Between class on Thursday, homework Friday and the football scrimmage Saturday, I didn’t get to see all four rounds of the Masters as I had hoped this past weekend.
What I did manage to do was clear out my schedule on Sunday and settle in for a ride from Tea Olive, through Magnolia, around Amen Corner and on to the majestic final green at Holly. Major championships, and certainly the final rounds of major championships, are not events to be missed in my house.
After Saturday’s showers at Augusta National, everyone studied the weather reports for Sunday. Golf analysts-turned-meteorologists predicted swirling winds of up to 30 mph that would limit scoring opportunities, and the greens would be constantly hardening, making for some slippery putts coming down the final stretch of holes.
So I woke up Sunday morning thinking that if Tiger Woods, who entered the final round at six strokes behind eventual champion Trevor Immelman, could manage a 3-under-par 69 he’d have a good shot of at least forcing a playoff. After all, Immelman came into the tournament having missed the cut in four of his last eight tournament entries and was ranked No. 202 in the world in putting. He even switched to one of those wacky belly putters for a while to see if that would help before going back to the standard stick.
By my thinking, if you want to win at Augusta, you have to make some extremely difficult, pressure-packed putts. So I, like many golf analysts, was awaiting the charge by Woods that still has yet to come in his career. A charge that would unnerve young Immelman, combining with the unpredictable winds and tricky greens to suck the leader backward while Woods surged forward.
And when Woods rolled in that unbelievable, 80-foot, side-winding putt on White Dogwood, the roar had to reverberate back to Carolina Cherry, where his young challenger was fighting to maintain the lead. At that moment the charge seemed even more inevitable than I had imagined and the first leg of Woods’ 2008 Grand Slam all but in the books.
But Immelman was never swayed, and it was Woods who faded down the stretch. Time and again he threw away opportunities to inch closer to Immelman and apply pressure that could break the young South African. Woods missed several reasonable putts over the last seven holes that could have pushed him toward the 8-under-par score that won the tournament.
Amazingly, it was Woods who seemed dwarfed by the stage. He looked frustrated, unsure of himself, and even a little scared. Immelman, in stark contrast, stood solid as a rock, even apparently smiling to himself at the roller coaster ride that is Augusta National on a certain Sunday in April.
Immelman did falter a bit, hitting his tee shot into the water to double-bogey the par-three Redbud and drop to eight-under-par, and every aspect of my feelings toward the final round was realized, but for Woods’ surge. Had Woods shot just three-under-par, he would have forced a playoff. Then again, with Immelman’s seemingly unflappable nature maybe the result would have been the same.
That’s what major championships do for us. They put these golfers under a microscope, allowing us to look more closely at their swing, their putting stroke and even their character. Under the microscope at Augusta last weekend flaws were discovered in Woods’ game that were previously unthinkable. Immelman turned out to be the putter that no one thought he could be as well as one hell of a competitor.
[email protected]