Chapter Three

Monday, April 7, 1997

This was what I’d been waiting for since I turned professional nearly eight months before: my first Masters as a professional. I’d been practicing for this moment since the start of the year, even during other tournaments where I had worked on shots that I knew I would need at the Masters: hitting the ball high, with a slight draw; getting my lag putting down so that I would have as many tap-ins as possible for my second putt. Butchie and I were pointing to the Masters; we were pointing hard.

Because my preferred shot at Augusta was a right-to-left shot, I felt one way to encourage that in practice was to hit balls with a persimmon-headed driver. I had an old Cleveland Classic driver and an old MacGregor Eye-O-Matic driver, and I used them to ensure I was hitting the ball in the right spot to promote a draw. The idea was to use the gear effect that you could get then with persimmon. The heads were small enough compared with the size they would become, and they had enough bulge and roll so that if I made a normal swing intending to hit the ball off the toe, the ball would draw. If I hit it toward the heel, the ball faded. I could shape the ball any way I wanted. If I aimed down the left side of the fairway and hit it off the heel, the ball always peeled back to the right. Off the toe, draw. There’s no gear effect now with the enormous, titanium drivers in play. Hit it off the heel, and the ball keeps going left. Hit it off the toe, it keeps going right. I felt I could feel the face on the ball more when I practiced with persimmon; the clubs became ideal training tools for me as I prepared for Augusta.

Every new calendar year, the Masters felt to me as though it was just around the corner; it was on my mind all the time and I felt I had to begin to prepare. I did the same thing when I was younger for the Junior World, the U.S. Junior, and then the U.S. Amateur; after I turned pro, I’d start thinking about the four majors. Above all tournaments, I wanted to peak for those.

It was obvious to me when I’d played Augusta National as an amateur that I’d need to hit the ball as high as possible to carry some of the bunkers, mounds, and hills off the tees. So my objective during practice sessions and casual rounds for the Masters was not only to flight the ball right to left, but also to get comfortable hitting the ball high. I was using the same yardage book as in 1995 and 1996 during practice, because the course had hardly changed. The changes were to come later, after the club decided it had to lengthen the course and make other modifications to counteract how far players were hitting the ball.

Fluff and I had the carry distances to the mounds on the fifteenth hole; we had stepped them off, and they were my targets. The mounds would kick a drive that landed in the area forward and get the ball running fast. We also had important carry yardages on other holes. Butchie and I talked during practice leading up to the Masters about shots I needed to hit on the holes. He would say, “Okay, you’re on the fifteenth tee. Drive it so that you’ll carry the mounds on the right side.” If I hit my spots on the par-5s, I would hit the speed slots and come into them with middle to short irons, and into the par-4s with wedges. I would effectively turn the par-5s into par-4s.

As I learned about playing Augusta National, it became apparent to me that it was important to hit the ball high to carry the bunkers around the greens. That was the only way to get close to some of the pin positions. There was no point, then, in working on hitting the ball low going into Augusta. It wasn’t surprising to me that Lee Trevino never figured he had a good chance of winning the Masters. He had great control over the ball, but he was a low-ball hitter. His best finishes at the Masters were in 1975 and 1985, when he tied for tenth. He won two U.S. Opens, two British Opens, and two PGA Championships. But the Masters eluded him. The course didn’t suit him, as creative a shotmaker as he was. Trevino said so, especially when he decided not to play the 1970, 1971, and 1974 Masters. Later, I heard the real reason he didn’t play those years was because he didn’t get along with Clifford Roberts, the club founder and tournament chairman, from the first day they met, and that he was actually fine with the course. I’m not sure what the truth is, but I was aware that Augusta was a place of legends that were both positive and negative.

I’d also heard the rumbles about black golfers not being welcome at the Masters. Everybody was writing about me as an African-American who was playing in his first Masters as a professional. I tried to make it clear that I was African-American on my dad’s side and Asian on my mom’s side, and that to think of me only as an African-American was to deny my mom’s heritage. At the 1995 U.S. Open, I had referred to myself as a Cablinasian, a made-up word that includes my Caucasian, black, and Asian heritage. I never thought it was right or fair to think of me only as an African-American, and I never will. But I had learned that to have one drop of black blood in you in America meant that you were considered an African-American.

