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AUGUSTA, Ga., April 7 — When the legendary sportswriter Dan Jenkins was among a group of senior golf writers honored earlier in the week for having covered 40 or more Masters tournaments, he joked about remembering the Masters won by Hogan, Snead, Nicklaus, Palmer and the greats. Many of the rest, he said, were just blanks.
"You'll be like that someday, too," he warned the younger writers in the room. "All you'll remember are the 15 or 16 Masters that Tiger Woods won."
He drew a big laugh. Maybe, however, it's not so funny. Tiger Woods is poised to win Green Jacket Number 5.
You may have missed this obvious point in all the commotion. This is the year when we've all discovered what Hootie Johnson has wrought — the meanest, toughest golf course in the world without real rough. This is the Masters that morphed into a U.S. Open, where four pars in a row constitute a charge. This is a tournament whose name, fittingly, rhymes with "disasters," and that's the unofficial theme of this bogeyfest. It turned ugly when temperatures dropped to near freezing early Saturday and strong, gusting and bitterly cold winds wreaked havoc and numbed hands.
Woods as a stealth bomber is an out-of-character role, but that's exactly what he was. When Woods finished what felt like a disappointing round of 72, considering he three-putted the par-5 15th for a par and went bogey-bogey on the last two holes, he was four shots off the lead.
"It's not like I'm a hundred back," Woods said after the round. "I've got a shot at it."
By the time the rest of the leaders finished, however, Woods was sitting pretty. The cold, brisk winds continued to take prisoners, and Woods ended up one shot off the lead behind Stuart Appleby, who tripled the 17th hole. So many players fell apart that Woods will tee off in the final pairing on Sunday. And as TV commentators like to remind you every 12 minutes, the Masters winner has come out of the last group on Sunday for 16 straight years.
Can you handle the truth? It's over. Again. Woods is going to win it. Again.
The Masters has turned into a par contest, and nobody makes fewer bogeys than Woods. He charged up the leaderboard on Saturday because he posted an even-par 72. That was the equivalent to a 66, apparently, in a normal Masters. The only other man still standing among the top 10 who didn't shoot over par Saturday was Retief Goosen, who blistered a 70 to get within four of Appleby.
