AUGUSTA – It was just Monday of Masters week. A chill, gray Monday at that, the conditions dulling the sharp edge of splendor.
Nobody’s going to really let it rip this soon. Any Monday at the Masters is for easing into the demands of the season’s first major. And that goes for the spectators, too. So, as the practice round throng reported for duty around Tiger Woods’ morning stroll, it performed but a little light limbering of its collective throat. The patrons – working stiffs in their real life, but patrons here – must build to the moment also.
Woods made a subtly stiff-legged tour of the back nine Monday. It’s not a limp now, really. Nor is it the confident, casual lope that any 47-year-old athlete should possess if only he had exercised more good judgment in his life. Now and forever more, we presume, Woods walks a little older than he is.
Greeting him were sporadic hoots from the gallery. The kind of loud, bold encouragement that no one else at this staid place has received since Arnold Palmer was hitching up his britches like he meant it.
They were just warming up.
“C’mon Tiger!”
“In the hole!” (Yes, that annoyance has breached the Augusta gates).
“Go Tiger! Go Tiger!”
More of the same will follow him through every practice sighting and each step of actual score-keeping golf Woods plays here. Much more, building by the day.
You can choose to join the grumps who complain that far too much acclaim follows Woods even as his game and body deteriorate. Time and scandal and crippling injury have seen to it that he will not add to his 15 major championships nor break his tie with Sam Snead atop the list for PGA Tour wins (82). You can scoff and harumph and tsk-tsk all the noise that accompanies his now rare public showings. But that seems a tough way to live. A complete waste of outrage.
Or, you bend to the simple truth that the Masters is Woods’ stage for as long as he cares to tread it. The great crowd that followed him and Rory McIlroy and Fred Couples and Tom Kim on their practice round confirmed that again Monday.
This is his 25th Masters, and no one over the last quarter century has remotely done so much to define the most famous tournament.
Same as it was in 1997 when at 21 he won his first Masters by 12 and announced that the world was his. Same as it was in 2019 when Woods won his fifth and last Masters, returning from spinal fusion surgery and inciting near riot among the faithful that built a wall of chaos around him as he climbed the final hole.
Last year as Woods returned from his latest personal calamity – the 2021 car wreck that nearly cost him a leg – the theme was gratitude. The most single-minded competitor in his sport was suddenly just thankful to be here. He put together the worst scorecard in his Masters experience, 13-over for the week while growing increasingly weary and sore, shooting 78-78 on the weekend. And yet, he smiled at the end, accessing a type of joy in playing that had eluded him in his glory years. And at the end he still received a champion’s cheers, each roar fully earned.
The questions this year still revolve around Woods’ ability to simply co-exist with his body.
It’s not, “Can he win?”
Today, it’s “Can he keep it together long enough to make his 23rd straight Masters cut, tying Couples and Gary Player for best ever?”
Then, can Woods avoid the same kind of deflation as last year? There is just such a lack of recent data to answer that either way. Woods played only three times a season ago – the Masters, the PGA Championship (withdrawing after three rounds), and the British Open, (missed cut). His lone PGA Tour appearance in 2023 was a T-45 at the Genesis Open in February.
Woods’ good buddy Couples was asked Monday whether the man he saw walking Augusta’s hills looked better, stronger than the one he saw a year ago.
“Probably not,” Couples said. “I don’t know how much better (his leg) is ever going to get. If he can get better to where he can play 12 times. ... I don’t think that’s going to happen. I think he would tell me that.”
They’ve let out Augusta National again this year, continuing the alterations that Woods with all his power inspired. Still, from the new tee box at the par-5 13th that seems to stretch all the way back to Fort Gordon, Woods still launched a long, stately drive Monday.
“He’s strong enough to hit it a mile,” Couples said. “He’s not hitting it as far as Rory but I don’t think many people are. But he’s hitting it really strong and solid, and he looks good.”
Overall, Couples’ prognosis is guarded: “I think when he tells you, ‘I’m only going to play four events and Augusta is one of them,’ he’s ready to go. It’s probably not going to be easy (though).”
Following Woods’ every stiff-legged step is the least we can do, given all the memories he’s manufactured here and the dwindling time he has to make any more.
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