I was focused on being a golfer, and I wished people could see me as only a golfer, but clearly that wasn’t going to happen. Nevertheless I could still control my golf game. The way for me to give myself the best chance of winning was to hit the ball high, leave myself in the right spots coming into the greens, and control the speed of my putts. That’s what I had been focused on.

I put in a lot of time on all parts of my game—except for the low ball. I’d been working with Butchie since the start of the year on getting less aggressive with my putting. As a junior and then as an amateur, I tended to pretty much go for every putt, which would often leave me with too much work to do when my first putt went well by the hole. But that was my nature. I was all-out on every part of my game, and I carried this attitude right through the bag, driver to putter. At both Bay Hill and the Players Championship, a couple of weeks before the Masters, Butchie and I both felt that I started to get the feel of what cup speed meant. I learned how to hit a putt so that it could go in from any part of the hole, front, back, sides, and all points in between. As for my swing, I’d continued to work on taking spin off my irons, so that the ball wouldn’t spin back when it hit the greens at Augusta.

I was the kind of golfer who liked to be more aggressive than conservative in my shots, without taking on ridiculous risks when the penalty for a missed shot was extreme. Still, it wasn’t easy for me to curb my go-for-it nature. Augusta’s greens demanded a more cautious approach. A sure way out of the tournament would be to constantly face comeback putts for par after running the ball a few feet past the hole on the slippery, undulating greens. I gripped the putter tightly, maybe to feel like I was stoked to make a putt. But it was dangerous to putt like that at Augusta. Butchie came up with a novel way to help me go easier on the putter, and to grip it, if not more softly, then at least without what golfers call a “death” grip. Butchie found a manufacturer that made a putter that would beep if I squeezed the grip tightly. Put the pressure on it, and I got the beep. I hated the thing, but it was useful. I practiced with it at home and in hotel rooms during tournaments. But there was no way I would take it to the tournament, even during practice rounds. I’d feel embarrassed if the thing beeped, and I often had trouble stopping it from beeping.

You would think I could just tell myself to ease up on the grip, but I found it difficult. I could take a light grip over the ball, but then I would instinctively squeeze the grip as I made my forward press just before taking the putter back. Butchie laughed as only he can when I couldn’t stop myself from taking a tight grip, but I eventually learned to ease up. Still, it’s always been a tendency of mine to grab the grip and give it a squeeze.

Meanwhile, I spent countless hours working on other parts of my short game, too. I was lucky that I’d spent some time with Seve Ballesteros in Houston when we were both working with Butchie. Seve had won the Masters in 1980 and 1983. I’d watched the tournaments on videotape. You often heard the word magician applied to Seve when it came to his short game, and that was what he was: a magician. I got to thinking he could do almost anything with the ball around the greens. He spent hours showing me his short game. We played until dark. I wanted to see how he did it. I wasn’t able to play all of the shots he had, but I could take pieces. I asked him how he did it, but knowing how didn’t mean I could, which was fine because I didn’t need to have all his shots, or to play them as he would. I could be creative in my own way.

Marko had also helped me prepare for Augusta, as I worked toward getting into what my dad called “major mode.” Even though I’d played the Masters twice, I was still young and raw. While playing with Marko at Isleworth, I had seen that I really didn’t know how to play the game. I could hit it for miles, but that was the easy part. I needed a wider variety of shots, and I hadn’t yet developed the physical parts of the game. My game was relatively immature—all power with whatever club I had in my hands.

