After Two Days of The Masters, We Have Questions

After two days of play at the Masters, we have a leaderboard and a golf course that aren’t behaving like the ones we are used to seeing.

Half the field hasn’t finished, so we really don’t know who is leading the Masters after round two because round two isn’t done until Saturday morning. That leaves us with questions:

Will Jon Rahm, Patrick Reed, Xander Schauffele, Hideki Maysuyama or someone else make enough birdies tomorrow morning to overtake Dustin Johnson, Justin Thomas, Abraham Ancer and Cameron Smith?

Will Tiger Woods, who has played better than any time this year, claw his way to birdies and eagles and get into real contention? He’s on the 11th fairway with plenty of holes to go before the conclusion of the second round.

Will Phil Mickelson get his iffy putting to match up to what he called exceptional ball striking?

“I’m driving like a stallion,” he said after his second round.

As proof, he cited his drives over the trees at the 9th, landing the tee ball at the bottom of the slope, and being able to hit wedge into the 14th and 17th holes as well as hitting a 5-iron into the second hole both days.

But his putting has him annoyed.

“I’m very frustrated and disappointed with the way I’ve putted,” he said. “I’ve left eight, nine, ten shots on the green, and it’s pathetic.”

He said he was headed to check his putting on a Quintic system to see if it was ball path or stroke or alignment.

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Will Brooks Koepka start playing like major-winning Brooks Keopka?

“All day I was hitting good shots,” he said. “Just sloppy, just making stupid errors. I don’t know, I guess I’m hanging around. Close enough.”

He cited the 10th hole today as an example.

“It’s middle of the green, and ( instead) you come up short and obviously leave yourself with a tough chip, and the lies, everybody has trampled it down, it’s wet, it’s not exactly the place to be,” he explained.

Koepka is tied with Mickelson and Charles Howell III at 5-under.

Will Rory McIlroy get his game together?

“You play this course so much by memory,” he said. “You sort of have to throw all that out the window this week because the course is playing completely different. The greens are so much slower, so much softer, and because of that they can use some different pins that we’ve never seen before, either.”

He said he was surprised by his first round 75.

“I’m like, where the hell did that come from?” he quipped.

Will there ever be a way to explain short hitters like Webb Simpson and aged-62 Bernhard Langer contending?

Langer, a two-time winner, said, “I think I know how to get around it ( the course), even though I hit very long clubs. But it’s certainly not easy.”

However, he said it was a course and a tournament that historically favored long hitters. He pointed to the number of victories by Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods as proof.

We have even more about questions about how the golf course is playing.

Golf balls are stopping on the front of the ninth green instead of rolling back down the fairway. Balls have held on the slope in front of the 15th green. That never happens.

They are actually holding when they don’t land in perfect spots on the fifth green and the sixth green, two places where extra gravity tends to live and drags golf balls off the putting surface.

It’s not just the greens, either. Drives land in the fairway on severe slopes and stop, almost like they have plugged. But they aren’t. It’s a bit like they have hit a patch of Velcro. That happened often on the second hole and on the 10th.

The well-known speed slot landing area on the 10th fairway seemed to disappear until Tiger Woods found it with a drive late Saturday afternoon.

And the second cut, is, gasp, tall enough to hide a golf ball!

What is going on with the golf course?

Adam Scott noted that the greens are much slower, reducing the break in the putts.

“You can actually kind of putt them without being so scared at the moment,” he said. They are so slow that he’s getting numbers to the pins and hitting at them.

“On a firmer green, you’ve got some difficult decisions to make on how you’re going to manage to get it on the green or keep it on the green,” Justin Thomas said.

“Obviously, there’s flags that you can go at that in April, or when the greens are firm, you can’t,” Dustin Johnson said about the current conditions.

He thinks the course can get slightly firmer, but he does not expect to see the speed and firmness that we are all used to seeing at the Masters in April when it seems like a patron’s sneeze will blow a golf ball off it’s intended line on the greens.

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Although we believe that the torrential rain of Thursday morning is the cause of the soft greens and fairways, as Johnson pointed out, we don’t really know if the course will dry out before Sunday.

Meanwhile, low scores abound. If your favorite makes the cut on the number, that means he still might be able to use his golf ball like a dart and work his way into the winner’s circle.

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