AUGUSTA – With late-stage greatness comes delusion. The world recognizes when time steals the greatness. Only the great often can’t concede it, looking in a mirror and seeing only a false promise of more glory smiling back.
Sometimes that’s sad. Other times it’s stirring.
Tiger Woods lives somewhere in between those poles.
Friday was a very good day for this 48-year-old, post-surgery, everything-hurts version of Woods. He put 23 more holes of golf on his battered body without needing to be towed off the course. He battled the slopes of Augusta National and a hard wind that blew the fine white sand of its bunkers up every uncovered orifice to come away with a very workable understanding with par.
By the time Woods rounded off his rain-delayed first-round 73, then turned around some 40 minutes later to shoot 72 in the second, he had easily made an historic 24th straight Masters cut.
Knowing the pain – much of it his own making – that comes with the leg he mangled in a 2021 car accident and a spine that could be nothing but fused, you’d have to call it a wonderful feat to get this far.
“All the cliches you hear about him and all the old stories about how he will grind it out, it was fun to see that in person,” said his verbally gifted playing partner, Max Homa.
Then, there’s the delusion.
To Woods, there was only one meaning to the cut record.
“It means I have a chance going into the weekend. I’m here. I have a chance to win the golf tournament,” he said.
To be clear, he is not going to win. He hasn’t won a full-field anything since what will prove to be his career crescendo at the 2019 Masters. At 1-over, he is seven shots off the lead, looking up at 21 players, and honestly no longer possesses the consistency or firepower to pass them all. And, really, that’s OK. Don’t you think he has done more than enough for golf, and can rest easy on his accomplishments?
It was just a year ago, in cold and rain that Woods made a Masters cut only to have to withdraw with foot pain. It was just two months ago that he was carted off the course in L.A. mid-round, laid low by illness. His victory here will come in the form of two more uninterrupted rounds of golf, and a full 36 more holes for his most appreciative audience to lay a little more love on its five-time champion.
I was all poised to write a fretful piece about Woods turning into a Willie Mays hitting .211 in his final season with the Mets or a Muhammad Ali in his last fight being carried for 10 rounds by Trevor Berbick in the Bahamas.
We’re at the point where you’ll hear more about aches and pains in a Woods press conference than at any retirement community mahjong game. After a bit, that can become wearisome.
But then the facts of these two days at the Masters got in the way. From the first day, as when on No. 2 he turned himself and his club around to punch his ball free from piney prison left handed (saving par) – to a second day of artful scrambling, Woods still provided plenty of entertainment value.
At this Masters, there is the Tiger Woods Flight, where he is only competing against his ailments and his every useful swing is greeted with the kind of applause reserved for conquerors. Then, there’s everyone else answering to the big hand-turned scoreboards around here.
Friday, Woods’ genius was most evident in a short iron game that consistently came to his rescue. He hit but 8 of 18 greens in regulation, yet kept chipping to a reasonable par-save range. Throw in a chip-in birdie on the par-3 6th hole from 27 feet, and you had an altogether satisfying 72.
By the time Woods arrived at No. 18 Friday, chipping from left of the green to a perfect below-the-hole position five feet from the pin, the theme of his round was well established.
“I was forced to get up-and-down a few times today, and I was able to do that,” Woods said. “A lot of those chip shots I was able to get up-and-down because I left it in the perfect spot, and that’s understanding how to play this golf course.”
By that point, with the wind whipping and everyone at No. 18 getting an unsolicited dermabrasion from swirling bunker sand, Homa was about ready to measure Woods for a monument right then and there.
“It was awesome,” Homa, the second-round co-leader, said. “It really is a dream to get to play with him here. I’ve been saying, I always wanted to just watch him hit iron shots around here, and I was right up next to him. It was really cool. His short game was so good. I don’t think I can explain how good some of the chip shots he hit today were.
“On 18, we had sandblasts for 45 seconds. I turned around five times so I didn’t get crushed in the face. And he’s standing there like a statue and then poured (his putt) right in the middle.”
A consecutive cuts record is the smallest kind of footnote to a career that encompasses 15 major championships and 82 PGA Tour victories. But considering what Woods went through to get to that number, it deserves at least a yellow highlight.
Woods said he planned to use the record mostly for fun, to give his buddy Fred Couples “a little needle.” Couples and Gary Player shared the old record of 23 consecutive cuts with Woods.
Otherwise Friday meant only one thing. “I have a chance to win the golf tournament. I got my two rounds in. Just need some food and some caffeine, and I’ll be good to go,” he said.
Unrealistic? Maybe. Understandable? Certainly. That’s why Tiger Woods is Tiger Woods.