Butchie asked me during our first session together after the ’93 Amateur if I had a go-to, automatic shot when I wasn’t swinging well. Every golfer needs a reliable shot that he can put in play, and I didn’t have one. I told Butchie that my go-to shot was what I did just about every time: swing as fast as I could, unleashing everything I had through the ball. I then would go find the ball and hit it again. He thought I was a cocky kid, playing golf that way, and he was right. But he liked my attitude. I had my own style—just one way, sure, but it had worked, at least as far as winning. I’d won three straight U.S. Juniors by the time Butchie and I got together. Did I know how to score and how to win? Yes, at the junior level. I knew how to get the job done. But I needed more shots, and I needed to maintain my distance while getting more accurate.

It was evident that I would have mostly short irons into the greens at Augusta. But I didn’t know how to dial it down, how to hit the little half shots, or how to be proficient at hitting the ball to the yardage I wanted, whatever it was for the shot. Butchie harped at me to understand how to hit the ball pin-high. That didn’t mean flag-high. Pin-high meant whatever you decided was your number, not necessarily where the flag was. If the flag was 164 yards, maybe I’d want to make sure my ball carried 160 yards to keep it short of the hole and leave myself an uphill putt.

There were so many holes at Augusta where I needed to learn the right spots to have my ball finish, depending on the pin position. The ninth green was an obvious example. I learned in the 1995 Masters that I should never be past the hole. I could putt off the green from there. But how do I hit my approach to a place that isn’t really drawing my attention? Like all golfers, I had trouble seeing anything but the pin. By the 1997 Masters, I’d learned to focus on the number I needed to carry the ball so that it would finish in the right spot. I’d learned to keep the pin out of my mind’s eye. Marko helped me with that. It wasn’t easy. It never would be easy.

I arrived in Augusta Monday after flying up from Orlando with Marko. My dad arrived the next day, with his physician, Dr. Gene McClung, who stayed at the house. My mom was there, and so were my friends Mikey Gout and Jerry Chang.

Mikey and I grew up on the same street and went to elementary school together. After school we played basketball or hung out at each other’s house playing video games. There was a field between our houses, and we’d grab some clubs and hit balls there. My dad offered Mikey some lessons. But Mikey was more interested in soccer.

One day I was playing football with Mikey and a couple of other friends. I had the ball and did my usual showboating thing, running down the field and not looking ahead. I ran into a tree and was knocked out cold. The tree flexed down. I had a concussion. Like idiots, the guys didn’t want to take me back home, because they were afraid of how my mom would react. The guys did, however, carry me back. Although you’re supposed to wake up the guy with the concussion and observe him, my friends just dropped me off, knocked on the door, and ran. (Thanks, guys!) Despite that we’ve remained close friends.

Jerry and I met at Stanford. He’d been on the golf team, had just graduated, and was traveling with me. It felt like we were back in college, going from tournament to tournament, except that I was playing more tournaments and I was playing against the best players in the world. Pro golf itself, the tournament part of it, didn’t feel that different from college, which was why I was glad to have my longtime pals around at the house. We had plenty of heated Ping-Pong games, and we also played video games and shot some hoops out back where the owners had a spot for that. Some of our games were pretty close, and very noisy. I felt as competitive there as on the golf course.

Jerry was the driver for the week at Augusta. He drove me to the course and back every day in the big Cadillac courtesy car that the Masters provided. And sometimes, when my dad was up to going, he would drive him, too. He usually stayed around the house when my dad was there, so that he could help him with whatever he needed. Jenny Hull, Kevin Costner’s personal assistant, was also staying in the house. I’d played with Kevin at the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am earlier that year, where I met Brian Hull, his caddie and Jenny’s brother. Brian played for the University of Southern California golf team. I planned to spend some time with Kevin after the Masters while he was shooting The Postman in Bend, Oregon.

Kathy Battaglia and Hughes Norton worked with IMG, my management agency at the time. They stayed at the IMG house, but Kathy was still the den mother for the week at our place. The house was in the Conifer neighborhood west of the course, and about ten minutes away in decent traffic. We knew that my dad wouldn’t be able to get to the course every day. Kathy rented a big-screen television so that he could watch the tournament. A fellow who lived in the area cooked for us. The menu was always the same, at least for me—chicken or steak.

