There’s hot and then there’s the back nine on Sunday here when there are five players within two shots of the lead. The TV weathermen reckoned it was 30C, but then they weren’t at Amen Corner when Rory McIlroy was standing on the tee at Augusta National’s 12th hole, that little rinky-dink 155-yard par three, tied for the lead and waiting for the wind to drop long enough that he could get his shot off.
Four days ago, they asked Tom Watson the one change he would make to the course if he could. He didn’t blink. “I’d fill in that creek in front of No 12.” “Touché” said Gary Player. “Good move,” added Jack Nicklaus.
“The 12th is the critical hole on the course and I think everybody here understands that,” Watson said. Player nodded his head. “That hole,” he said, in his own inimitable way, “has crippled more men than polio.”
Yes, everyone in the room blinked when he said it. Point is, no matter how big your lead, you have not won until your tee shot is safely across the water. Just ask Jordan Spieth, who coughed up a five-shot lead with a quadruple bogey there in 2016 and seems to have been playing with a twitch ever since.
Nicklaus once called the 12th “the hardest hole in tournament golf”. He had a rule for it: don’t go for the pin if its on the right. Play for the middle of the green, make your par and get the hell across to the 13th tee box. “It comes down to whether you want to keep it in play,” he said, “or go for a two and come away with a five.” Nicklaus knows. In all his years playing here, he put it in the water once.
This Sunday the competition committee had stuck the pin (where else?) way out there on the far edge. It was so far to the rightit could have stood in the special election they held for Marjorie Taylor Green’s seat in the week. The 56-man field had made three birdies on it between them all day and were a combined 15 over par.
Here is McIlroy, tied for the lead with Justin Rose, who is playing a few hundred yards in front of him, and a shot ahead of Cameron Young, Russ Henley and Tyrrell Hatton, who is already back in Butler Cabin, waiting to see if there would be a playoff.
McIlroy had already lost the tournament once, when he broke another of Nicklaus’s laws on another of the par threes. “No fucking double bogeys,” Nicklaus had told him in the week. At the 4th, McIlroy got himself in a mess when his tee shot flew left on to the fringe of the big bunker. He managed to blast his way out to nine feet, but somehow ended up taking three putts after he missed a wretched little heartbreaker from two feet, that rolled right around the back lip of the hole and out again. The sigh of disappointment blew dust all the way up to the clubhouse.
His putter was so cold it was a wonder no one asked him if they could nuzzle up to it to cool off. And that was before he made another bogey on the other par three, the 6th, when his putt from the first cut stopped dead on the edge of the green. At that point McIlroy was back to nine under two shots behind Young. He had become the first player to take a six‑shot lead into the weekend of the Masters. Now it looked as if he was going to be the first man to lose after doing it.
Being the man he is, it was about now he turned up for his round. He earned one birdie at the 7th when he finally made a putt and another at the 8th with a wizardly second shot that steamed around the trees into the heart of the green. All of a sudden he was right back in contention again. Has anyone who can make the game look so easy ever found it so complicated?
Now here he is at the 12th, Golden Bell, with the wind whipping in great gusts along the creek, riffling the needles in the pine trees, and the crowd so quiet the stewards will tell you off just for coughing, that famous yellow flag just begging him to try to reach it and everyone thinking: “Just do what Nicklaus told you too.”
The club is coming down and the ball is going up, up, up into the bright blue sky and over the water and it is falling down again into the little sliver of parched grass just beyond the bunker and it is bouncing once, twice, three times and rolling around right up towards the cup. Seven feet left and a birdie putt even he could not miss.
A lot of players have lost the Masters at the 12th. McIlroy is one of the few who won it there.
