Masters Tournament Live Updates: Tiger Woods Looks Steady in Return to Augusta

“This is normally not an easy walk to begin with,” Woods, 46, said on Tuesday. “Now given the conditions that my leg is in, it gets even more difficult.”

Over the first few holes on Thursday, Woods walked with a limp and took shorter strides than usual. He also struggled to squat when eyeballing a putt.

Few elements of Augusta National Golf Club are more surprising to huffing-and-puffing first-time visitors than the topography, which is only so apparent from television broadcasts and newspaper photographs. There are plunges — there is one right after the tee shot on the first hole — and, naturally, steep climbs, too, that tax even some of the most athletic people during Masters week.

“It’s the toughest of the year,” Justin Thomas, 28, said of the course. “It’s very, very long, very hilly, a lot of long walks back to tees.”

Adding those trips, he said, to “some of the craziest undulation and terrain of any course we’ll play all year, it produces some pretty tired, sore legs at the end of the week.”

Fred Couples, who practiced with Woods and Thomas this week, suggested that the journeys around Augusta National would perhaps be the determining factor in whether Woods will make a strong run for his sixth green jacket.

“If he can walk around here in 72 holes, he’ll contend,” Couples, who won the Masters in 1992, said. “He’s too good. He’s too good.”

Woods said he did not fear slipping, even after the rains that saturated the course, because he would be wearing metal spikes. Now, if only our colleague Christopher Clarey had done the same thing …

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/04/07/sports/masters-leaderboard