Augusta: As Tiger Woods was making his stirring late charge up a bunched Masters leaderboard on Friday, he was chasing a formidable cast of rivals that included six major golf championship winners.
Any one of them could have tripped up Woods’ run at the lead as the tournament reached its halfway point.
Instead, for one alarming moment, it appeared that a stumbling security official at Augusta National Golf Club might derail Woods’ most memorable Masters surge in years.
After Woods hit a shot out of the trees left of the 14th hole, a sprinting uniformed guard, who was trying to control the crowd just behind Woods, slipped on wet grass and slammed into Woods’ right ankle. Woods recoiled and limped forward, hopping on his left foot several times before regaining his footing.
But Woods, who grimaced but never looked back, kept striding toward the green. In fact, the episode seemed to spur him to greater heights.
With the galleries around him cheering wildly, Woods birdied the 14th and 15th holes, and he had two choice opportunities in the closing holes to vault into the lead. While those birdie putts slid past the hole, Woods still managed a four-under-par 68 and a two-day score of six-under that left him a shot off the tournament lead shared by five golfers.
Jason Day, Brooks Koepka, Adam Scott, Francesco Molinari and Louis Oosthuizen — all major winners — were tied at seven under.
After his round, Woods played down the collision with the security official.
With a smile, Woods said: “Accidents happen, and you move on. I’ve had galleries run over me. When you play in front of a lot of people, things happen. But it’s all good.”
Woods insisted he was not injured in the accident, which looked a little like a base runner trying to take out an infielder at second on a double-play attempt.
When pressed on whether he was physically sound for the Masters’ weekend rounds, Woods grinned and answered: “Yeah, other than having four knee surgeries and four back surgeries, I’m fine. Good to go.”
On a day when most of the top scores were produced by golfers teeing off in the morning, with the sun out, Woods’ ascent up the leaderboard as an evening rainstorm drenched the golf course was something of a surprise.
At one point, it seemed the poor weather could undermine Woods, as play was suspended just after he hit his tee shot to the menacing 12th green, about five feet behind the hole.
When play resumed 29 minutes later, Woods, who admitted he grew stiff during the delay, missed the birdie putt. Then his short birdie putt on the 13th hole stopped an inch in front of the hole’s Centre. At the time, Woods was stuck at four-under for the tournament.
“I had a few chances go the wrong way, but I wasn’t too bummed about it because I also hit a lot of really good shots,” Woods said later. “So I was still confident.”
Indeed, Woods was at his scrambling best, reaching 16 of 18 greens in regulation despite missing half of the fairways on the 14 par-four and par-five holes.
He missed a seven-foot birdie putt at the 17th hole and a 15-footer at the final hole. Converting either of them would have put him in a tie for the lead.
Afterward, Woods could not resist stressing that he has now been a contender in three consecutive major golf championships, including last year’s British Open and PGA Championship.
“I felt very good out there doing what I was doing, and so now this is three straight majors that I’ve been in the mix,” he said. “So it’s good stuff.”
Most of the attention early Friday was on Molinari, which was unusual because he is rarely included in the featured groupings of top golfers selected by tournament officials. And even as Molinari was shooting a bogey-free 67, he toured Augusta National largely unrecognised.
But Molinari, the reigning British Open champion, the world’s seventh-ranked golfer and a winner just last month on the PGA Tour, does not seem perturbed by the disregard.
“There’s obviously loads of great players in golf right now; I think I’m getting the attention that I deserve,” said Molinari, who played Friday with Tyrrell Hatton and Rafa Cabrera-Bello. “So I’m happy to go about my business and keep playing good golf.”
Molinari’s climb into golf’s upper echelon, however, may soon be impossible to overlook, even on US soil.