Tiger not alone in finding trouble in the woods
As Marc Leishman and Patrick Reed began to pull away from the field yesterday, some of the top players in the world seemed grimly determined to kick their own prospects of winning the 82nd Masters deep into the long grass. Or rather, as long grass doesn’t actually feature at Augusta, deep into the woods that line this famous course.
Between the regular ripples of polite applause and the very occasional roars of acclaim, the soundtrack of the day was provided by the distinctive thwack of Titleist against tree trunk that hackers everywhere know so well.
Those sounds were probably ringing in the ears of Tiger Woods, Jordan Spieth and Phil Mickelson as they retired to bed yesterday.
All three did serious damage to their cards with their arboreal excursions, Spieth, the first-round leader, did well to make up some of the ground he lost, but Mickelson and Woods look too far back to have much chance of adding to their combined collection of seven green jackets.
Woods, however, still made the cut and has won a lot of admirers with his demeanour on his return to competitive action at the Masters.
In his prime, Woods crushed the par-fives at Augusta, but when he came to the eighth, the second of the course’s long holes, he was one of just two players in the field who had yet to record a birdie at one.
But it was the par-four fifth that hurt him most yesterday. Woods pushed his tee shot to the right and then flew his second past the green.
Worse still, he was deep in the forest at that point, his ball settled in the undergrowth amid a tangle of branches, forcing him to declare it unplayable. After his penalty drop, he did well to punch it out to the edge of the green, from where he took another two strokes to get it in the hole.
Only three of the past 21 Masters winners have had a double-bogey on their cards in any of their rounds.
Spieth, after a round of 74, might fancy his prospects of bucking the pattern. Having led by two shots at the end of the first round, the Texan talked about achieving an average of three under par for each day of the tournament. A noble aim, but one that didn’t look very likely after two holes yesterday, by which point he was three-over for his round.
As with Woods, it was Spieth’s follies amid the foliage that had done the damage. On the par-four first he sent his drive far off to the right and ended up with a six, then put the same number on his card at the second after pulling two shots off to the left. By the time he left the seventh green, the 2015 champion had dropped four shots, but he undid some of that damage over the next 11 holes, converting birdie opportunities at the par-five 13th and 15th holes for a 71.
Phil Mickelson, who shot 79, had threatened early in his round, but then began to unwind, most spectacularly when he came to the ninth. At that stage of the day, a logjam had formed at the top of the leaderboard – at one point eight players shared the lead at threeunder – and he looked well placed to make a charge through the field.
Instead, like a startled deer, he scarpered into the forest, his tee shot flying far off to the right and resting among the pines.
As a golfing escapologist, Mickelson has gifts that would once have had him burnt at the stake for sorcery, but they deserted him when his ball hit a tree, shot off at a silly angle and put him even deeper into trouble. As with Woods, the lie was unplayable, so he had to drop and pitch out, a sequence of events that ended with a messy hole-out for a triple-bogey seven.
Mickelson squeezed through to what looks likely to be a wet weekend. Among those who didn’t were Danny Willett and Sergio Garcia, the past two champions, and 2008 winner Trevor Immelman.
TIMES