Tiger found his refuge from reality
A strange and powerful symbiosis between golf’s first black icon and Augusta, where...
‘AUGUSTA IS A PLACE WHERE IT PAYS NOT TO DIG TOO MUCH BELOW THE SURFACE. THAT SUITS TIGER’
LATE one night during the US Masters, I drove from Alabama to Augusta along the I-20, the four-lane artery of America’s south that runs west to east for more than a thousand miles almost in a straight line from Texas to South Carolina.
It was just after 3am when I disconnected from its bloodstream of heavy trucks and neon invitations and turned off on to Washington Road, the main drag that runs past the entrance to Magnolia Lane.
The yellow of the Waffle House sign was still lit up and customers perched on stools at the counter. Cops in cars watched the empty road, the blue lights of their blackand-whites flashing in the night. Outside Hooters, John Daly’s RV was in darkness.
A train wailed in the distance as it rumbled across the bridge over the Savannah River and past the topless bars into town. The dollar store was closed but the gas stations and a couple of burger joints were still open. Hopeful fans slumped in chairs by the roadside next to handmade banners that said: ‘Need Tix’.
Outside the gates of Augusta National, even in the dead of night, America does not stop for the world’s greatest golf tournament.
Inside the gates, though, it is different. Not much survives of what we think of as modern life. Not while the Masters is being played. Nobody runs. Nobody takes selfies. Nobody makes a phone call because nobody is allowed a mobile. Nobody drops litter. Nobody heckles the players. Time retreats amid the azaleas and the firethorn and those manicured valleys.
That is why, even in the difficult times of the last decade of his career, even when some sought to mock him because of his fall, even when he seemed to be living out a tortured existence in bleary-eyed police mugshots, on the front covers of supermarket magazines and in a painkiller haze, Augusta always provided Tiger Woods with a refuge from reality.
It was where he made for when things got rough. When his marriage fell apart amid revelations about his personal life in 2009, the Masters was the first tournament he played after months out of the game. It was a safe haven. It was home without the questions.
There is a strange and powerful symbiosis between golf’s first black icon and a club that only admitted its first black member seven years before Woods announced his greatness there in 1997. Woods found a kind of sanctuary and comfort there and Augusta drew renewed relevance
from its association with the game’s new Arnold Palmer.
Augusta is a place where it does not pay to dig too far below the surface for fear of what you might find. Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies. It suits the industrialists and the financiers in their green jackets and it suits Tiger, too. It is his protection and his salve. And it was why, if he was ever going to win a major again, it was always going to be here.
By Sunday afternoon, the entire place was willing him to win. It was a Tiger Woods force-field. Armies of fans swarmed around the course with him as he played in the final group with Francesco Molinari and Tony Finau.
Sport loves a comeback, particularly one as improbable as the one Woods has staged since his spinal fusion surgery two years ago, and there was a fervour about the support for Woods that has rarely been seen at Augusta.
I stood with the crowds at Amen Corner when Molinari, who was leading by two, pulled his tee shot at the 12th into Rae’s Creek. People did not yell out in celebration because they knew that is frowned upon. But when Woods’s tee shot sailed over the water and landed in the middle of the green, they let out an almighty roar.
I watched the rest of the tournament from the tightly packed rows of green canvas chairs reserved for the Press just behind the 18th green. There are no big screens at Augusta, of course, so other senses come into play.
When another huge roar reverberated around the valley below us, everyone around the 18th knew that Woods had birdied the par-five 15th. There is a big white leaderboard between the 18th green and the ninth fairway and, a few minutes later, the operators changed the figures on it.
When they slotted it back into place, it confirmed that Woods had moved to 13 under and now held the outright lead. Around the 18th, people roared and yelled and punched the air.
And we waited. Ten minutes later, another huge roar rent the air from the valley below. Woods had birdied the 16th. The same ritual was repeated with the scoreboard. Eventually, it was changed to show that Woods had moved to 14 under. When the figure appeared, the rejoicing around the 18th was unconfined. All of us there knew that, in another half an hour, history would be walking up the fairway towards us.
All of us knew then that we were about to watch the completion of one of the greatest comebacks in sport. Perhaps even one of the greatest moments in sport. When Woods was on the 18th tee, still out of sight around the fork in the fairway, a security guard pushed a small boy of eight or nine to the front of the section of the crowd and asked the patrons if he could stand there so he could see.
The kid stood there and watched Brooks Koepka miss a putt in front of us that would have put some real pressure on Woods. He heard the murmur of excitement as Woods stood on the right of the fairway, ready to play his approach on that historic final hole.
But when Woods walked towards the green and the crowd stood to laud him, whooping and roaring and applauding, it was too much: the boy darted away to find his parents. Maybe when he retells the experience in years to come, he will omit his retreat from one of sport’s defining moments.
A brash young TV guy looked at Woods’s lie in the rough to the right of the green and said: ‘I could get down in three from there.’ An older journalist, who wore the gravitas of a man who had seen many major victories but had never seen anything like this, looked at Woods and smiled. ‘I don’t know about that,’ he said. ‘But he can.’
Soon, Woods was standing over the tap-in he needed to win his 15th major. I looked down into the valley. Thousands of people massed there, waiting for that final putt, like an army waiting for a sign from its general. They could not have a hope of seeing the ball fall into the cup but maybe they could see the figure of Woods and that was enough.
Outside the gates, the traffic rolled on down the strip. Inside, a man hugged his mother and his children at the back of the 18th green. The world belonged to Tiger Woods again.