Sports Goggles

Sure Tiger Woods bogeyed two par fives the first two days of this year’s Masters Tournament. And those bogeys might eventually cost him the tournament. But Trevor Immelman’s gaffe at 15 yesterday turned out to be nothing. How his third shot, a wedge spun way too much that did not roll back into the drink, might win him the tournament.

Interestingly, on ESPN’s Sports Reporters this morning, Mitch Albom and Mike Lupica took the time to tag-team excoriate the 13-time major tournament winner.

Albom:

“He’s now looking at a couple of young guys who are in their twenties who have that bravado who are maybe saying, ‘we don’t know any better.”

They didn’t seem intimidated by him [Woods] yesterday and I don’t think they will today.

Lupica:

We look at Augusta and think, 68 is par for Tiger Woods. He shot par for himself yesterday!

And though show host John Saunders brought up Phil Mickelson and how he fell apart so quickly, Lupica pushed those thoughts aside by reminding us how “we all know” Mickelson’s propensity for shooting himself out of a tournament, and implying that neither Immelman nor Brandt Snedeker do not have the ability to shoot high scores.

The two journalists went on to laud both Immelman and Snedeker as if they were multiple major winners… ahhh, there’s nothing like hyperbole to start off a Masters Sunday.

The cold facts of Immelman’s and Snedeker’s games are these: Entering this week, Snedeker was tied for 54th in adjusted scoring average this season; Immelman was 119th.

Immelman is known as an excellent ball striker who has major problems on the green. Snedeker is known as a Tom Watson wanna-be whose jaunty gait and seemingly care-free quick play belies a fragile psyche.

In greens in regulation (GIR), Snedeker is 46th, Immelman is 52nd. Immelman was tied for 199th in the PGA Tour in putting (putts per GIR), Snedeker, tied for 72nd.

Tiger Woods is first all those statistics and more.

But this Masters Woods – and all those who played in groups with and near him – is a victim of circumstance and Immelman is the beneficiary of the same circumstances – tee times and weather.

Woods had the misfortune of late morning-early afternoon first and second round tee times. Immelman played an early first round and took full advantage of a moist course that slowed the greens enough to make them easy to navigate. His second and third rounds were to be played in heavy afternoon Augusta winds. Until the final two holes Saturday, the late winds never kicked up.

On Friday those winds kicked up just in time to affect all the players teeing off between 12:30 and two p.m. The winds continued to blow until about four p.m. – just in time for Tiger Woods’ 1:50 tee time and in time for him to play most of his round. Meanwhile Immelman, with a tee time an hour or so later played no more than the first four holes in blustery conditions.

Trevor Immelman is riding the winds – or lack thereof – of good fortune. And again, if you didn’t know already, his water shot that wasn’t on 15 was as sure enough sign that it will take a catastrophe of his own making for Trevor Immelman to miss being fit for a green jacket.

Finally, there is one last issue with Augusta National that allows for someone like Trevor Immelman to spring from nowhere to win the most prestigious of golf’s four majors; the dramatic alterations to the course itself.

Lengthening the course by another 155 yards was silly enough. But the most drastic changes were the final set of course alterations made in an effort to “Tiger-proof” Augusta National without saying so. Between the 2005 and 2006 Masters, then course chairman Hootie Johnson added myriad trees and bunkers and deepened existing bunkers around the 18 holes. Then Johnson committed the cardinal sin of narrowing the course’s fairways, which is a direct contradiction of Bobby Jones vision for the course when he designed it. The fairways were wide at traditional landing areas to force golfers to make the correct decisions with each approach shot to Augusta’s notoriously slick, fast, and oddly-sloped greens. It meant that from what may look like a perfect tee shot, a player might choose to hit a draw into the wrong part of the green.

One poor choice from a seemingly benign fairway position could turn a birdie into a bogey, or worse.

That was Jones’ thinking when he designed the course. It turned what is straight ahead, fairway to green to birdie opportunity golf into a game for only the thinkers and the best and most creative ball strikers. With today’s narrow fairways, the ball is almost automatically wedged into the proper line to almost every pin placement on each par four and par five Augusta National has to offer.

The product of these changes steals from the fans the greatest golf that the game has to give. The creativity and club mastery of Woods, Phil Mickelson, Vijay Singh, and even players like Sergio Garcia is mostly gone, replaced by which player is hot this week in April. Steve Flesch, in third place after three rounds at 8-under par, previously entered nine tournaments this year and missed the cut in four.

What some of the big names have not seemed to realize is that this is not the Augusta of old. We should see more long irons and three woods off tees, but we do not. We should see longer irons into greens, but we do not. Despite this week’s tee time luck – good or bad – and weather whims, it is up to top tier players like Woods to take what the changes Hootie Johnson has made and somehow use them to their advantage.

Until the big boys consistently make those nuanced and compulsory adjustments (Woods, to a degree, has), we will continue to see more and more Zach Johnsons and Trevor Immelmans fitted for green jackets and until they change how they attack Augusta, fewer and fewer legends and legends to be receiving and passing those jackets along.