Woods ranks playing four rounds at Augusta as one of his greatest achievements and confirmed he will be at St AndrewsThe look on Tiger Woods’s face as he walked off the 18th green told you all you need to know about what he’s been through in the last 14 months.Woods had just shot his second consecutive round of 78, which is the worst score he’s ever made in the 24 years he’s been playing here, and done it on a day that seemed tailor-made for going low. The round left him 13 over par for the tournament, and 22 shots off Scottie Scheffler’s lead, in 47th place. And despite it all, he was grinning like he’d just won the tournament....
Northern Irishman still attracts galleries at Augusta but has now adjusted his sights to a top-10 finish going into final day“I feel like I’m right there,” said Rory McIlroy on Friday night, as he weighed his chances after back‑to‑back rounds of 73 on Thursday and Friday. “You go out tomorrow and you play a decent front nine, and all of a sudden you’re right in the thick of things.” Seventeen hours later, he stepped out on to the 1st tee and, thwack, dumped his opening drive right into a fairway bunker, then, crack, whacked his second shot into the lip where it rebounded and fell back down by his feet. His third made it on to the green, where he...
Golf’s greatest showman shows he is ready to compete against all odds after a solid if mostly unspectacular start There were about 50,000 people at Augusta National for the start of the Masters: fans, media, members, stewards, caddies, cooks, camera crew and all the other support staff, and on Thursday morning almost every last one of them was asking the same sort of question. Plenty had come along to the 1st tee at 11am to find out the answer, too. The dogged ones had staked a front-row spot first thing that morning. Everyone else was craning their necks and popping up on their tiptoes, jockeying to try to find a line of sight that would allow them to catch a...
Eisenhower’s drinking partner and the man who helped make the Masters what it is today surely deserves more recognitionTucked away in a corner of YouTube sits the kind of cheesy 1976 sales pitch Augusta National had to make to Asia decades before Hideki Matsuyama came along. Cigarettes, whisky and terrain far less manicured than is the case for Masters of this day and age feature. So, too, Philip Russell Wahl Sr.“We have had the finest group of players, the greatest competitors, on our golf course,” says Wahl. “That’s what makes the Masters great.” And then the payoff: “The Masters is my life.” Related: Hideki Matsuyama is Japanese but his victory matters for Asian Americans Related: Gary Player’s apartheid history is...
Player invited Lee Elder to play in South Africa and was praised by Nelson Mandela but admits his past is not blamelessIt has been almost 50 years since Lee Elder became the first black man to play in the Masters, and five months since Augusta National announced they were at last going to mark his achievement by inviting him to join Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player as one of the tournament’s honorary starters.So long that when the moment finally came around early on Thursday morning, Elder, who is 86, wasn’t able to get up and swing a club. Instead he sat and watched as Player and Nicklaus did. It was a poignant moment, despite the way Player’s son (and caddie)...