Six ways of looking at the Masters Sunday’s back nine

AUGUSTA, Ga. – This is the story of a broken tee, an unexpected handshake, and a sideways grin that, together, sum up Augusta National and the 2015 Masters.

You know how it ends, with Jordan Spieth winning a green jacket. Here’s what happened in the final hours before it happened.

You have to work hard to find a location at Augusta National Golf Club that doesn’t feature spectacular vistas of one of the world’s great golf courses. The greens at 16 and 18 are particularly popular, and the view of Amen Corner is so impressive that you’re willing to crowd amongst thousands of fellow patrons for a chance to cheer a shot you can’t even see.

So you’ve got to dig a bit to find a spot that’s both critical and sparsely populated. One such spot is the 11^th tee, a tiny elevated plateau just up from the 10^th green, a peninsula of green cut into the pine straw and azaleas. And it’s here that our little odyssey starts.

HOLE 11, White Dogwood

You know the old line about the Masters not beginning until the back nine on Sunday. This particular Masters was over right around 1:15 on Thursday afternoon, when Spieth first teed off. But you don’t often get a leaderboard like we had on Sunday, with the golf world’s four most fascinating characters holding down the top six spots. (Nothing but love for you too, Charley Hoffman and Justin Rose.)

Knowing full well I’m about to see either a coronation or a historic collapse, and that either would make a damn good story, I post up on the right side of the 11^th tee. I watch Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, Phil Mickelson, Hoffman, Rose, and Spieth work their way through this hole, the 15^th, and the 18^th, all close enough to touch them.

I don’t, of course. You can get in real trouble with Augusta for far smaller offenses, as we’ll see in a bit.

But first: the 11^th. A note on how this hole is set up: Augusta National is an incredibly hilly course, something that’s not obvious from TV. So you come off the 10^th green, meet up with the 11^th hole about a third of the way down the fairway, and then must walk back up another hill to get to the tee box. For this reason, many caddies don’t haul the 50-pound bag all the way up to the tee, instead shoving a driver in their player’s hands and saying, “Go hit it a long way, or something.”

Rory and Tiger are our first guests, and they walk up the fairway chatting. At this point, I don’t realize that Tiger has apparently done some kind of fairway surgery on himself, popping a wrist bone back into place, but I can say that Woods doesn’t appear to be showing any ill effects. His demeanor is relentless, while McIlroy has that little bouncy strut he gets when everything’s going exactly his way.

McIlroy tees off first, striping a 347-yard drive. He then makes an immediate beeline for the players-only Porta-John, tucked discreetly out of camera view behind a hedge. While McIlroy is taking care of business, Woods smacks his tee shot into the pine straw to the right of the fairway. He leaves his tee on the tee box and immediately sets off walking alone down the vast expanse.

There’s a lot of time to think in golf. Woods is, at this moment, 13 strokes behind Spieth. We don’t know what he’s thinking, but “so this is what it feels like” is a reasonable guess.

McIlroy, meanwhile, bounds out of the bathroom and – in violation of all codes of behavior at Augusta – begins running down the fairway to catch up to Woods. I mean a full-on, knees-high sprint. This would get a patron and their descendants keelhauled, but when you’re a four-time major winner, the rules are a bit different.

The broken tee still sits there on the tee box as Mickelson and Hoffman, both smiling broadly, make their own way up the hill. Mickelson has just birdied 10 and is loving life, and Hoffman appears relaxed and, honestly, just happy to be here. He grabs a water bottle from a players-only cooler as Mickelson picks up Woods’ discarded tee and tosses it to the side.

Hoffman’s first tee shot drifts wide, and he growls a “No, Charley!” as it flew. Mickelson, at this point five strokes back of Spieth, keeps his grin as he walks back down the fairway.

And then it’s time for the leaders. Rose and Spieth walk up 11 with their caddies in tow, not speaking but not dismissive of each other, either. They know that Amen Corner waits just a few hundred yards away; they know their professional lives could be defined by what awaits them in the next 8 holes.

Rose’s drive is workmanlike, but Spieth hits his and immediately points hard right. “That’s a bogey,” someone in the gallery says, and like most things said in the gallery, it’s both stupid and wrong. Both Spieth and Rose par that hole, and at this point Spieth’s lead is six.

Woods’ broken tee rests there as patrons pack up their chairs and leave. Finally, only a father and son stand there at the ropes’ edge, trying to get the attention of a course marshal. A member of the private security team that patrols Augusta ambles over, and he tosses the tee to the kid. He grins, turning it over and over in his hands.

