AUGUSTA, Ga. — Everyone was smiling on Thursday at Augusta National.
Perhaps that shouldn’t have been a surprise. It was Masters Thursday, and for the first time in three years, that reality wasn’t accompanied by the many ways in which it would not, in fact, be Masters Thursday.
For the first time since 2019, there were no limitations on capacity, the golf course, or on belief. Augusta National was jam-packed, the pimento cheese sandwiches flowed freely, and the last two years were all but a distant memory. So the patrons smiled, the green jackets smiled, and even Tiger Woods smiled, too.
“He doesn’t normally do that,” Mike Tirico said on SiriusXM shortly after Woods’ downright cheery 71. “But there’s nothing normal about today.”
But actually, everything was normal about Thursday. It was the Masters just as we left it in April 2019, right down to Woods.
Tiger Woods-tracking swarm at this Masters is a golf gallery unlike any other
“Good morning ladies and gentlemen and welcome to Augusta National,” one security guard said to the masses streaming through the front gates on Thursday. “Where have y’all been? We’ve missed you.”
Perhaps the fans should have been asking the same question. But they weren’t, because they were too busy smiling (and because the line to the patron shop already reached halfway down the driving range).
These are things as they are supposed to be at Augusta National, and even mother nature agreed. As if preordained by Fred Ridley himself, the clouds parted just as Tiger stepped to the first tee box. The sky broke into a brilliant shade of blue, and by the time the final groups reached Amen Corner on Thursday, beams of sun cast golden shadows on the turf.
So those at Augusta National smiled, and they yelled, and they fist-pumped. Even when they didn’t know why they were smiling, yelling and fist-pumping.
“I didn’t see a damn thing,” one patron said mere seconds after delivering raucous applause for Cameron Smith’s birdie on No. 12. The patrons around him laughed, though they’d done the same thing.
Smith finished the day at four under, one stroke off the lead set by South Korea’s Sungjae Im. Of course, no Masters would be complete without a loaded leaderboard, which is good, because after Round 1, the names lurking near Im and Smith include World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler, Dustin Johnson, Patrick Cantlay and Woods.
Scheffler, who finished at three under, has never seen a “normal” Masters. His only starts came in 2020 and ’21. On Thursday, though, he earned a quick introduction to Augusta National scoreboard calculus.
“Yeah, it was definitely a lot different,” he said. “There was a lot more crowd noise. I think Tiger was a few groups in front of us, so we definitely heard some noise. One of [the roars] was actually Joaquin [Niemann’s] eagle on No. 9. We thought, oh, Tiger made a birdie, but it was Joaquin making an eagle.”
