Chapter Seven

Friday, April 11, 1997

Paul Azinger and I were walking side by side up the seventeenth fairway early Friday evening. Our second round was nearly over, and we were chatting away. Paul was even for the round and 3 under for the tournament, while I was 6 under for the day and 8 under through the thirty-four holes I’d played. I was leading the Masters, and I’d played well the second round. My concentration was sharp, and I was hitting plenty of solid shots that came off the clubface just as I wanted. While I didn’t want to get distracted—I still had a hole and a half to play—there was no reason we couldn’t talk between shots.

Players have different styles, and I had learned how to accommodate. Nick Faldo and I hadn’t said a word to each other during the first round, which was fine. He preferred to be locked in every minute and not to step out. I respected that. We got along fine. We shook hands on the eighteenth green, and that was the extent of our interactions.

Paul, on the other hand, was a talker. He and I would do the usual thing of saying “good shot, nice play,” that sort of exchange, but we also talked while walking to our shots. People must have wondered what we talked about. Well, surprisingly, we were playing the second round of a major and discussing posture, of all things. Rounds were taking four hours, minimum, as they always did at tournaments, and I was glad to talk about anything and everything. Fluff and I talked about sports—mainly baseball, basketball, and football during the season (I’m a big L.A. Dodgers, L.A. Lakers, and Oakland Raiders fan), and hockey, his favorite sport. He also had quite a repertoire of jokes, and then there was his enduring affection for the Grateful Dead. For me, even the Rolling Stones weren’t my music. I went to one concert, heard a couple of songs, and didn’t get it. Give me hip-hop anytime.

Compared with the major sports—such as baseball, football, basketball, and hockey—a round of golf on tour takes a long time. Granted, these other sports have gotten longer because of mandated commercial breaks for television, but the only thing that would cause a game to last four hours would be extra innings or overtime.

Although I’d been playing tournaments for a long time, I sometimes still felt worn out mentally, not physically. The time it took to play a tournament round was one of the game’s challenges, and I welcomed it. I grinded hard from the first shot to the last putt, so it wasn’t surprising that I’d get worn out. It wasn’t an issue for me, in the sense that I could grind hard for the four or more likely five hours it took to finish a round. It would have been crazy if I hadn’t learned to adjust to how long it took to play.

Golf at the Masters wasn’t meant for speed. It was meant to test your resolve and resilience as much, or probably more, than your physical talent. My objective was to give it everything I had for the time I was on the course, for that five-hour window. I had nineteen hours to recover from the mental fatigue. If I couldn’t handle the effort, I shouldn’t have gone into pro golf.

It had been a productive round for each of us, although mine hadn’t started in a promising way. After a par on one and a long drive into good position on two, I hit a six-iron into the gallery to the right and then dumped my pitch just short of the green. But things looked up quickly when I chipped in. That was my second hole-out in nine holes, and I thought, “Maybe that’s a good omen. But then again, maybe it wasn’t.” I hit driver on the short par-4 third, one of my favorite holes at Augusta or any other course.

It was like the tenth at Riviera in Los Angeles. You could drive the green if you hit a perfect shot. But if you didn’t, or tried to get cute with your second, you could easily come up short or go over the green and have an almost impossible shot to get up and down. The green at Riviera is small and on an angle to the drive. The third green at Augusta is also small and protected by severe slopes. The green contours alone could make you queasy, because there are so many sneaky little undulations that you have to consider. I’d heard accounts of, and seen, balls rolling all over the place. You could make eagle or birdie there, and also a bogey or double bogey, just like that. It was a serious golf hole, even if it was only 350 yards.

My plan in using driver was to roll the ball onto the green. If I missed, I wanted the ball on a flat area on the right side. My drive rolled up to that flat portion of the fairway beside the green, which would have given me an easy chip if the ball stopped. But it came back down the slope. Now I had to pitch up and over the slope, otherwise the ball would roll back to me. I hit the pitch firmly enough to carry the slope, but the green on that angle runs away, and it was so firm and fast that I couldn’t keep the ball on the green. I chipped back to six feet—the ball just kept rolling—and I missed the par putt. I’d bogeyed a hole that I had nearly reached with my driver.

It was my fault, and I took those ten seconds my father had taught me to use. I let my anger out and got ready to play the par-3 fourth, which I parred with a decent shot to the green and two putts. I was back in that “obsessed with the shot at hand” state—feel the swing, hone in on the target—and proved that to myself when I hit a big drive on the fifth and hit sand wedge to two feet for birdie.

My round proceeded nicely from there, and I felt myself getting on a roll where I was hitting plenty of nice shots and not too many that could hurt me. A long drive on the eighth, which was playing downwind, enabled me to hit a four-iron up the hill and onto the green, where I two-putted for birdie from thirty feet. Nine almost cost me, but I got away with a snap-hooked drive into the trees, and then an intentionally snap-hooked seven-iron toward the green. It didn’t hook enough and finished in the gallery to the right of the green.

