MARANA, Ariz. — The baseball player Curt Schilling once said that mystique and aura are dancers at a nightclub. Golf, though, has Tiger Woods, who after an eight-month absence, the longest of his career, radiates those qualities perhaps now more than ever.
The world's No. 1 player went three under for his first two holes since winning the U.S. Open on a broken leg last June, and he easily beat an awed and mostly misfiring Brendan Jones, 3 and 2, in the first round of the WGC-Accenture Match Play Championship on Wednesday.
"I got off to probably an ideal start," said Woods, who never trailed after seizing the first hole with a birdie and the second with an eagle. "I hit a couple loose irons in the middle part of the round. But other than that, I really hit it pretty good all day."
Woods, top seed in the Bobby Jones Bracket, will face the No. 8 seed, Tim Clark, a 3-and-2 winner over two-time U.S. Open champ Retief Goosen. Clark and Woods tee off at 12:02 p.m. local time (2:02 Eastern) in the second round on Thursday.
After winning his 14th major, Woods had undergone surgery to repair a torn ACL and two hairline fractures in his lower leg. He said he would spend Wednesday evening icing and elevating his left knee.
Since June, Woods had existed only in our imaginations, or on TV. Was that really him out there on Wednesday, or was it a ghost? Throngs of fans and media surrounded the first tee, and the dramatic impact of his return was unmistakable to everyone except, apparently, Woods himself.
"It felt like nothing had changed," he said. "Walking down the fairway, it felt like business as usual."
With all eyes focused on his comeback, Woods tempered his masterly start with three bogeys on the front nine. Still, Jones, a 33-year-old Aussie, couldn't capitalize, matching Woods's bogeys on two of those holes.
Unlike the first round of the Match Play in 2008, when J.B. Holmes nearly upset Woods, Jones looked like he was in over his head.
"We have to buy our own lunch," Jones said earlier in the week, when asked about the differences between the Japan Tour, where he works, and the PGA. He added: "You don't have the media to a point that we have got here or in America in general."
Preparation had gone well enough. Jones secured a seasoned caddie, Ron Levin, through his friendship with Levin's old boss Todd Hamilton, another Japan Tour veteran. Jones and Levin began learning the new course on Monday, and there was much work to do. Woods had not hit a shot in competition since last June, but that didn't necessarily give Jones a leg up. Because of the vagaries of the Japan Tour's schedule (it doesn't start until mid-April), he had not competed since early December.
When he wasn't scouting the course and knocking the rust off his game, Jones charmed the media with self-deprecating humor. "If I get beat by anybody," he said, "I would like to get beat by Tiger." Asked what he would say when he met the great one, Jones replied, "Can I have three [strokes] a side?"
One problem for Jones may have been that he never met Woods before Wednesday. "We never saw him," Levin said on Tuesday night. "I wanted Brendan to meet him to get the mystique thing out of the way."
Jones, who admitted he "got a few chills up the back of my neck" when he heard last week that he would be playing Woods, looked like he still had them at game time. It probably didn't help that on the first tee, after Woods had nonchalantly polished off a banana, a corpulent fan bellowed at the nervous underdog, "Have fun, Jones!"
On the first two holes, Jones made tentative pars that couldn't measure up to Tiger's fireworks. On the par-3 third hole, Woods hit his tee shot into an awkward lie in a greenside bunker. Given an opening, Jones bladed his 66-foot chip shot 21 feet past the pin. Both bogeyed.
Woods found trouble off the tee on the par-4 fifth hole, but Jones followed suit.
Jones won a hole with a par 4 on the seventh, but Woods answered with a birdie on the par-5 eighth to regain his comfortable 2-up margin. Jones did not make a birdie until the par-5 13th hole. Woods made eagle.
