Unusually calm, Tiger looks ready to pounce
Woods might be better than ever after surgery, and he knows it
 Andrew Redington / Getty Images Tiger Woods shot a 2-under 70 in the first round of the Masters, but he doesn't seem flustered at his mistakes, AP columnist Jim Litke writes. |
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On a picture-postcard day when journeymen and even a 50-year-old were part of the crowd going low, low and lower on every side of him, Woods was unusually calm. He closed this round of 2-under with a few uncharacteristic stumbles, but that didn’t seem to fluster him, either.
He missed an 8-footer at No. 16, then a 4-footer at No. 17 for birdies. Next, he deposited an 8-iron from the fairway 50 feet over the 18th green and wound up making bogey. You half- expected to see steam blowing out of both ears when he exited the scoring hut.
“If I had hit bad putts, it would be a totally different deal, but I hit good putts. It just means,” he said evenly, “I need to read them a little better.”
Why so calm?
Over a golf course where he averages almost 73 on Thursday, it was his best opening round in a half-dozen years. So when someone pointed out that Woods had never broken 70 on the first day at Augusta National, he was rehearsed and ready. His smile widened from ear to ear.
“Yeah,” he said, fixing the questioner. “I also won it four times.”
Moments like that are a reminder that Woods had surgery to rebuild his knee, not his confidence.
“It’s a long week and the weather is going to start changing a little bit here and you’ve just got to keep patient, stay with it,” he added. “It’s not like I haven’t been in this position before.”
Woods says something like that almost every year, but this time there’s a sense he knows more than he’s letting on.
The swing he and coach Hank Haney have been fine-tuning for going on five years now looks better than ever, even better than when Woods finished off his latest sublime run by winning the U.S. Open on the 91st hole before going under the knife. The left foot that used to lift off the ground to take some of the stress off his knee now stays firmly rooted to the ground. He’s still susceptible to the occasional blocked drive, but he’s also still the best scrambler on the planet.
His drive off No. 2 wound up in a gully, sitting on pine straw, 25 yards right of the fairway. With the TV cameras filling up the bushes behind him, Woods settled into his stance, hit a deft little pitch back to the middle of the fairway and left himself an approach shot of close to 230 yards off a downhill lie.
Anybody who still had questions about whether the knee was strong enough to brace against for a full shot didn’t have to wait long for the answer. Woods threw the iron shot up into the sky and the ball stopped 10 feet past the flag like a Velcro strip was attached. Then he missed the putt. It went like that the whole day.
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