I was fortunate in that many Augusta spectators plunked their chairs down at the start of a round and never took them away, even if they went to watch golfers on other holes. People were so polite at Augusta that they didn’t sit in somebody else’s chair. If they did, they would probably have their Masters badges revoked. The badges are so hard to get that nobody wanted to let that happen. Meanwhile, most people stayed in place on the hole they chose. Unlike just about any tournament, the Masters gave players a wall of people that you sometimes chose to use as a backstop.

The people seated to the right of the ninth green definitely provided a backstop for me on my second shot. My ball came out of the trees so hot that it was moving very fast. Who knows where it would have ended up if nobody had been there? My shot ricocheted off somebody sitting there and allowed my ball to end up beside the green. I made par from there to shoot 2 under on the front. I’d gotten to 4 under for the tournament after being 4 over after nine holes.

My round started to really lift off after I began the back nine with pars on the first three holes. I hit three-wood off the tee on the thirteenth and then eight-iron into the green. I had 170 yards for that second shot. I hammered that eight-iron, starting it a bit right. That brought the creek into play, but I was swinging the way I had when I hit that two-iron on ten on Thursday to turn my game around. I was confident that I could draw the ball in over that side of the creek, and if I overdrew it, that wouldn’t be a problem. I knew I would have to hammer the eight-iron, and I did. That felt good. The shot finished twenty feet behind the hole. It was a front pin, five yards on.

I had seen that putt before—not because I had it during practice rounds or in the Masters, but because I saw the putt while watching it at Golf Channel studios in Orlando in the months before. I watched how all the putts broke. I wasn’t concerned with other shots but fast-forwarded to the putts. I knew from seeing the putt I had for eagle on thirteen that it didn’t break as much as I would have otherwise thought. The putt straightened out at the hole. It almost wanted to go to the right, up the hill from where I was putting. You would likely perceive it as going up the ridge, where there was a tier to the right. But I had seen the putt, and read it as flattening out near the hole. I played a little less break than I might have, had I not seen the putt on a previous telecast. I made the putt for eagle and took the lead for the first time. It was satisfying to see that putt work exactly as I thought it would. I’ve always been thankful to Golf Channel for letting me come in to use its video library. Doing that sure made the difference for that one putt.

Now I was rolling. I hit three-wood, and then sand wedge into fourteen just left of the flag on that wild, topsy-turvy green to one foot, for birdie. My drive on fifteen caught the speed slot again and ran on to just short of the crosswalk, around 350 yards out there. I hit wedge in and made another birdie. I had gone 4 under on thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen. I was hitting short irons into most of the par-4s, and short irons and wedges even into the par-5s.

Nicklaus played the course like this when he won five of his six Masters. He demolished the par-5s and made a lot of birdies on the par-4s because he hit so many wedges into the greens. I read an article in which somebody asked Jack before a round in the 1963 Masters how he was feeling. Jack was twenty-three, and he answered, “Big and young and mean.” What a way to feel. Jack knew that he could overpower Augusta if he played his game.

It’s hard to overestimate how much of an asset it was to be able to hit the ball miles, and also to hit it high so that you had a chance of having a birdie putt and not always having to putt from forty feet. But Jack also said there wasn’t any need to take chances at Augusta, because the course could wreck your scorecard if you made mistakes at holes such as the second, by driving into the trees, or the eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth because of the water.

I studied how he played the course, and I took his views into account when I thought of how I would play it. Jack had won six Masters, and so I couldn’t have a better teacher—even if we hadn’t talked very much about how he played the course. But his approach was apparent to me from our one practice round in 1996, and from watching tapes of the Masters he had won.

Another thing I learned from studying Jack was that it was never a good idea to complain about a course. It used to be said that Jack, while sitting in a locker room during a major, heard one player after another coming in and moping about the course. He said to himself, “I’ll check that guy off the list of possible winners. And that guy. And that guy.” He knew that there was no point in teeing it up if you complained. The course wasn’t going to change for you. You had to change for it.

Tom Watson was also a teacher in this regard. He didn’t like links golf when he first played it, because it made no sense to him that one round, into the wind, he might hit a five-iron 130 yards. The next day, downwind, he might hit a five-iron 230 yards. He also didn’t like it that the ball bounced all over the place on the firm ground, and often into what are known as “collection” or “gathering” bunkers. But it didn’t take long for Tom to appreciate what links golf was all about, and he went on to win five Opens. A bad attitude toward a course gets you nowhere. You might as well not play. But an attitude where you accept the challenge can put you ahead of players in the field who don’t.

As for Jack, I learned that he said while I was playing my second round that I made the course into “nothing” because of my length. It was kind of Jack to make such generous comments about me, but I had a long way to go before I could even think of approaching what he had done at the Masters, winning those six times between 1963 and 1986. That was quite a span from start to finish. I was trying to win my first Masters at age twenty-one, a couple of years before Jack’s age when he won his first. Jack during his career reached the pinnacle of golf; he was the pinnacle. He was fifty-seven when I played the 1997 Masters, and he still had plenty of game even though he wasn’t happy with it coming into the tournament. But, as we had seen in 1986, when he was forty-six, he knew how to win once he got himself into contention.

