There is more hope than expectation about Woods’ game. Playing is a win | Andy Bull

The five-times champion had some good moments in his first round, but too many mistakes led to a two-over-par finish

It’s an odd truth that if you’ve got to ask someone who it is you’re watching at Augusta National then you already know the answer. At a quarter-to-ten, half an hour before Tiger Woods was even due on the 1st tee, the crowd was packed four or five deep down the length of the fairway, and three times as thick again up by the clubhouse. So anyone who arrived hoping to see him afterwards needed to be awfully comfortable up on their tip-toes, or else try to find a vacant pine tree root to perch on so they could peer over everyone else’s heads.

After all these years, Woods is still the only man in the field here who draws a gallery like that. Catching a glimpse of him has become as much of a Masters tradition as buying a pimento cheese sandwich or posing for a photo out round the back of the clubhouse. It’s one of the things every daytripper wants to cross off their list. They don’t much mind whether they’ve caught him playing a particularly good shot or not, his five-foot pars earn the same sort of roars as other people’s ten-foot birdies.