Chapter Eight

Saturday, April 12, 1997

If I needed any extra motivation for my third round, Colin Montgomerie provided it during his media conference the day before. Monty was in second place, three shots behind me, and so we were going to play together in the last twosome on Saturday, just after two o’clock. At the conference, Monty was asked about our prospects for Saturday, and he spoke his mind, saying that everybody would see in the third round what I was made of, and that his experience might be a “key factor.” There was no question about it: Monty had much more experience. I didn’t know Monty at the time, and I came to like him over the years. We’ve battled quite a bit around the world, and he’s been fun to play with. But I took it to heart that neither of us had won a major championship when we went out there on Saturday. And if anything, his comments only strengthened my resolve to play my best golf the rest of the way.

I went through my warm-up routine, and couldn’t wait to get to the first tee and into the third round. The last thing Butchie did as we left the range was to remind me of Monty’s comments the day before. He could tell Monty might just have sparked something in me. I started par-birdie, and I was fired up. I shot a 4-under 32 on the front side. This was only the third round, but it felt good to be playing so well and increasing my margin not only over Monty but also over the entire field.

I wanted to keep taking care of the par-5s, as I did on the front nine when I birdied the second and eighth holes, and to birdie other holes when opportunities presented themselves. I putted carefully, trying to leave myself tap-ins for pars or birdies on the par-5s that I reached in two. I wanted an easy round that was as stress free as possible. That was nearly impossible at Augusta, though, because of how tricky the greens complexes were. So much thinking and strategy had to go into every approach shot.

The way I played the third hole was a good example of that. I hit a three-iron off the tee, and then a wedge that went over the green to the right. That was a serious mistake, because I had a brutal pitch back to the hole. Looking at it, you wouldn’t think it was that hard. There’s the green, and there’s the hole, and I have enough room to pinch the ball and put a bit of draw spin on it so that it would catch and sneak on down near the hole to where I’d have a short par putt, or maybe a tap-in. But I didn’t spin the ball as much as I wanted to, which annoyed me. I had a hill between me and the hole, and a slope off that hill that went left to right. I was trying to kill the shot with that bit of spin. It would have softened the blow coming into the hill so that it wouldn’t have been as hot coming across the crest, and then it would have taken the break to the right and finished near the hole. But it ran on by, because I didn’t impart the precise amount of spin that the shot required. The ball ended up running straight, about eight feet by the hole. When I thought about it later, I realized that I did well just to get it there—that’s how ticklish the shot was. I made the putt for par, though. I walked to the next tee and told myself, “Okay, that could have been nasty, but you made par. One under after three holes.”

I was enjoying the round and Monty’s company. He was respectful and complimentary, and would say, “Nice putt, good shot.” That’s the way golf is supposed to be; I did the same. We had a lot of banter going back and forth, but he knew pretty quickly that he was in a heavyweight battle. He probably also realized that his comments were giving me extra motivation in the round. He was walking with his head down and shoulders slumped. Meanwhile, I kept pushing myself to handle the par-5s and any situations that came up during the round. It didn’t hurt that the greens were soft because they had absorbed some rain, so I could attack some pins where I felt that was warranted. The ball was picking up some mud, so I hit some low hooks off the tees to run the ball out and allow the mud to come off.

I was competitive, simple as that. If you challenged me, I wasn’t going to back down. Mom knew that, Pop knew that, and that was why they weren’t concerned after I shot that 40 on the front nine the first round. They believed in me, and had always told me I could do things on the course that nobody else could do. I’m sure I internalized that self-belief. I didn’t believe all the people who were saying and writing that things would be different for me when I turned pro. Why should it be? It was still golf. The ball didn’t know I had been a pro for only seven months, and it didn’t know I was only twenty-one. It didn’t know I was playing my first Masters as a professional. I’m sure Nicklaus thought this way at the 1986 Masters, when he was forty-six years old. The golf ball didn’t know he was forty-six.

Nicklaus rarely received criticism, and for good reason. But he wasn’t playing very well when he showed up at the 1986 Masters, and Tom McCollister, a writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and somebody Jack respected, didn’t believe he had enough game to win. He wrote an article in the paper the Sunday before Masters week in which he said, “Nicklaus is gone, done. He just doesn’t have the game anymore. It’s rusted from lack of use. He’s forty-six, and nobody that old wins the Masters.”

That was true. Nobody that old had won the Masters. But so what? Did it really matter that Nicklaus hadn’t won a major in six years, or a PGA Tour event in two years, or that in seven tournaments on tour that year, his best finish was a tie for thirty-ninth? Jack didn’t believe any of that mattered. He was coming to Augusta and the Masters, a place and tournament he knew very well, and where he had won the Masters five times. He said at Augusta, “I still want to win and think I can. If nothing else, I’m gonna do it just to show you guys I still can.”

