When there has been a Tiger and a Boom Boom to put on the green jacket, who would blush if a Bubba were next?
Bubba Watson, a Georgia graduate and long-hitter extraordinaire, overpowered Augusta National in the Masters third round Saturday, firing a 5-under par 67 to put his name on the bottom of the leader board.
He tied for the lowest round of the day with his best score in 11 Masters rounds. He had much better control Saturday than Thursday, when he said he had no idea where the ball was going.
"When you are almost dead last starting the day, you don't really think about the leader board until after 18," Watson said. "I went out there and freewheeled and made some birdies."
He likely will need to do even better if he wants to win his first major. Jack Burke came from nine strokes behind during the fourth round to win the Masters in 1956. He started the day eight strokes behind. Watson will step on the first tee Sunday seven strokes behind leader Rory McIlroy.
Though his swing looks more suited to playing on a Wii than on the PGA Tour, he seems in-tune enough to predict when he can post a low score. He said after Friday's 71 that he would like to shoot a 67 on Saturday. He did so with birdies on Nos. 2, 3, 8, 12, 13, 15 and 18. Four of them came on Augusta's par-5s, which can be easy pickings when you average 310.7 yards per drive.
It also came a few hours after Watson tweeted that he didn't want to make any double bogeys. He avoided the double squares on his scorecard, even making a birdie on the par-3 12th. Ironically, it's the 12th, the shortest hole on the course, that has caused arguably the longest hitter in the field the most trouble in this tournament, with back-to-back 5s on Thursday and Friday. He said he dropped down a club and hit a soft pitching wedge Saturday.
After bogeying 17, he came back and hit his drive into a bunker on No. 18. However, he blasted out with a 52-degree wedge pin-high and made the long putt to get back to 5 under.
He said he doesn't believe the momentum of that putt will mean anything Sunday, but he does have the experience of being a two-time winner on tour and coming close in two majors from which to draw. He finished second in the PGA Championship last year and tied for fifth in the U.S. Open in 2007.
He didn't want to predict what he will tweet Sunday morning or how he will play later in the day, saying he could wake up sick and play bad or get up feeling well and play perfectly. Either way, he has one more round to try to become the second consecutive left-hander to win the coveted green jacket.
"I've got one more to go, and hopefully that'll be pretty good," he said.
