Masters Thursday

It may feel like February outside, but golf balls are in the air in Augusta...

Early Results - The Big Three have taken the early lead avoided physical injury and opened the festivities....  Jack and Gary striped theirs down the middle, and while Arnie hit his low and left, he is just off the DL.

Seventeen - Probably the most discussed hole over the last few days... First up was Shack, who aggregated comments from the various players:

PHIL MICKELSON: It really doesn't any play different because it wasn't really in play

for most players that hit the ball high enough. It was in play for some guys that couldn't quite carry it over that tree, maybe a quarter of the field. I don't think it's going to affect scoring too much. The challenge is really the approach shot into the green in that you can't see the green because it's so flat and hidden by the bunker. It's very difficult for depth perception and difficult for distance control with you're dealing with that elevation change and it's difficult to hit the ball online because you're hitting off an uphill lie. Most people pull that shot and you're trying to hit a cut to a lot of the right‑handed pins for a right-handed player.

It's a challenging hole because of the other subtleties and nuances of the hole, not so much the tree you were past after your first shot.

OK, then this from our favorite player, architectural commentary division:

Upon his return to Augusta this year, Ogilvy said, he did a “double-take” when he stood on the 17th tee and saw that the Eisenhower Tree, a broad loblolly pine, was missing, having been destroyed in a storm prior to last year’s Masters. “To my eye, it looks better,” he said of the hole, before adding that a precious “bit of history” had been lost. 

Ogilvy described the green at No. 17 as his favorite on the course, for the subtlety of the rolls despite the fact that the putting surface was fashioned from a piece of relatively nondescript land.

 It really is quite the green complex... and there was this from a guy that wasn't here last year:

I just find it fascinating that they keep changing this place, it seems like, every year and it looks exactly the same, like it's never been touched. It's just fascinating.

I didn't play last year so I didn't see when the Eisenhower Tree was gone. I didn't realize 17 was straight ahead. I always thought it was a little bit of a dogleg‑left. It's eye opening to see it's just dead‑straight. That was very, very shocking to me to see it like that. 

Q. Do you like it now? 

TIGER WOODS: I loved it the way it was. That tree, I've hit it too many times, trust me. I've had my issues on that hole, that tree. But I thought it was a fantastic hole. It's iconic, that tree, and I don't think you can ever, ever replace it.

Bit of a split verdict there, but I guess Tiger is in that quarter of the field that couldn't clear it...But Shack also had some interesting stats for us:

And yet with the fairway hit percentage climbed 11%, the scoring average went up in 2014 and the fewest number of GIR's were registered since 2006 (42%). That was down 7% from the previous year. 

So 11% more balls finished in the fairway and from there we saw a 7% drop in GIR's. I theorized in the Golf World story that the loss of the tree led to more 3-woods and therefore more players playing blind to one of the most difficult greens on the planet.

Those two data points don't seem to go together, but that's golf.  But wait, there's more...

I can't find a reference to it in print, but Arnold was presented a piece of the tree at the Champions Dinner, and got quite emotional about it.  he's entitled, after all he played the hole with Eisenhower, and I don't mean Tripp.

But there's still more, per Shack (at The Loop):

AUGUSTA, Ga. - Masters Chairman Billy Payne unveiled a new memorial case featuring a cross-section of the fallen pine that so annoyed President Dwight D. Eisenhower's tee shots. One case will go to the Eisenhower Presidential Library and an identical display will stay on the grounds at Augusta National.

And in an ode to Jurassic Park, there's this:

Demonstrating just how attached the club was to the tree and its place in club lore, Payne announced that the club has preserved the tree's genetics in the hopes of some day planting the offspring on the grounds.

I gather the club was surprised by those scoring stats above, and is holding off on a decision as to whether to replace the tree.

And The Wind Cried Herb - Not many Hendrix references in Masters commentary, so I've got that going for me... I've taken Pravda's Karen Crouse to task when warranted, but she provides today's required reading, a wonderfully warm and intimate profile of the legendary Herbert Warren Wind.  

I simply can't constrain myself from excerpting from it, but you'd be remiss not to simply click through and read it from top to bottom yourself.  Are you familiar with the man's work?  If not you've denied yourself one of golf's great pleasures.

The thread of Crouse's piece is that Wind famously coined the term Amen Corner to describe the far reaches of the ANGC property, specifically the 11th green through the tee shot on No. 13.  He did so in the lede graph to this very 1958 Sports Illustrated article:

On the afternoon before the start of the recent Masters golf tournament, a wonderfully

evocative ceremony took place at the farthest reach of the Augusta National course—down in the Amen Corner where Rae's Creek intersects the 13th fairway near the tee, then parallels the front edge of the green on the short 12th and finally swirls alongside the 11th green. On that afternoon, with Bob Jones investing the occasion with his invariable flavor, two new bridges across the creek were officially dedicated: one (leading to the 12th green) to Ben Hogan, commemorating his record score of 274 in the 1953 tournament; the other (leading back to the fairway from the 13th tee) to Byron Nelson, commemorating his great burst in the 1937 Masters when, trailing Ralph Guldahl by four strokes on the last round, he played a birdie 2 on the 12th and an eagle 3 on the 13th, made up six strokes on Guldahl (who had taken a 5 and a 6 on these holes) and rolled on to victory.

