Fans blindly follow the Tiger’s trail

The Tiger hunt took in a sea of fans — many of whom had never seen a golf tournament before — a rolling mass who spent the day trying to get into position to watch Woods make the kind of shots that won the Masters by a record 12 strokes in April.

He was given three ovations before he uncorked his long and gangly body on the first tee. As the ball landed in the fairway, a tall teenager in a Tiger T-shirt shouted: “Nice bounce, Tiger” and the big crowd laughed.

Everybody was smiling when his second shot dropped just a few feet from the first pin, but the tone of the day changed quickly when he missed the putt, took a deep breath and looked hard at the hole.

The fans were eight and 10 deep around the first green and every subsequent green. They lined the fairways two and three deep as he walked to approach shots, and clapped and cheered as he battled the course to go two under after 10 holes.

“It’s hard to see him. My strategy is to do a lot of running,” said Lenea Phifer, a 27-year-old bank employee from nearby Washington, who was attending her first tournament.

“I try to get two holes ahead of him, running back and forth between the greens and the tees,” said Ravi Murthy, a 17-year-old high school student from Potomac, Maryland, who was pressed against the rope near the 15th green.

“I’m looking for a high five from him,” he said, but Woods bogeyed the hole and there were no high fives for anybody.

Woods kept flying his approach shots over the greens and missing putts. When he missed a long birdie putt at number three, he lost his temper and punched his putter into the fringe of the green, leaving a Tiger print on the grass.Blair Bennett of Concord, North Carolina, pressed eagerly against the ropes. He’d been waiting for Woods at the 15th tee for 40 minutes because, “I want to see him hit the big doggie.”

When the whoosh of air that marks the young phenomenon’s swinging of the driver had subsided, Bennett drawled his analysis:

“Well, my god. He looks more like a cub than a tiger. But he hits the ball like a lion.”

Those lion-size drives worked brilliantly at the Masters. But on a course where it is said the players have to walk single file down the fairway, this ball was caught in the long rough and Woods made bogey.

And on the 17th and 18th holes of Woods’s first round in the tournament he hoped would bring his second Major title, the cheers were reserved for Lehman.

Woods hit a 7-iron into the drink on 18 and after he carded a double-bogey for a four-over 74, he marched quickly toward the clubhouse.

When asked what was going through his mind right then, Woods said, just as quickly: “You don’t want to know.”

Up on the grass above the green, however, was 16-year-old Rebecca Herron of Bethesda, Maryland, dressed in a Tiger costume, complete with black stripes and fuzzy ears.

Asked how she thought Woods had played, she said, “Oh, he’s wonderful, he played wonderfully. I know he’s going to win the Championship.”