Twelve years later, in 1998, he tied for sixth, four shots behind my buddy Marko, who took the Masters—finally, his first major win. Jack was showing us the value of experience, especially in majors and, maybe more than anywhere else, at Augusta. He was like a detective who had solved the mysteries of the course. I was grateful for what I had learned from him.

And then there was Arnold. He was sixty-seven and was playing his forty-third straight Masters, having won in 1958, 1960, 1962, and 1964. Arnold had been diagnosed with prostate cancer the previous January and had surgery five days later. The first question he asked his doctor was when he could start playing again, and he was told six weeks. Arnold made a quick calculation and realized that would give him time to prepare for the Masters. If it was at all possible for him to be at Augusta and to play there, you knew he would show up. I was in the locker room with him during one Masters when he was in his seventies, and we started talking about the round ahead of us as we put on our shoes. Conditions were firm, and so we figured it would be a good day because we could both get our drives down the fairways farther. We were talking strategy and kidding around. When I told him he should be able to break 80, he gave me a big “F.U.” It was so much fun being with him there, going at one another.

On Friday he was in the first twosome, at 8:20 with Ken Green. I was in the second-to-last twosome with Paul. We had started at 2:39, and so I was getting ready for my round when Arnold came up the eighteenth fairway. He was tired, and he was on his way to shooting 89 to follow his first-round 87. He was given one standing ovation after another during his second round, and the one around the eighteenth green as he approached it and finished his round was loud and prolonged. Arnold and Augusta had been going together for years, and prostate cancer wasn’t going to stop him. Arnold said his scores embarrassed him, and that he hadn’t thought his compromised health would affect him as much as it did. His scores didn’t matter to Arnie’s Army.

A few years later, in 2004, Arnold, who was then seventy-four, played his fiftieth and last Masters. Five years after that, in 2009, Gary Player, then seventy-three, played his fifty-second and last Masters. What other sport can somebody play for half a century?

My heart rate was elevated as Paul and I walked up the seventeenth fairway, because I had gotten so intense as the round progressed. Fluff’s jokes relaxed me, and so did the brief conversations Paul and I had. Now it was time to take my heart rate down, because I was about to play. I was aware of the level I needed my heart rate to be to play shots, when to get jacked up, and when to calm down. There was a certain level I wanted to play at when it came to the energy I needed to put into my swing. I controlled my heart rate through my breathing. I was able to get into an almost meditative state on the course when required.

I parred seventeen and eighteen to shoot 66 and take a three-shot lead over the field. This was a big improvement on the first two times I played the Masters, when I didn’t break par in the six rounds I played. One important difference was that I was now a professional golfer, and was playing many more tournaments than when I was in college. I was pulling all-nighters to study for finals at Stanford when I came to Augusta before, which put me at a significant disadvantage playing against the tournament-tough pros. I could hit all the balls I wanted, for hours and hours, and putt on the floor of our volleyball court at Stanford, but there was never a substitute for competition. This time, the tournaments I had played before, and won, suggested I was properly prepared and ready to compete at Augusta.

After my round, I went to the range with Butchie and Fluff to work on my swing. I had hit a couple of iffy shots—like the drive on nine—and I didn’t want to leave until I got the shots out of my system and understood what had gone wrong. I worked on moving the ball left to right—a shot I struggled with when I needed to hit it—and was able to do that when I got into a better position with my hands and shaft on the backswing. I hit a couple of bags of balls, and then Jerry drove me home. Well, not home right away. First there was that stop at Arby’s, an absolute must now that I’d played well for two straight days.

Going over the round later at the house, hole by hole, I concluded that I had played smart, strategic golf, as I had planned coming into the Masters. It was the style that Nicklaus advocated at Augusta, where he knew so many players would beat themselves by making mental errors and taking unnecessary chances. I wasn’t right on it yet, given how young I was, but I’d learned that it was important to play efficient golf. It didn’t have to be razzle-dazzle golf, and I didn’t need to go at pins that were inaccessible. Jack always said you would have a lot of decent birdie looks if you hit the middle of the greens at Augusta. I tried to do that on most of the holes, except that I enjoyed using the slopes to sometimes take the ball nearer the hole after it landed in a safe spot. I was driving the ball well, so I knew I could take care of the par-5s and make a few birdies on them, or maybe also an eagle or two.

My plan for Saturday was for more of the same. Maybe you could call it boring golf, in that I wasn’t forcing things, as I had done in ’95 and ’96. I was hardly a veteran at Augusta, but I was starting to understand the course and to plot my way around properly. I was doing what I had come to Augusta to do.

Maybe people didn’t like it when I said after the second round that I didn’t feel different leading at the Masters than I did when I was leading at other tournaments I’d won as a pro. I felt the same because I wasn’t playing for the crystal and I wasn’t playing for the green jacket, and I wasn’t playing to be the first minority golfer to win the Masters. That was all there, but it was background. I was playing for the joy of competition, and for the hunt. But the hunt was to bring out whatever talent I had. The hunt wasn’t for a trophy. If I did what I felt I could do, everything else, all those honors and gifts and trophies, would take care of themselves.