Editor's note: In what was to be 2020 Masters week, we are walking down Memory Magnolia Lane with a look back at some of Furman Bisher's columns from the tournament. Bisher died in 2012 at the age of 93 having covered 62 of the 75 Masters. Selah. Today: Tiger Woods wins third Masters, second straight. The column appeared in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on April 15, 2002. | Yesterday: Greg Norman comes in second ... again
AUGUSTA — After the 36-hole cut, 40 players left for home. The others stayed around to fill out the supporting cast, to carry the spears and sing in the chorus. Then at the end, to answer the curtain call with the leading virtuoso.
“Tiger Woods Strikes Again,” now playing at your local opera house.
The course of inevitability struck again at Augusta National on Sunday. Eldrick (Tiger) Woods won his third Masters championship in what is becoming a familiar routine. Once he got out front, it was just another stroll in the grass. No one threatened him. He barely broke par by a stroke, but that was even less than he needed. He made a couple of bogeys, but never gave his pursuers any hint that he was a softening target.
Simple as that. “He did just what he had to do,” Retief Goosen said. “There was never any pressure, and he just made the shots he had to make.”
The turning point, if there was one, was the sixth hole, where he chipped in from off the green for birdie. That was the signal that whatever was thrown at him, he could handle. You’ve never seen a better unspectacular round played on the final day in this championship.
Goosen and Woods started the day even, 205 after 54 holes. They were never that close again. The South African is not unaccustomed to the heat of head-to-head challenge. He won the U.S. Open at Tulsa in a two-man playoff, but Tiger Woods is no Mark Brooks, or vice versa. In fact, Goosen sounded as if he had only lost the Sunday dogfight at the club.
“I played my irons terrible, and I was never in it,” he said, “but I enjoyed it. It was a nice day out there.”
On the other hand, what Woods said was that it was some kind of grind, playing the soggy course, with fairway grasses of uneven length, some fringes around greens unmowed, some mowed, all due to the heavy weather conditions.
“It was a tough day,” Woods said, “conditions being what they were. I had to be patient. I just hung around.”
Still, no one was ever within two strokes of him but Goosen, that on the first two holes. After that, Woods went into cruise control, and when rare trouble arose, he took his bogey medicine and moved on.
If Woods hadn't been here, it might have been a thriller. The pack behind him was first shooting birdies, then shooting themselves in the foot. In all my years, I can’t recall two contenders drowning their games in the water, Ernie Els on the 13th hole, Vijay Singh at the 15th. His gaffe, twice in the trickling stream, cost Els a triple bogey. Singh’s sin, twice in the pond at 15, eventually cost him a quadruple nine.
If ever anyone had a chance of getting in Woods’ rearview mirror, there it went. Phil Mickelson hung around at about the same level all day, started 7-under par, finished at -8, sharing 71s with Woods, Jose Maria Olazabal and Padraig Harrington. But say this for the iconoclastic southpaw, at least four of his putts that should have dropped, didn’t.
What Tiger Woods has done is establish himself as the dominating figure in the Masters picture for years down the road. The man to beat, at 26, the picture of health, personality and charm. “I always felt I had the game to win here,” he said, and that fact has been clearly established. Just how many times remains to be seen.
The only thing that could halt him might be one of those letters from Chairman Hootie Johnson, saying, “In the interest of competition, we suggest that you sit this one out.”
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