On Monday morning I got up at my usual time—very early. I rarely slept more than four or five hours a night and normally woke up between four and five, without an alarm clock—six was sleeping in for me. I’d used the odometer on the car to create routes in the area where we were staying of two and two and a half miles. I loved to run, and every morning I’d have my breakfast, usually some kind of oatmeal, and then get out on the streets for a four-to five-mile run out and back. My normal pace was a seven-minute mile. That was cruising. If I wanted to work hard, it was six fifteen. I’d work up a good sweat at either pace.

I’d run track in high school, and getting out by myself had been a routine of mine for a few years, including during tournaments. I felt peaceful out there in the darkness, and could let anything and everything flow through my mind. Running for me was meditative. I could run off any kind of stress, anxiety, excitement, or nervous energy. Sometimes, while running in bad weather, I’d want to stop because it was raining and cold. But I wouldn’t let myself quit, and I would use the situation as motivation. Running in nasty conditions gave me an opportunity to test my will, maybe even to build it. I’d think of something Muhammad Ali said, that the will must be stronger than the skill. I wanted to see myself as an athlete and do the things that athletes do.

Many people didn’t consider golf a sport. When I played on my high school golf team, I wasn’t even thought of as an athlete. But I had to work out in high school. I didn’t have a choice. I had to participate in the team workouts, and get in the weight room and do lifts. Then I realized this was helping me, and I began to enjoy it.

I felt golf should be and could be a sport, and that the fitter I became, the more likely I would do well. But my dad also had taught me since I was a kid to make my mind strong. I’d learned as an amateur—when I’d come from behind time after time to win national championships—and during my first seven months as a pro that my mind could be my most powerful ally. The thing was to never give up, from the first shot on the first hole to the last shot on the last hole. The first hole was as important as the last hole, and every shot was exactly the same. I had the same focus, the same intensity. I didn’t try harder the deeper I got into a tournament. Nothing changed. I was busting myself as hard as I could from the first shot. I learned to have that mentality, and to maintain it. That was how I was going to approach the first shot at the Masters. Each round would take maybe five hours at the most, so I had nineteen hours to recover. Why wouldn’t I focus as hard as I could for the five hours? Let’s go. After that, hey, I’m done.

I needed to develop my will not only because mental strength could be such an asset in golf, but also because I’d already had some surgeries with their accompanying pain during rehab and recovery. My first surgery occurred in 1994, when I was at Stanford, with the removal of two cysts sitting on the saphenous vein on my left knee and hitting my saphenous nerve. I was left with a long scar behind my knee. The surgery was a few weeks before my nineteenth birthday on December thirtieth. I packed up my car and drove home to Cypress. I wanted to play on my birthday, so I went to rehab every day. The physios and trainers rehabbed the hell out of my knee, and finally I got the sutures out. The swelling from the bruising came down as well. I was disappointed when I was told, though, that I still wasn’t ready to play. But I really wanted to tee it up. Although I had this big, old green brace on, I still asked if it would be okay if I played with it on. They wouldn’t advise me to play, but they also said I wouldn’t hurt myself further if I did play.

I said the heck with it, and went out to play with my dad at the Navy course. He didn’t think it was a good idea. But I conned him into it. I started by asking if I could just ride in the cart with him while he played with his friends. He said, absolutely, come on. I then asked if I could bring my clubs. Maybe I could chip onto a green, or putt a little bit.

The next thing my dad knew, I was teeing it up behind the guys on the first tee. I hit it right down the middle of the fairway. Meanwhile, when they asked me how my knee felt, I’d say it was just fine. But in reality, the pain was excruciating and I was dying on the inside. Par for the front nine was 37. I shot 31. Then I said, “You know what, Dad? I’m done. I’ll just rest it from here.” I could see my skin coming out through the brace. The swelling was getting so bad that I kept strapping the brace down tighter. To me, it was like when you tweaked an ankle. You kept the shoe on. You didn’t take it off, because the ankle would blow up on you. I kept it on there because I had to watch my dad and his friends play the back nine. I didn’t have anyplace to go to elevate the knee and ice it. I had to ride the back nine. So I did, without letting on that I was miserable. The mind is powerful.

