It takes only a couple of minutes for a player to walk from the ninth green to the 10th tee at the Augusta National Golf Club, where the Masters will start next Thursday. As Tiger Woods made his way to the tee halfway through the first round of the 1997 Masters, his first as a professional, he slowed his step. Woods, then 21, was analyzing what had gone wrong as he shot four-over-par 40 on the front nine, and the corrections required.
Around the course, the tens of thousands of patrons, as club officials insist television analysts call people who hold Masters badges, couldn't believe the number Woods had posted. This was the golfer who, after all, was going to own the Masters. Couldn't he handle the pressure, the course, and the expectations?
During his walk to the 10th tee, Woods concluded his backswing had been too long, and convinced himself to shorten it. He birdied the 10th and 12th holes, eagled the par-5 15th, and shot 30 on the back nine. Along the way, the impression grew that the door to the Champions locker room in the clubhouse would soon swing wide open for him.
Woods was two shots behind leader John Huston after the first round. He shot 66 in the second round to assume a three-shot lead over Colin Montgomerie, who said that as a veteran he might have an advantage over the youngster on Saturday. Woods shot 65 in the third round against Montgomerie's 74, and took a nine-shot-lead into the final round.
"There is no chance. There's no chance humanly possible," a bedraggled and utterly defeated Montgomerie said about the chances of anybody catching Woods.
Woods shot 69 on Sunday to win by 12 shots. He'd shot the highest front nine, by two shots, for an eventual winner, and won a major tournament by the widest margin since Old Tom Morris's 13-shot victory in the 1862 British Open. He didn't have a three-putt on golf's slickest and most treacherous greens. He became the first black man to win the Masters, at a club that had admitted its first black member only six years earlier, at a club whose co-founder Clifford Roberts once said, "As long as I'm alive, golfers will be white and caddies will be black."
Woods had done only what he intended to do every tournament — win. He would never say so publicly, but he knew even then that nobody could beat him if he played the golf of which he is capable. Woods has since won three more Masters, in 2001, 2002 and 2005. This year, he's been almost ruthless in his dominance. He won his first three PGA Tour events before finishing fifth in the CA Championship in Miami. Earlier this year, he said he believes winning the Grand Slam in a calendar year is certainly feasible. Just about everybody is already handing him this Masters.
But not even Woods can bring out his best on demand every tournament, and win every Masters, even if Jack Nicklaus said, in 1997, that he had reduced the course to "almost nothing."
Augusta National is 500 yards longer than when Woods won his first Masters. The club, under the supervision of Tom Fazio, its consulting architect for the past 20 years, has added trees to tighten the once-wide driving corridors, and superimposed some rough beside the fairways and around the greens, on a course that was never meant to have any. The club calls the rough the "second cut."
Woods has said that the course plays easier now because the rough keeps errant shots from running away. Meanwhile, the changes haven't fazed him.
