Monday, November 16, 2020

Humans, being

 This was the off-kilter Masters, the hanging-on-the-wall-crooked Masters, the Masters Guaranteed To Drive Obsessive-Compulsives Right Over The Edge.

The season was wrong, the silence was wrong ... even the drama was wrong, because Dustin Johnson was so impeccable, so imperturbable, there wasn't even anything to provoke the usual roars even if there'd been spectators there to roar.

The man simply drained the life out of this Masters with four days of unerring golf, going 65-70-65-68 to finish a record 20-under and win the green coat by five strokes. Augusta has rarely been staked out so cruelly or rendered so helpless to one man's skill.

Instead, it saved whatever measure of retaliation it could find for one of its most notorious tormenters.

Tiger Woods, as we all know, has won the green jacket five times, most notably last year. But not on Sunday. On Sunday, he played a quite different role: Object lesson for why golf can be a perfect bastard sometimes.

In 10 excruciating strokes he turned the last bend in Amen Corner into Holy S*** Corner, butchering the par-3 12 the way Harvey the air conditioning repairman would at Whispering Stump Golf Course and Arcade. 

First he floated an 8-iron off the tee that landed on the green but kicked back into Rae's Creek.

Then he took a drop and hit another shot that landed on the green and kicked back into the water.

Then he took another drop -- and this time, just to switch things up a little, his shot flew the green and landed in one of the bunkers behind it.

After which he botched the shot out of the sand, and the ball scooted across the green into, you guessed it, the creek again.

Finally he got his eighth shot to stick on the green, then two-putted for his 10.

I don't know about you, but if I ever played No. 12 at Augusta, this is exactly what would happen to me. You, too, I imagine.

And so the strangest thing about the strangest Masters ever was not its emptiness or the hermetically-sealed vacuum in which it was played, or its seasonal dysfunction. It was the realization that, for one brief moment, Tiger Woods was us and we were Tiger Woods.

Humans all, in other words.

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