Jerry drove me to the course after my early-morning run. I had a question for the tournament chairman, Jack Stephens, and went to his office. “Come on over and sit right here,” he said. I sat down and said, “Mr. Stephens, sir, I’m now a professional golfer, but I qualified for this tournament when I won the U.S. Amateur. It’s a Masters tradition for the current U.S. Amateur champion to play the first round with the defending Masters champion, and to go off second to last. But I’ve been wondering whether that would still apply, since I’m here as a pro. Will I still be playing with the defending champion?”

My victories since I’d turned pro had already ensured I’d be invited to the Masters. But my eligibility off winning the U.S. Amateur wasn’t in place anymore, because I had turned pro. I wasn’t sure whether my winning as a pro would get me into the twosome with the defending Masters champion. I hoped it would and was eager to find out. Winning the Las Vegas Invitational, my first win as a pro, wouldn’t have gotten me into the twosome with him. The defending Masters champion plays the first round with the most recent U.S. Amateur champion, not the winner of a PGA Tour event.

Mr. Stephens sat back in his chair and paused. He thought about my question. I’ll never forget sitting there and waiting for his answer. He said, “Son, you’ve earned that right.” I thanked him and told him I appreciated the opportunity. Mr. Stephens wished me good luck, and off I went. He could have answered differently. He could have said that as a pro, I wouldn’t be playing with the defending champion. I’d have understood, but would have felt disappointed. Augusta National has complete control of the pairings, so they could have done whatever they chose. But Will Nicholson, Augusta’s competition committee chairman then—he died in May 2016—said that when I got back into the tournament after winning as a pro, I should still play with Nick Faldo. Mr. Stephens said I earned the right to play with him. I left his office feeling really pumped.

Mr. Stephens was right. I’d earned the privilege of playing with the defending champion. It wasn’t an easy decision for me to turn pro in August 1996, but I had realized, in consultation with my father, that I no longer had anything to play for in amateur golf. I’d won all the big amateur tournaments. I wanted to go to the next level.

My dad had impressed on me that I had to earn my way to the next level, and the way to do that is by winning. Eventually I went from local junior golf to national junior golf to national amateur golf. I eventually won in every age bracket growing up. But each time I moved up a bracket, I always started with a loss. I played up a bracket many times, but I got dominated at first. I wasn’t good enough. Sure I could hit the ball a long way, for my age. But that didn’t mean I would beat the other guys when I played up a bracket.

I was only thirteen when I lost to Justin Leonard at the Big I, the Insurance Youth Golf Classic at the Texarkana Country Club in Texarkana, Arkansas. Justin was seventeen. I hit it a long way for a thirteen-year-old, but not for a seventeen-year-old. Everybody was hitting it past me. They were young men, I was an older boy, and the difference was huge. They were simply bigger, stronger, and more efficient than I was. They knew how to control the ball. They outthought me. I had a long way to go, a long way to develop.

I finished my junior career by winning three straight U.S. Juniors. After winning my first in July 1991, I shot 152 at the U.S. Amateur the following month to miss qualifying for the match play portion. In 1992, I shot 78-66 to qualify for match play, but lost to Tim Herron in the second round. I made it into match play again in 1993 but lost in the second round. The jump from junior golf to the next level was proving difficult for me. It was after I lost in that second round that my dad contacted Butchie and asked if he would meet me and take a look at my swing. Three years later, after I won the 1996 U.S. Amateur—my third in a row—it was apparent that I was ready to turn pro. I had successfully made the transition from junior to amateur golf, and so it was time to move on.

