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AUGUSTA, Ga. — The feel good story of Thursday at the Masters turned into a horror show as 66-year-old Fred Couples game went from under par to underwater at Augusta National.
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“Never hit a 90-yard shot in the water and then followed up with another one,” Couples said. “I’ve played 41 years here. I’ve never done that.”
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The affable Couples is one of the most popular figures at the Masters every year and he seems to turn back the clock and, for a while, remind everyone how he won the green jacket in 1992. On Thursday, he was on the first page of the leaderboard at two under and in the fairway after two shots at the par-5 15th hole. His pitch shot into the green landed safely and spun back into the water. He then hit nearly the exact same shot into the water again. After finally finding dry land he two-putted for a quadruple-bogey nine.
Couples then proceeded to head to the par-3 16th hole where he hit his iron shot short and, yes, in the water. He double bogeyed that hole, as well as the par-4 17th, to finish at six-over par.
“All the gas was gone. It was kind of a sour game, but it was fun,” Couples said of playing alongside long-hitting Min Woo Lee and Fifa Laopakdee, the first Thai amateur to play at the Masters. “Tomorrow I just have to go do the same thing but maybe not finish 10-over par on two holes or whatever the hell I did.”
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Three-hole nightmare stretch
It was eight over through three holes, but who’s counting?
Back to the golfing nightmare fuel.
“I actually had a perfect yardage (at the 15th hole) and I had seen a couple other guys, not in my group, but skip it over that green. I just felt like, you know, it was a shot I can handle,” Couples said. “I just kind of skinned it off the downhill lie and didn’t carry far enough. Then I did the same thing. Then on 16 I tried to regroup and just hit it down in the flat where the ball is going to roll anyway and I pulled it and hit in the bank and went in the water.”
He finished his day with a par at the closing par-4 18th hole, but according to Couples that might have been a minor miracle.
“I didn’t really reset. I just kept hitting the ball and the ball got in the way and went well,” he said. “I went nine, five, quad, double, double. There not much regrouping from that.”
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