A long way to go
Singh's distance puts him out front
Vijay Singh wasn't worried about the added length at Augusta National Golf Club for the 70th Masters Tournament. The long-hitting Fijian knew he could handle that.
The slick and tricky bentgrass greens were another matter.
At least for a day, though, the 2000 Masters champion held his own on greens that haven't been altered in years.
Singh found the elusive pace on the putting surfaces in Thursday's first round, firing 5-under-par 67 over a firm and fast Augusta National that has been lengthened to 7,445 yards. It is the lowest first round at Augusta National for Singh, who is making his 13th Masters start.
The world's No. 2-ranked player had a bogey-free round, as did the surprising Rocco Mediate, who is second with 68.
Mediate is ranked 189th in the world and is 191st on the PGA Tour money list with just over $31,000 this year.
The only other score in the 60s was by first-time participant Arron Oberholser, who had 69.
Singh, a three-time major championship winner, has been hot and cold on the Augusta National greens. He conquered them when he won in 2000, but was last in putting in 2005.
"The putter has been working pretty good for me," Singh said after his round. "So I have a lot of confidence with that right now."
No matter how he putts, Singh has been a contender at Augusta National for the past four years; his worst finish during that time is seventh.
Singh and Mediate are being chased by a pair of two-time major champs.
Retief Goosen, the 2001 and 2004 U.S. Open champ, shot 70, as did Phil Mickelson, the 2004 Masters champion and 2005 PGA Championship winner.
The other golfers at 70 are Tim Clark and Geoff Ogilvy, a Masters rookie.
Eleven players shot 71, including 54-year-old Ben Crenshaw, a two-time Masters champion making his 35th start. He is joined by three-time major championship winner Ernie Els and 2003 Masters champ Mike Weir.
Defending champion Tiger Woods rolled in a 35-footer for birdie to close with 72. That's two shots lower than his opening round last year, when Woods trailed Chris DiMarco by seven shots.
"I'm in good shape," Woods said.
Vaughn Taylor, the first Augusta resident to play in the Masters in 50 years, bogeyed his first two holes and ended up with 75.
Mediate, one of Taylor's playing partners, tried to calm him down on the first tee by telling Taylor "a 7-iron still goes 170 yards and there's no green jackets hanging in the trees, (so) just play golf."
The three first-round scores in the 60s wasn't that unusual. There were only five in the 60s in 2005 and three in 2004 and 2003.
The beefed-up course didn't beat up the players, as some had expected. At least not yet.
"I thought at the beginning of the day there might be two scores in the 60s today," Woods said.
Thanks in part to fast conditions, the first-round scoring average was slightly lower than in 2005, and there were 12 eagles made, one fewer than the one-round record set in 1991.
Augusta National Chairman Hootie Johnson said the club added more length to counteract advances in golf club and ball technology. He wants to dial it back to the way the course played before the technology explosion.
"I think they accomplished that," said 1971 champion Charles Coody, who shot 89. "All the players are hitting the same irons they did 20 or 30 years ago."
A telling statistic Thursday, however, was in the number of first-round birdies, which dropped from 214 in 2005 to 185.
Goosen joked that the gallery was cheering "for when you're making pars whereas in the past they cheer when you make birdies."
As the greens get firmer, the tournament could turn into a battle of attrition, where the player who makes the most pars wins.
Woods and his caddie, Steve Williams, talked during the round about how the style of play reminded them more of a U.S. Open than the Masters.
Like a U.S. Open, where the courses are set up to be penal, there wasn't as much for fans to cheer about as normal, other than the eagles.
"You certainly hear a lot more roars when the golf course is soft and the greens are holding and you can get the ball in there close," Woods said. "That's not the case today. There were a bunch of bogeys out there, and I know our group was making some bogeys."
Said Goosen: "There was one hole when Mike Weir was teeing off, you could hear the birds sing away, like there's nobody on the course."
The only cheer Goosen heard was when "Tiger was doing something," he said.
Rod Pampling, one of the early leaders, said Augusta National "played fantastic, and I wouldn't put it in the same toughness as a U.S. Open."
Pampling, the winner of the Bay Hill Invitational in March, was leading the tournament at 2 under through nine holes before shooting 38 on the back nine for 72.
