the more trivial makers of a Masters double eagle.
Both Watson and Oosthuizen parred in on Nos. 17 and 18, setting up the playoff. All the other challengers have melted away, most notably Phil Mickelson. His second triple bogey of the tournament took care of that. His shot to the par-3 fourth went into a stand of bamboo left of the green. After extensive forensics identified the ball there was his, Mickelson choose to try to extricate it by flipping his club over and gouging it out right-handed.
Bad move. When that didn’t work, he tried it again as if determined to prove this was a good idea. He managed to only move the ball barely to ground packed hard by 10,000 footsteps. He took a 6 and could not recover.
Watson would carry the day for the left-handers, becoming the fifth southpaw to win in the past 10 Masters. He had a chance to settle the matter on the first playoff hole – the 18th – but just missed an eight-foot birdie putt.
No matter. That gave the masses more time to proclaim their allegiance to the former Georgia Bulldogs golfer. They held a golf tournament Sunday and a Georgia spring game broke out.
He answered them with his initial words after being awarded the green jacket: “First of all, to all my fans, you got to say, ‘Go Dogs.’”
One more playoff hole also gave the free-swinging Watson another chance to show off his trademarked “Bubba Golf,” the style he personified thusly: “I always attack. I don’t go for the center of the greens. I want to hit the incredible shot.”
He did exactly that. Bubba went into the woods and came back with the trophy of a lifetime.
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