FUZZY ZOELLER stood behind the pin on the sixth green yesterday, studying the line of his ninefoot birdie putt. He had earned the right to be here as the 1979 Masters champion, but there had been much wear and tear on his 45 year old nervous system in the intervening time.
"Anybody like to putt this one for me?" he asked the huge gallery. There were no offers, only laughter. "I know. You're thinking the same damn thing I am," said Zoeller. More laughter. The first putt looked good, as it eased gently down the slope, but Zoeller still had to hole a return effort of four feet to save par.
Welcome to Augusta 97. Lee Westwood, the bright, young British hope, knew the feeling after a decidedly chastening first hole. While preparing for his first Masters, he had birdied the hole twice, sinking a 15 foot putt last Monday.
Now that the gun had gone off, however, the experience was very different. Westwood drove into the huge fairway bunker on the right; later pitched over the green in three and took three more to get down for a double bogey six. I watched six other competitors fail to make par at the hole before I headed further out the course.
Standing behind the treacherous sixth, it was difficult to decide which was harder on the nerves watching seasoned professionals suffer on the slopes, or listening to a spectator beside me eating ice from a soft drinks carton.
Duffy Waldorf got lucky when a 45 foot putt, up and across the slope, dropped in off the high edge for a birdie. In the same two ball, Dudley Hart had left his tee shot only 15 feet from the target, but the fact that he was on the wrong side of the hole meant he had to sink a six footer for par.
Indeed, the only straightforward birdie I saw on the Fuzzy Zoeller playing to the gallery sixth came from Lee Janzen. After a tee shot 10 feet from the hole, above and to the right, he barely touched the ball to send it trundling inexorably into the target.
Further observation confirmed it the greens were murderously fast. The announcement by the committee that they were cut to one eighth of an inch - standard for championship golf - and that the level would be maintained until the end of the tournament, was purely academic. As usual, the slopes provided the real key to pace.
Charles Coody, the 1971 champion now playing in his 31st Masters, doesn't approve. "I don't think Bobby Jones would be very happy about what is out there," he said, after shooting an 83 that included 45 strokes with the blade.
The greens were too quick? "Yes, he replied."
Coody, a regular competitor on the US Seniors Tour these days and winner of the du Maurier Champions tournament last season, has experienced Augusta greens, old and new. And he suspects some underhand work when the change was made from Bermuda to Penncross Bent, nearly 20 years ago.
"I reckon they put more pitch into the greens when they were doing that work," said Coody. But we were assured, I told him, that through the use of old graphs and diagrams, every effort was made to replicate them accurately. "Then they must have done it at midnight, or in the morning after a load of margaritas," he replied acidly.
"They're much faster than when I first came here. And I, think that's wrong. In fact I can remember Mr Roberts (the erstwhile Augusta National chairman, Clifford Roberts), frequently reminding us of the objective of Bobby Jones when he built this place.
"The Jones philosophy was that a good shot should always be rewarded. That simply won't happen out there today."
Yet, as we have come to expect, a lot of the players coped. As scores in the high seventies and eighties went up on the board, however, it was equally clear that there were a number of others who very clearly didn't.