While the time was right, I also hadn’t done much in pro tournaments that I’d played as an amateur. I’d never contended in any of the seventeen tournaments I had played. I’d made the cut in only seven of them. True, I had won the three U.S. Juniors and the three U.S. Amateurs, but that’s nothing at the tour level. Now I was turning pro the week after my last U.S. Amateur, and playing in the Greater Milwaukee Open. I had seven tournaments in which I could get sponsors’ exemptions and try to make enough money to earn my full playing privileges for the 1997 season. I had to earn as much as the guy who would finish 125th on the 1996 money list. I needed to play well. My mind went back to the 1992 Los Angeles Open at Riviera, where I shot 72-75 and missed the cut. I thought I did pretty well, but I was seventeen shots behind Davis Love III at that point. How could I ever make up that many shots so that I would be where he was after two rounds? I was only sixteen, but I wasn’t that good. In fact, compared to the tour guys, I sucked.

It wasn’t until the 1996 British Open at the Royal Lytham & St. Annes Golf Club the month before I moved on from the amateur ranks that I was finally ready to play with the pros. I made seven birdies in eleven holes in the second round, and shot 66 after opening with a 75. I shot 70-70 on the weekend for a 281 total, and was low amateur. That tied me with the English player Iain Pyman for the low amateur score in an Open; he had shot 281 in the 1993 Open at Royal St George’s, which Greg Norman won.

The 66 I shot at Lytham, where I slept on the floor in the hotel because I didn’t like the bed in the room—the mattress was too soft—turned things around for me, especially coming after my poor first round. It helped my confidence to know that I could make that many birdies in one round in a tour event. The seven birdies in an eleven-hole stretch came after I was 1 over for the day and 4 over for the tournament after five holes. I’m sure Richard Noon, a kid at the club and my caddie for the week, figured I was on my way to missing the cut. But years later he told Ewan Murray, a writer for the Guardian, that just then I said, “It’s time to turn this around.” Richard said that from there, “It was like a switch was flipped.”

My self-confidence soared. I realized I could play this game at the pro level. I was becoming more efficient, and I wasn’t wasting shots like I did when I was playing pro events earlier. I figured that I just needed to get into a rhythm of playing tour events, and then I would do well. I wasn’t certain when I came to the Open that I would soon turn pro, but the second round convinced me I was good enough not only to play against tour pros, but to compete and win.

Looking back now, I do wish I had stayed one more year at Stanford, because I liked it there so much. I missed the long nights when a group of us talked about anything. I missed going away for Christmas vacation and looking forward to seeing my buddies after and catching up with them. Stanford students were exceptionally smart, so some of our discussions went far afield. One night we talked about Descartes for three hours, and our entire suite of five or six guys got deeply into it. Another night we talked about the evolution of Mongolian tribes in Central Asia. I could talk for hours about the evolution of the golf swing, but this was new territory for me and I found it very stimulating. It was invigorating to talk about subjects that weren’t likely to come up on tour. I missed those nights, but it was time to turn pro.

I’d never seen anything like I saw in Milwaukee at my first tournament as a pro. Back at the L.A. Open that I played when I was sixteen, the first tee was packed, and there was a big fuss around me at the beginning of my round. Then everyone went to watch the top guys once I started playing; I learned to deal with big crowds but was also fine with playing when the spectators moved on. Milwaukee was totally different. The crowds were big all the way through. It was so different from a regular tour event in that most of the spectators were following my group only. It was trippy. In Milwaukee I ripped my first drive 336 yards down the fairway—it was a great feeling.

I played with Bruce Lietzke in one round, and I looked forward to that because he hit everything with a big fade. Even then, you didn’t see golfers curving the ball that much. If anything, it was a slight fade or draw. But he hit these big slices out there. I’d heard about the way he played, and had seen it in telecasts. But it was different to experience it. He hit it so far left to a back left pin on one hole that I thought the ball was gone. I was about to yell fore, when all of a sudden the ball started slicing and coming back, and it finished ten feet from the hole. Okay, I thought, I didn’t see that coming. This was just another sign that tour players had a lot of game. I mean every tour player. Nobody got to the tour on luck.