"It's just a very good test of golf ," Pampling said. "You can be a foot either way and have a good shot and a bad shot. It's a fine line."
Singh had 27 putts Thursday, compared with 31 he had in the opening round of 2005.
Singh followed that with putting rounds of 34, 32 and 32 to trail the field in putts among those who made the cut with 129.
He still finished fifth and admitted earlier this year that he "probably" would have won if he'd had a normal putting tournament.
"I think I've been putting pretty good for the last three months or two months," Singh said. "That's been the strongest part of my game since the Match Play at La Costa (in late February). The rest of my game I've been struggling with."
Not on Thursday, when Singh hit nine of 14 fairways, 14 greens in regulation and averaged 301.5 yards per drive.
"After TPC (The Players Championship, which ended March 26), I saw my golf swing on video and I found out exactly what I was doing wrong," Singh said. "I worked really hard last week, tried to fix it and it's on the way, I guess."
Singh and Mediate had more in common than their bogey-free rounds. They birdied the same holes - Nos. 11, 13, 14 and 15 - with the only difference being that Singh also birdied No. 7, one of only seven players to do that.
Singh and Mediate had the only two birdies on the 505-yard, par-4 11th hole, which Goosen called "probably the hardest hole out there."
Indeed, it ranked as the toughest Thursday, with a 4.477-stroke average.
"You're not supposed to do that," Mediate said of his birdie on No. 11. "I actually kind of apologized to the hole as I left."
Mediate couldn't have been in a much better mood after he made par on No. 18 and "skipped into the scoring tent."
Mediate, who is playing in his ninth Masters, was the surprise story. The 68 broke his personal eight-round streak of over-par rounds at Augusta National, dating to 2002. He has made the cut in all but one of his previous eight appearances at Augusta National, but he has only one top-20 finish.
Mediate qualified for the Masters by finishing in the top eight in the 2005 U.S. Open.
He said no one has asked him how he qualified for the Masters this year, but wouldn't blame them if they did.
"I haven't played a lot of golf and I've been hurt," said Mediate, who has had back problems since 1994. "I haven't played well at all. I've had a couple good events in two years. That's all body-related, not golf-swing or golf-game related, because otherwise I probably could have killed myself by now."
Though Singh is a card-carrying member of the long driver's club on the PGA Tour (he averages 292.2 per drive), Mediate and Clark took full advantage of the fast conditions to get added roll.
Mediate ranks 152nd on the tour at 279.7 yards per drive, but was ninth in the field Thursday with a 306 average. Clark is 175th on the tour in driving at 276.3. On Thursday, he was 49th, at 288.5.
"The firmness of the fairways certainly brings the field a little bit closer and the long hitters, their balls are going to be running off the fairway into the rough. So it certainly closes the gap," Clark said. "If it was wet, I'd be hitting two more clubs iron-wise into the greens, and then it would be really tough."
"It just is playing different this year being fast," said Woods, who averaged 293 yards on his drives. "We haven't played it like this in a while where it's been dry like this."
Crenshaw, with his 71, was the only former Masters champion in his 50s to break 77. He led the field with just 24 putts.
"That's great," two-time Masters champion Tom Watson (79 on Thursday) said of Crenshaw's round. "The golf course is long for us old folks."
"I felt that I had a few miracles out here happen," said Crenshaw, the 1984 and 1995 Masters champion who hasn't made the cut since 1997. "I have to chip and putt here. That's the only way I can get around. I'm hitting such long shots to the greens."
On Thursday, there was a favorable light southerly wind, making some of the lengthened holes play downwind.
"The conditions today favored us, not the holes that were changed," Singh said. "It was really the conditions that dictated the difficulty of the hole, and today was perfect conditions, so we could get it out there.
"It was warm, and the ball was going a long way. I better not say that; they'll move it back 50 yards next year."
Today's forecast calls for the wind to come out of the southwest at 12-18 mph with gusts to 20 mph. The more wind, the harder, faster and more difficult the greens will get.
"If the wind really picks up and it stays like this, there might be a few greens the ball might move on," Goosen said. "The greens are going to be tough."
Reach David Westin at (706) 724-0851 or david.westin@augustachronicle.com.