Ever curious as to where that came from?   

Wind’s inspiration, though, came from a 1930s jazz recording, “Shouting in the Amen Corner.” In an article for Golf Digest in 1984, he said that he was aiming for “some colorful tag like those that Grantland Rice and his contemporaries loved to devise: the Four Horsemen, the Manassa Mauler, the House That Ruth Built and the Georgia Peach.” 

“The only phrase with the word corner I could think of (outside of football’s ‘coffin corner’ and baseball’s ‘hot corner’) was the title of a song on an old Bluebird record,” Wind wrote.

But Wind was far more than a guy who came up with one clever moniker, and his writing was the genesis of my love of the links.  Back in the day when I had the attention span to tackle New Yorker articles, I carried his North to the Links of Dornoch with me on my first pilgrimage there.  

Wind and the New Yorker were a perfect fit, as Crouse gets into here:

Wind was the Bubba Watson of writers: Nobody was longer or more entertaining. He once joked that he needed 5,000 words to clear his throat. His four-page article introducing “Amen Corner” to the golfing lexicon was written under what Wind considered deadline duress. It appeared in the April 21, 1958, issue of Sports Illustrated and detailed Palmer’s victory over Ken Venturi on April 6.

There's so much there, including that his love of golf came from a radio broadcast featuring Grantland Rice and Bobby Jones.  And there's of course a Ben Crenshaw connection, as they were very much kindred spirits.  

Read the whole thing, and I'll just leave you with this HWW quote that happens to top Shack's blog today:

The Masters has a great many things going for it, some planned and some fortuitous. It is played on a superb and scenic course that inspires the fine field of players to spectacular feats and offers singularly good vantage points for spectators. It is held at a wonderful time of year, when practically every golfer, after a long hibernation, finds his fancy turning to thoughts of supinating the left forearm or some other such crucial action that will make the season at hand the big one he has been waiting for. 

Bad News -  Just heard on Golf Channel that Carl Jackson isn't feeling well and won't be on Gentle Ben's bag today.  I didn't catch what the issue is, but his brother, also an ANGC caddie, will do the honors.  For those unaware of the story, he's caddied for Crenshaw here since the 1970's, was on his bag for both wins, and this would be his 53rd Masters.

Hopefully he can go tomorrow, as that walk up No. 18 will leave nary a dry eye in the house.

Eye on the Tiger -  I have not the faintest clue as to how he'll play today, but I will be watching...and I'm guessing you will as well.

Zinger has carved out the Tiger-skeptic role for himself and had this:

“He hasn't played in a long time,” Azinger said. “Confidence is an earned commodity,

and it’s something that Tiger is going to have to earn back. He can’t be confident. The last time he played, we saw him play, his game was in shambles. Curtis and I might have been able to give him a little trouble. It was sad to see that somebody could fall that far. What happened? I think that Tiger allowed himself to be over-engineered and possibly over-engineered right out of a career.”

At the other end of the spectrum is Alan Bastable, who gives us five reasons that Tiger will, gulp, win:

2. HE’S GOT HIS GROOVE BACK

We’ve seen no evidence yet of Tiger’s new swing clicking in competition. But everyone seems to have a breathless tale of his resurgence. (Surely you heard about his worst-ball 66 at Medalist?!) Also encouraging: his yip-free practice rounds this week at Augusta.

OK, but everyone is yip-free in practice... More seriously, his premise is that we shouldn't underestimate the man, which is well argued.... I don't doubt that he can win, I'm just note sure that he can win now.

A couple of the writers ask the really important questions, such as, "Who is this man?"

“A man walks into a press conference two days before the Masters, wearing Tiger Woods' hat and clothes and looking quite a bit like the tournament's legendary four-time winner,” USA Today columnist Christine Brennan writes. “But it's not Tiger. It can't be. The man is smiling — wide, genuine, warm, Phil smiles, the kind that the real Tiger would never be caught dead sharing with the news media. This man also is introspective and forthcoming, telling stories about practicing while his young children picked flowers and played tag nearby…He's funny. He's kind. He's even a little bit humble. Who is this human being, and what has he done with the real Tiger Woods?”

Yeah, going back to the Bastable piece above, he does seem to have a groove, but it's very much a different groove...Hopefully it works for him, as the game is more interesting with him in attendance.

And, of greatest interest to your humble correspondent, is whether Tiger and Strick have something they want to share with us:

Maybe that's why Tiger has been smiling so much, not that there's anything wrong with that.