Golf: Tiger battles form, expectations

The only trouble with omnipotence, Tiger Woods learned again yesterday, is that sometimes it can prove a stretch, especially when expectations are at their highest.

It was a problem that was etched into every corner of his face on the day he was supposed to take over the Masters tournament for the fifth time.

On the 17th green, where he was poised to make his most serious move on the edge of the leaderboard, he fell to his knees in despair when his putt stopped 2.5cm from the hole.

This was supposed to be a time when the Tiger reclaimed all of his old ascendancy. Instead, it was a day when survival became a progressively desperate priority, and one that he had barely claimed when his last stroke of the second round, a saving putt, rolled around the lip and refused to fall.

By the end of it, the Tiger was just happy to be still in the fight - seven shots behind the two leaders, Chad Campbell and Kenny Perry, who are expected to be chased into the woods somewhere around mid-afternoon.

If a cannonball had been fired from the first tee it could scarcely have had a more arresting effect than his first drive of the day. On the first day on this hole, Woods' fiercest rival and the world No 2 Phil Mickelson found two bunkers before making it to the green.

Yesterday Woods almost made it from the tee. The drive made two statements. One was that he was awash with the adrenalin of his return to a major theatre of golf. The other was that his failure to drive home his advantage of the previous evening was still gnawing at him.

Unfortunately, the ensuing nudge was too slight and left him with a long putt, which he left short before making a white-knuckled save.

There we had more or less the complete picture of the Tiger in the first phase of his rehabilitation. Genius is still in residence, but not yet arrived is that all-consuming sense that every tournament he plays is at his mercy.

Before going to the tee yesterday Woods made it clear that a five-shot deficit on the leader - it was eight by the time Campbell had completed the outward nine - was for him, of all people, no grounds for panic: "You know, it's a long week and sometimes you just have to hang in," he said.

That became an absolute imperative yesterday as he parred his way through the early holes. On the par-three fourth, which is known in the brochure as Flowering Crab Apple, he could only taste some of the bitterness of wasted opportunities.

Most acutely, he had to regret the climax to an opening round which could have left the rest of the field in a state of suspended destruction.

It was far from what he had in mind when he first picked up his stride on the back nine.

"Really, it's frustrating to look at my first-round score. It should have been at least two shots better, but then sometimes you have to accept days like that. I had good pace but I just didn't make enough putts. The thing was I was hitting most of the putts on my line - and I've just got to read them a little better. I found a combo I didn't quite expect, fast greens that were also soft. Going to the course I thought that five under would probably be the leading score.

As the wind rose yesterday, Woods' mood was again buffeted almost at random. On the beautiful but treacherous sloping par-three sixth he made a fine birdie but then on the next, a par five, he over-reached with his drive and paid with a bogey.

As he had anticipated, it was a round that had to be built on attrition, with the hope of a surge home which this time had to be exploited with a rather more measured touch.

It seemed like the most reasonable of ambitions when he launched himself into that first withering drive. The crowd gasped at such a warning of a fresh invasion from the Tiger and a broad smile broke through the tension.

"I'm not far away," he insisted yesterday. "It's just a question of hitting a few more shots." Another brilliant one came on the eighth, when he returned to three under - a mere six shots off the lead. Perhaps the omnipotence wasn't, after all, quite played out.

It was a pretty thought but it didn't survive the majority of the second-round action.

The most killing evidence of the extent of the Tiger's battle to smooth the effects of an eight-month absence came on the 13th fairway. There he elected to lay up rather than take directly the hazardous route over the water and into the green. Unfortunately, the safety-first shot was sprayed into the crowd - a potential disaster only nerveless work retrieved.

Inevitably, he refused to surrender to these most unpromising circumstances. And so he went into the night insisting he still had a part to play, despite "so many wasted opportunities".

But then he always says that. It is a habit to which the omnipotent are somewhat prone.