Four-time major champion Ernie Els was struggling to regroup and searching for answers on Thursday after a humiliating record quintuple-bogey nine on the first hole at Augusta National in the first round of the Masters.
The 46-year-old South African, nicknamed “The Big Easy,” found nothing simple at all on the 445-yard hole named Tea Olive, time and again unable to sink short putts.
“I can’t explain it. I’m not sure what I did,” Els said. “I don’t know how I stayed out there, but you love the game and you’ve got to have respect for the tournament and so forth. But it’s unexplainable.”
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“It’s very tough to tell you what goes through your mind. It’s the last thing that you want to do is do that on a golf course at this level,” he said. “So, it’s very difficult.”
“I’m not sure where I’m going from here. I don’t know. We’ll see,” he added.
Els six-putted the par-four opening hole to open his 22nd Masters appearance, his nine-shot agony one stroke worse than the prior highest score on the hole, the eights shot by Olin Browne and Scott Simpson in 1998, Billy Casper in 2001 and India’s Jeev Milkha Singh in 2007.
“I couldn’t putt with a stick,” Els said. “You make some stuff up in your brain. It’s difficult. It’s something that holds you back from doing your normal thing. I don’t know what it is. I can go to that putting green now and make 20 straight three-footers. And then you get on the course and you feel a little different and you can’t do what you normally do. So it’s pretty difficult.”
“Hopefully I can pull it back and play some decent golf,” he said.
His total on the opening hole was originally scored as a 10 by running scorekeepers, but Augusta National announced after Els completed his round that the score had been “incorrectly recorded” and amended it to a nine.
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