The sun rose at 6.58am on Sunday in Augusta, a full three hours after Tiger Woods. Across the city, people were asleep and sharing the very same sorts of dreams, about the view down through the pines along the first fairway, the shots over the water at Amen Corner, the long walk uphill to the 18th green, where the club chairman Fred Ridley and last year’s champion Jon Rahm would be waiting ready with that freshly pressed Green Jacket. Woods says he still has these thoughts himself, in the few hours’ rest he gets between warming-down for the evening and warming-up again in the morning. For him, it’s a sixth win, and a share of Jack Nicklaus’s record.
Only a handful of the people entertaining these thoughts had a chance of actually realising them. In the 29 years Woods has been playing here no one had come from further back than six shots off the lead on Sunday. Which meant you likely needed to be at least one-under already to have the slightest chance of overtaking the third-round leader Scottie Scheffler.
