Now on the other end of watching someone running away with the Masters, Tiger Woods didn’t sound like a player who is ready to give Jordan Spieth a green jacket just yet.
After shooting a 3-under 69 in Friday’s second round, Woods is 2 under for the tournament but trails the 21-year-old Spieth by 12 strokes. Woods wasn’t discouraged by the Eisenhower Tree-sized gap between the two.
“There’s not a lot of guys ahead of me and with 36 holes to go, anything can happen,” Woods said. “We don’t know what the conditions are tomorrow, what the committee’s going to do.”
The course conditions and the decisions by the tournament committee were two themes that dominated Woods’ answers Friday after posting four birdies against one bogey.
As he said Thursday, Woods said he couldn’t get a feel for the speed of greens that he once could read with the ease of a bedtime story while winning four Masters, starting with his 12-stroke victory in 1997 as a 21-year-old, and ending with his playoff win over Chris DiMarco in 2005.
He needed 28 putts for the second consecutive round because he once again had trouble getting the ball all the way to the hole.
“We talked about it all day yesterday, and we talked about it all day today,” Woods said. “You expected certain putts to roll out, but they aren’t rolling out.”
The positive that Woods said he will take is that he gave himself chances. Though he hit the same number of fairways on Friday that he did Thursday (10), he hit 14 greens, three more than in the opening round. He had no three-putts, not bad for someone whose short game was a mess when he took a hiatus from competitive golf in February to work on his game.
“I’m very proud of what I’ve done and able to dig it out the way I have,” he said.
To make those putts reach the holes, Woods all but asked the tournament committee to turn on the SubAir system that is under the course and can suck all the moisture out of the ground. Woods noted how quiet it was on the greens because the system wasn’t running underneath.
Turning the systems on can change greens that were soft and easy to read on Thursday and Friday into things as hard as granite and difficult to read in a short time.
Who would that favor? Spieth, who Saturday will play only his seventh competitive round as a pro at Augusta National, or Woods, who will be playing his 77th?
“It is what it is,” Woods said. “You have to make the adjustments and go get it or you have to play more passive.”
Woods noted that Spieth is in a different place than he was in winning his first Masters. Unlike his win in 1997 in which he had two challengers within four strokes after the first two rounds, Spieth’s closest challenger is five shots back. He has some wiggle room.
But stranger things have happened. Nick Faldo rallied from six strokes back in the final round to defeat Greg Norman by five strokes in 1996, a year Woods referenced as an example of what’s possible.
But Woods did seem realistic that rallying may not be entirely in his hands in his attempt to not be “1997’d” by the new hot thing in golf, a role he knows well.
“He’s put a big enough gap between himself the rest of the pack,” Woods said. “It’s up to what the committee does overnight: whether they they are going to make the golf course like this, where we can go get it, or they can make it hard and firm where it’s going to be tough to make birdies.”
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