TIGER ENDS ON A HIGH AND CHARLES SALE AT AUGUSTA
Woods shows why he can still be a contender
AS Tiger Woods reached the end of his first Masters in three years, the iconic leaderboard at the 18th hole showed the top 10 names going into the final round. Seven of them were aged 28 or under. Six of them were younger than Rory McIlroy.
Here lies the next challenge, therefore, for the walking miracle man. as the sheer joy of having him back begins to temper, will he be able to bridge the gap that will enable him to compete for major championships against a seriously good generation of young players — all aged at least 15 years younger?
Happily, the signs are positive that by the Opens on both sides of the atlantic this summer he will be a contender. Over the last nine holes yesterday he played beautifully bar an ugly three-putt at the last, signing for a 69 and a 72-hole total of one over. By any standards, it was a respectable result for a man playing in a major for the first time in 1,000 days.
‘I can’t tell you how much I missed competing in the majors in general and the Masters in particular,’ he said, poignantly. ‘The last two years all I did here at augusta was eat (at the Champions dinner), so it felt wonderful to walk up the 18th hole on Sunday.’
Overall, Woods was just a little off in all departments and at augusta that’s all it takes to finish in the middle of the pack.
Take putting, usually one of his strongest suits. The 42-year-old talked in the build-up about putting on bentgrass greens for the first time since he was last at augusta in 2015. One of the characteristics of putting on greens with this strain of grass is the ball breaks more than usual, owing to the absence of any grain. ‘It’s crazy how more they break,’ he said, and he never got to grips with this on any day.
every time he picked up a shot in the final round, he gave it back again by missing a short putt. ‘My putting was just awful,’ said Woods. But we’ve seen enough during this comeback to put that down to unfamiliarity rather than a permanent erosion.
One of the things that links all seven of those players in the top 10 is their prodigious length off the tee, but Woods showed at augusta that keeping up is not a problem.
Rafa Cabrera-Bello is a long hitter but he was 40 yards behind Woods at times yesterday. ‘I drove it on a string,’ said Tiger. against the odds, Woods’s driving was unquestionably an asset.
aside from not holing the momentum putts for pars that are so vital for success, the thing that killed him was distance control with his irons.
Time and again he would come up six or seven yards short or long of his landing targets and you’ve got no chance at augusta if you’re half a club out.
a perfect example came on friday at his opening hole, where he pummelled a drive 345 yards to this fairway that rises steeply uphill. He’d drawn the teeth from this difficult opener and had just 98 yards to go. Talk about a green light to get something going.
He then missed the green with a sand wedge for the sort of bogey that draws the wind from anyone’s sails.
Over 72 holes, though, there was nothing to suggest this was anything other than a man who simply needs more golf under his belt.
His absence from the first page of the leaderboard was perhaps the only thing this wondrous Masters was missing but he still made a huge contribution, for all that.
No other player came remotely close in terms of the amount of patrons following them, and they will have enjoyed some of the shots Tiger played during the final round.
None was better than the pure long iron he struck to the hellish par-three fourth. On a hole that has only given up one ace in Masters history — and that one, by Jeff Sluman, came in 1992 — Woods’s shot was literally a couple of inches from becoming the second, as it caught the edge of the hole rather than the flagstick.
at the 13th his drive flew so far he had just a mid-iron for his second shot and he played that to 15ft. He didn’t come close to making the eagle putt. He did make one at the 15th, though, to generate the loudest roar early on.
after a three-week break, Woods will crank it up for the Players Championship in a month. He might have been back home in florida by the time the green jacket ceremony was taking place, but the months ahead are still filled with exciting possibilities.