AUGUSTA, Ga. — If you can bear it, take a few seconds to imagine how it felt to be Fred Couples on Masters Thursday afternoon.
Your day starts with a warmup. But really it begins before that, when the first patron sees you on site at Augusta National, and you can feel the first thought in their head. You’re 66 years old, playing at Augusta National for the forty-first time, and the rumors surrounding your competitive retirement from golf’s first major have gotten so loud you can’t even pretend to ignore them.
But you believe you can compete — not in a vain way, but really believe it — so you’ve showed up again. And you’ve showed up even though you know certain members of the public are snickering at you. Or worse, overlooking you. And you’ve showed up with a bright yellow ball, because if they’re going to laugh anyway, you might as well laugh back.
You arrive on Thursday with something to prove, and though you’re realistic about your goals, things go well. The weather is good. The golf course is firm and fast, which plays into your strengths as one of the geezers who actually learned how to play Augusta National before the days of 350-yard drives and 9-irons into par-5s. You make birdies on a few holes early. You survive the turn unscathed. Suddenly you look up at the big leaderboard behind the 12th hole and you’re one under for the day, three shots off the lead, and royally spanking your younger, longer playing partners despite their insistence on outdriving you by 40 yards.
By the time your birdie putt drops on 13, you’re feeling it. You’re smiling at the crowd, and the crowd is smiling back at you. They’re beginning to believe, and damnit, so are you.
“That’s Freddie, alright,” they’re saying each other, remembering some vision from the past so old it doesn’t even feel like a memory to you. “He’s making a move!”
Your last real risk arrives on 15, but thankfully, the green jackets have taken disaster out of play. The par-5 has gotten so long that it’s a three-shot hole on your best day, so you lay up to the bottom of the hill and plot for a chip shot that will leave you with a 30-footer for birdie. At worst, you’re looking at an easy par and a pathway to the clubhouse with some real breathing room inside of the cutline.
And then, just when the confidence is really beginning to flow, something mystifying happens. You skin two straight wedge shots within the span of three minutes, sending two balls in the water from 90 yards out. Before you can even count your strokes, your dream is dead. A few moments later, the number on the scorecard confirms it: You’ve just recorded a nine.
“I’ve played I don’t know how many rounds, I’ve never done that,” you say. “Never hit a 90-yard shot in the water and then followed up with another one. I’ve played 41 years here. I’ve never done that.”
And then, even though you know you’re playing for pride, you know the air is out of the balloon, and so a bad situation becomes worse. You look up after punching out into the 18th fairway and laugh.
“What did I do?” you ask later, but you already know the answer. “I went quad-double-double. There’s not much regrouping from that.”
You walk up to the 18th and roll in a 20 footer for par, and the gallery erupts, but you’re too furious to care. You pull the ball out of the cup and take a long, deep breath. You’ve just shot six over for the day, 78, and unless there’s one last true Masters miracle within you, you’re careening for a missed cut.
By the time you make it to scoring, you’re so ready to begin the walk to the parking lot that your feet are already moving in that direction — but here comes a green jacket. A reporter has requested you. A singular reporter. And even though everyone’s pretty sure this request is a bad idea, yourself and the green jacket included, you hear yourself say Yes.
You stand in front of the reporter for a handful of truly painful seconds, hearing yourself recount the events of the last few minutes. It takes you a while to realize it, but you’re sporting the cervical flexibility of a barn owl — eyes and thoughts pointed at 12 o’clock but legs pointed firmly at 4:30. It’s as if your body is already beginning the long walk into the night, but your brain hasn’t realized it yet.
And then, just when you began to think your legs might walk you right off the podium, granting you the dignity of escaping from a closing-stretch meltdown on Masters Thursday in the comfort of your own thoughts, you’re asked why you bothered to say yes to this request in the first place, and you laugh.
“I do it at Augusta. I love this place,” you say. “No matter what I shoot, I try. I get very frustrated. Because at any age you still want to hit shots. But I’m not going to run.
“If I was 35 and did that I would be going bananas on everybody,” you say. “And I would’ve ran right by and you told you to get out of my life.”
But today?
“It really was a fun day.”
And the craziest thing is that even though you don’t feel it, you know you mean it. You still play golf for moments like Thursday — not for the fleeting moments of magic, but for the brief, totally insane belief that the magic might stick around.
You don’t like to think about your game as timeless; you think about it as very much of this time. But there’s a reason why the patrons at the Masters cheer louder for you than anywhere else on earth: This is the golf course where time stands still, and you are the golfer who embodies it.
“I’ll end with this,” you say. “My first Masters I played in I shot 73-68, which was fantastic. I got paired with Tom Watson and I shot 80.”
“I couldn’t keep up with him. I was bogeying holes and didn’t want to get in his way and my score became irrelevant.”
“I think that happens at all acts of life. You just feel uncomfortable and can’t turn it around.”
The reporter seems pretty glad you haven’t thrown a 7-iron at him, so he’s not going to keep you, but he sure seems to think he’s seen some magic, and he sure seems to think that magic is lingering … even in an opening-round 78.
But you’re Freddie Couples, and you know better than that, so you laugh.
“Tomorrow I just have to go do the same thing. But maybe not finish 10-over par on two holes, or whatever the hell I did.”