It seemed like I played every week after I turned pro, which was much different from playing maybe one or two college tournaments a month. I wanted to win my PGA Tour card for 1997, which meant I needed to keep playing. I tied for sixtieth in Milwaukee, finished eleventh the next week in the rain-shortened Canadian Open, which went three rounds, tied for fifth at the Quad Cities Open, and for third at the B.C. Open in Endicott, New York, my fourth tournament since I became a professional. The tournament was shortened to three rounds because of poor weather. My earnings through the first four tournaments guaranteed that I would finish the year in the top 150 money winners. That meant I could be given unlimited sponsors’ exemptions in 1997. All the guys at the B.C. Open were congratulating me on getting my card so fast. That was the coolest thing ever.

Now I was a real tour pro. I’d secured my playing card and gotten my money clip—the recognition in a tangible form that I had made it to the PGA Tour. I won the Las Vegas Invitational two weeks later, finished third at the Texas Open, and then won Disney in October. I was getting tired, because I’d never played as many tournaments in college. Maybe it’s crazy to think about a twenty-year-old getting burned out, but that was how I began to feel after Disney. After I got some rest at the end of the year, I won the Mercedes Championships, the tournament reserved for the previous season’s winners, at the start of 1997.

I was pointing to the Masters by then, and my education in the short game around Augusta definitely continued on Monday of tournament week. I played nine holes with Seve and Ollie. It was a master class, and when I thought about it, their games reminded me in some ways of the improvisational jazz my dad loved. He appreciated when the talent meshed various musical elements and made something out of nothing. You couldn’t practice improvisational jazz, because it would then be something else. You could practice all kinds of shots at Augusta, but inevitably you would put yourself in a spot that you hadn’t been in before. Seve and Ollie were geniuses at improvising, and they were Masters champions, with Seve, as I’ve said, winning in 1980 and 1983, and Ollie in 1994 (he would also win in 1999). They gave me a nine-hole lesson in inventive shot making. I was pumped after playing the nine holes with them. When they continued to play on their own after, I, too, tried all kinds of shots.

A while later I heard a story about Seve that captured his spirit, competitiveness, and creativity. He was playing with Tom Kite in the last round of the ’86 Masters, and they were on the par-5 eighth hole. Not many guys could get to the green in two shots then—the ball had yet to turn into an exploding missile. Tom had laid up to about one hundred yards, while Seve’s second got him within fifty yards of the green. That right there taught me one thing. It wasn’t important to Seve to make sure he had a full shot into a green. If he had to hit half or three-quarter shots, fine. I think he enjoyed those far more than full shots. He always wanted to do something with the golf ball. Conventional, by the exact yardage golf, wasn’t for him. Seve was the ultimate feel player. I’d appreciated his style since I first met him, and I wasn’t surprised to hear this story—especially when I thought about the shots he hit when we played on the Monday of the ’97 Masters.

Kite, I learned, hit a full wedge to the green back on that Sunday in 1986, and holed it. I could just see Seve looking at Tom after he holed his shot, and then thinking about the crafty shot he was about to play. He had something special in mind. I could see his wizardry at play.

Seve then studied his own shot. The hole was cut to the left of a slightly raised portion of the green. Seve had at least a couple of options. He could fly the ball directly at the hole with some sort of shot, and put some spin on the ball to make sure it stopped quickly. But he saw another way. He could use the contours to the right of the hole. Seve chipped the ball up to the green in such a way that it would take the slope and curl toward the hole. I doubt he had practiced that shot, but I’d bet he saw the trajectory and the bounces and the roll clearly in his mind’s eye. The ball scooted along the fairway, hit the green running, took the slope, rolled left and sideways, and fell into the hole on top of Tom’s ball. They had each holed their approaches and eagled the hole. The way I heard the story, you never saw two happier guys. They walked to the green side by side, acknowledging the people who were watching. It’s too bad that CBS wasn’t covering that hole. It must have been quite a moment, vintage Seve.

The genius of Augusta National is that it allows you to be so imaginative around the greens. The more creative I could be, the more inspired I would feel. This was another reason I was so excited about my first Masters, and my first major, as a professional golfer.