Woods flashes of magic suggest there is more to come

They say there were about 50,000 people at Augusta National for the start of the Masters: fans, media, members, stewards, caddies, cooks, camera crew and support staff, almost every one of them asking the same question. It felt like most of them had come along to the 1st tee at 11 in the morning to try to find out the answer, too. 

The dogged ones had staked a front-row spot first thing. Everyone else was left craning their necks and popping up on their tiptoes, jockeying to try to find a line of sight that would allow them to catch a flash of Tiger Woods in his shocking pink shirt.

Could Woods really do it? Even Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player were yakking back and forth about it. Nicklaus wasn’t sure. “Feeling competitive is different than feeling like you can win,” Nicklaus said after he had hit the ceremonial tee-shot, “I mean, I’m sure Tiger will be very competitive this week. I don’t know whether he can win or not. He hasn’t played any competition golf for a long time.”

Player disagreed. “There’s no reason why not. As long as he does something which is absolutely imperative, and that’s to believe that he can.” There’s no doubt about that part at least. Woods said himself he wouldn’t be here otherwise. The fun part would be in finding out whether he was kidding himself, and everyone else, when he said his game was up to it.

It became clear pretty quickly that he wasn’t. We don’t know how he will handle the recovery and whether his body will hold up through four days of play, but we do know that he wasn’t lying when he said he still had his touch.

Woods covered the five holes in even par, although when his first putt went in the roar was so loud that it tricked a lot of people into thinking he must have done something spectacular. 

Since his name wasn’t up on any of the big white scoreboards dotted around the course, and Augusta’s strict rules meant that no one had a phone handy to tell them any better, the whisper went around the grounds that he had in fact birdied the first. “He’s in great shape to make another,” said a man at the 2nd after Woods had hit his second shot down to the slope in front right of the green.

“I heard he couldn’t even swing after the accident,” someone said as Woods was standing over his chip, “he was like a total beginner.” He was all anybody was talking about. “I think his win here in ’19 was the greatest comeback ever”, and “none of us had him to win then, either” and “I think he’s going to run out of steam” and “just making the cut here would be a win for him” and “I can’t wait to tell my mama that I saw Tiger Woods”. His partners, Louis Oosthuizen and Joaquín Niemann, didn’t figure in the conversation.

Woods on the other hand was playing some good, steady stuff, a little less spectacular than the crowd would have liked maybe. They were quiet when he left a poor putt from off the front of the green short on the 3rd and again on the 4th when he missed with another putt from the fringe. It felt as if he was feeling his way back into it in tricky conditions. The course had been softened by two days of torrential rain but the sub-air drainage system was hard at work, sucking up the groundwater. Overhead the wind was starting to carry away the thick cold, clouds and drizzle. By the time the group got to the 5th, the sun was out for the first time all week.

He did drop a shot at the next after he missed the green with his first chip and hit his second 5ft by. And it all started to get a little wild after that. There were some bad misses, some brilliant recoveries and a couple of breathtaking putts.

He saved par after he hit a wild drive at the 9th but didn’t when he made the mistake again, worse this time, at the 14th, where his foot almost seemed to slip as he was midway through his swing. 

That bogey cost him the shot he had just picked up at the 13th where he had a tap-in after his eagle putt from 23ft finished short.

Andy Bull is a senior sports writer for The Guardian. This is an abridged article published by The Guardian UK