Off to 15.

HOLE 15, Firethorn

The 15^th is the final par 5 on the Augusta docket, and thus the last realistic chance for a leaderboard-altering eagle. If someone’s going to make a move with four holes to go, going low at 15 is an absolute must.

We’ll go in reverse order here, for reasons that will become obvious. As Rose and Spieth walk up, Rose points at a young kid sitting cross-legged on the right side of the fairway, and rolls him his ball. It seems a noble gesture; I only find out later that Rose has just bogeyed the 14^th, and thus he surely wants to get rid of that underperforming ball with all due speed. He and Spieth tee off without incident.

Preceding them came Mickelson and Hoffman, and it’s clear that Amen Corner has worked over both men. Phil’s smile has a lot less zip on it, but Hoffman – lord, Hoffman looks like a man who’s been told the date and manner of his own death. He walks stiff-backed, all traces of a smile gone from his face, his eyes locked somewhere over the pines in the distance. Both of them tee up and off easily enough; Mickelson, though he doesn’t know it yet, has an eagle just a few minutes in his future.

These four are anticlimactic to our first pairing, however. McIlroy arrives on 15 with about 43 percent less pep in his step. Woods has gone from arrogant to merely businesslike. And when he tees off, following McIlroy, well, that’s when the real action on 15 begins.

“LIGHT THE CANDLE!” some backwards-hatted bro bellows, and before Woods has even picked up his tee (he cleans up after himself this time) a Richmond County deputy – armed, unbelievably enough – has taken hold of the bro’s arm and is leading him over to another member of the security team.

(If you’re curious what “light the candle means,” well, here’s sort of an explanation.)

Up strides a course marshal sporting a blue (not green!) jacket, a white Masters baseball cap, an orange GALLERY ribbon and the folksy accent of a man who knows his way around both an SEC tailgate and a boardroom. He takes the bro’s badge and begins calling in the number, summoning transport to rid the club of the bro’s presence. He then hands the badge to the officer, who tucks it in a breast pocket.

“I can’t believe you would do something like that,” the marshal says in a disappointed-father tone. “I cannot believe it.”

The bro begins protesting that this is his grandparents’ badge, and when bro’s friend comes up and tries to intervene, the marshal says, “Yes, I’m kicking him out. You want me to kick you out too?”

So it looks bad for our bro, but then peak Augusta kicks in. Our bro notes that he’s a student at a notable Southern university – surprise – and manages to drop a few names that catch the marshal’s interest – double surprise. A little back-and-forth later, some proper obsequiousness from the bro, and the badge is returned with a classic let’s-not-let-this-happen-again handshake. The golf cart that has been summoned to politely but firmly bum-rush our bro to the front gates is sent off, and all is as it should be at Augusta.

HOLE 18, Holly

And here we are, the end of the line. It’s all been decided now, everyone except Rose knowing this is a done deal. When Tiger and Rory approach the tee, they do so with the resigned air of men who know their cause is lost, but march forward into oblivion. Both of these guys can walk out of here with some measure of pride, Woods because nobody expected him to be still playing in Augusta with the Sunday sun setting, McIlroy because he’d played so poorly earlier in the week that no one believed he could make any kind of run.

Behind them come Mickelson and Hoffman, and both of them appear to have accepted their fates. Phil has been here, of course, coming in second in roughly 700 majors over the last decade. Hoffman looks like he’s just watched his car get towed away, which is a step up from the haunted demeanor he had before.

And then comes our leader and his playing partner. Rose has his jaw set hard; five strokes back, he knows his only hope at this point is to kneecap Spieth, and that probably wouldn’t result in a green jacket for him either. So he sends his final tee shot into the night, breaking a chunk off the tee as he swings, and then it’s all up to Spieth.

It’s here, the moment this kid has dreamed of for his whole life, even if that’s a period of time that’s a lot shorter than most of us reading this would believe. But he’s worked so long, so hard to get to this point, putting in hour after hour of thankless practice, and today, it’s paid off. He’s maintained a stern, reserved face every time I’ve seen him this round, but, at long last, after hitting his final tee shot of the 2015 Masters, he finally cracks.

Jordan Spieth leaves the last tee box at Augusta National and takes the final steps of his old life, grinning all the way.

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Jay Busbee is a writer for Yahoo Sports. Contact him at jay.busbee@yahoo.com or find him on Twitter.

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