Tiger Woods’ Masters is more hope than expectation. Playing is a win

I t’s an odd truth that if you’ve got to ask someone who it is you’re watching at Augusta National then you already know the answer. At a quarter-to-ten, half an hour before Tiger Woods was even due on the 1st tee, the crowd was packed four or five deep down the length of the fairway, and three times as thick again up by the clubhouse. So anyone who arrived hoping to see him afterwards needed to be awfully comfortable up on their tip-toes, or else try to find a vacant pine tree root to perch on so they could peer over everyone else’s heads.

After all these years, Woods is still the only man in the field here who draws a gallery like that. Catching a glimpse of him has become as much of a Masters tradition as buying a pimento cheese sandwich or posing for a photo out round the back of the clubhouse. It’s one of the things every daytripper wants to cross off their list. They don’t much mind whether they’ve caught him playing a particularly good shot or not, his five-foot pars earn the same sort of roars as other people’s ten-foot birdies.

There is more hope than expectation about Woods’ game these days. Listening to him talk before the championship about how his perspective has changed since he nearly lost his leg in that car crash two years back, you wondered if he feels the same way about it himself. Woods was the greatest competitor of his generation, but it feels like just being able to play here is a victory for him these days. Realistically just making the cut, which he’s done in every professional appearance at Augusta, might be the limit of his ambitions.

Woods’s body simply won’t stand up to four days of walking up and down Augusta’s hills, let alone the hours of practice and tournament play he needs to keep his