It was accurate, though, that he wasn’t playing well leading up to the Masters. But Jack Grout, his teacher since he was ten years old, was in his corner. He saw Grout the week before the Masters, and they decided he was using his hands too much in his swing. He needed to get more synchronization between his hands, arms, and body. There were similarities between what he was trying to do at forty-six, and what Butchie and I had worked on since we started together, when I was seventeen.

Jack saw the article that McCollister had written, because a friend staying with him in their rented house had put it on the fridge. Jack couldn’t miss it. Then he shot a final-round 65 and won his sixth Masters. It wasn’t long after he sat down in the media center that he asked, playfully, “Where’s Tom McCollister?” The writer was finishing a story, and he showed up a few minutes later. Nicklaus said, “Hi, Tom… thanks,” and McCollister replied, “Glad I could help.” Everything was said in good humor, but everybody in Jack’s orbit that week knew that the article saying he was finished had given him a shot of motivation.

I enjoyed reading about that Masters, and that incident, as I got older and thought more about playing in the Masters. Then Monty hit me with his comment on the Friday evening before we played. Perfect. Butchie could see it in my eyes as we walked from the range toward the first tee that I was itching to play and to take on the course, Monty, and the rest of the field. But Monty especially.

I finished the front nine with a two-putt birdie on the eighth and a par on the ninth, to shoot 32. Four under for the front side, and 12 under for the tournament. Forty-five holes of the Masters were over for me, and I was making excellent progress. I wanted to take it as deep as I could, though, without taking any chances or making mistakes. Nicklaus had shot 74, and was talking to the media behind the eighteenth green as I walked from nine to ten. That was the first of a few times we would cross each other’s path at a major. I was ready to tee off in the second round of the 2000 U.S. Open at Pebble when a huge roar erupted from the eighteenth green. It was Jack. He had knocked it on the green in two, for the first time in his career. There was a time nobody could hit that green in two, but the ball was going farther and the equipment was more forgiving, and so Jack thought he would give it a go. That was his last U.S. Open.

Two months later, I was playing the PGA Championship at Valhalla in Louisville. I was paired with him for the first two rounds. We were coming up to eighteen in the second round when he said, “Let’s finish this correctly,” meaning we should each make birdie. He hit his third on the par-5 close to the hole and made birdie, and I also made birdie. During that round, Jack was talking about different generations, and passing the torch. He told me he had played with Gene Sarazen in one of his last majors. And there I was, paired up with Jack in his last PGA. That was a special moment.

The fairway on the eleventh hole was so wide in 1997 that I could blast my tee shot down the right side. I hit it slightly farther right than I intended, but it didn’t matter, because there was room in that area. I had only a nine-iron in, which I hit according to plan: below the hole, leaving me eight feet for birdie. I was pleased to see the ball finish that close to the hole, but it would have been okay with me if it had finished fifteen feet short. The point was to be below the hole. I preferred to have a putt of fifteen feet from below the hole than six feet above the hole. I’d hit a similar shot on the seventh hole, where my sand wedge finished twelve feet below the hole, and I made that for birdie. Below the hole, below the hole, below the hole… That was my theme. This was the only way to score at the Masters. But I didn’t have the distance control or the half shots when I had played the Masters twice as an amateur. Butchie and I worked until I got to where I could hit what Fluff called “feeders.” I fed the ball toward the hole, using the green’s slopes, rather than firing it right at the flag without much distance control. I’d left myself too many putts from above the hole in the ’95 and ’96 Masters. I sometimes hit a short iron I thought was perfect, but then looked up to see that the ball had carried an extra fifteen yards. Good luck at Augusta with that little distance control.

There were times, though, when it was tough to leave the ball below the hole, sometimes because of the pin position, or because I was hitting a longer club into the green. The greens are at least big enough that you can go at them with a longer club, not that I had that many long irons or fairway woods into even the par-5s.

But on the thirteenth I did. I had 205 yards to carry the water and 236 yards to the hole after hitting three-wood off the tee. The pin was back left, and sitting on a knob. I hit four-iron but bailed out to the left in a swale there. I’d never practiced that shot, not from the downslope in the swale. I’d practiced from the bowl itself, or chipped it from there, but not from the far side. I didn’t think I would ever hit the ball there. Many of the spectators who will never get a chance to play the course, and even some of my friends who would later play Augusta with me, couldn’t have understood how hard that shot was until they played from there. It was one of those Augusta shots that television can’t do justice to. You have to be out there.

I hit such a good little shot there, a little bump spinner, just to get it within ten feet of the hole. But I misread the putt, which didn’t help when I hit exactly the putt I wanted, at the inside left. The putt broke left, so I made par. That was one par-5 I didn’t take care of, but I felt good about the pitch shot. It was one of the best I had hit on any course, and, as time passed, one of the best I hit at Augusta. But it wasn’t the best. Even the pitch and run that I holed from behind the sixteenth green on the last day of the 2005 Masters wasn’t the best, as dramatic as it looked with the ball twisting almost ninety degrees after I hit my spot and then dropping into the hole after hesitating a second and looking like it would stop.

The greatest pitch I ever hit at Augusta was one I hit at the sixth hole in the early 2000s, in a Masters that I didn’t win. The pin was back left, and I had hit my tee shot way to the back right of the green. I couldn’t putt from there because of where the pin was. I had to pitch across a corner of the fringe. I took my sand wedge out because I could put cut spin on it, whereas I couldn’t put as much spin with my sixty-degree wedge because of the extra loft. I played a little cut-spin pitch shot from on the green that held up and then rolled down. I left myself on top of the ridge, about four feet from the hole. That was one of the most satisfying pitches I have ever hit at Augusta, probably the best as far as the difficulty of pulling it off. It’s not too often that you get to chip off a green at Augusta.

I did make birdie on the fifteenth, where I pulled my drive and was slightly blocked out by the big tree on the left side. I didn’t want to chip a shot down the fairway short of the water, because that leaves a shot that is one of the most treacherous not only at Augusta but also in all of golf. It’s sharply downhill, and if I chose that route I could easily spin the ball too much on that kind of a shot. The shot looks easy on television, because the steep slope isn’t apparent. You could spin it back into the water, or, trying to make sure you got it on the green, you could hit it over and have a scary shot back up the hill behind the green. That wasn’t a shot I wanted.

I had no alternative but to hook a six-iron around the tree. I couldn’t aim at the green on that angle, but had to play toward the bunker on the right side. It was a trouble shot, but that was okay. I could really feel a trouble shot, and often hit some of my best shots when I was in recovery mode. The six-iron curved back and finished on the back edge of the green, about thirty-five feet from the hole. Two putts later, I had my birdie. I hadn’t birdied the thirteenth, but I had made birdies on three of the par-5s. I was taking care of them, or nearly enough, as was my plan.

After parring fourteen through seventeen, I got to the eighteenth tee 6 under for the day and 14 under for the tournament. The seventeenth was a prime example of a hole where I needed to stick to my game plan, but I could easily have been tempted to take a chance. I had seventy-six yards to the hole after my drive, but the hole was only four yards behind the big, steep bunker on the right front. It wasn’t smart to try to leave the ball between the hole and the bunker, because there was so little margin for error. I played well past the hole, took my two-putt par, and moved on. I hit driver off the eighteenth tee, and then sand wedge from 109 yards to the back fringe on the right side. The ball had a lot of spin on it, and it grabbed into the turf and rolled down to within a foot of the hole. I had a clean card, eleven pars and seven birdies, for 65. That was the kind of golf I had been working toward.

Monty and I shook hands on the eighteenth green. His 74 had put him twelve shots behind me, after starting the round three shots behind. He was beaten up but cordial. I liked the way he played, especially because his swing was so repetitive. You could see that, even when he didn’t have a good day. Monty hit a cut out there all the time and was one of the best drivers I had played with. He wasn’t overly long, and when he didn’t cut it as much, and he was feeling good and could turn it over or hit a straight ball, he could get it out there. Otherwise, he went to his slap cut. He didn’t miss many fairways.

The media wanted to talk to Monty, and he accepted their invitation, as disappointed in his round as he was. He gave them what they wanted—the straight goods as he saw the situation—just as he had after the second round.

“There is no chance humanly possible that Tiger is going to lose this tournament,” Monty said. Somebody mentioned that Norman had lost a six-shot lead the previous year. Monty came up with “This is different. This is very different. Faldo is not lying second for a start [Costantino Rocca was second, nine shots behind me], and Greg Norman is not Tiger Woods.” The comment was cutting to Norman, but that was how Monty felt.

My interview lasted quite a while. I was informed of Monty’s comments, which I said were kind. But the tournament wasn’t over yet, even though I was being asked what size jacket I wore. I didn’t know, exactly. Forty-two long, I thought. It was too early to be talking about putting on the green jacket. Sure, I had a big lead, but the tournament was seventy-two holes, not fifty-four. It wasn’t over yet. I planned to go home, review my third round, and make some plans for Sunday. I didn’t think they would be much different from what they had been for Saturday. I also had something to fall back on, from when I had a six-shot lead going into the last round of the Asian Honda Classic. I played one of my best rounds to that point, and I’d won by ten shots. I planned to think about that Saturday night. It was almost like I was going to hypnotize myself into playing well with a big lead.