Northern Ireland's Rory McIlroy walks off the 16th tee during a practice round.

Nine players have completed one hole, with no one making a birdie. "Hopefully that will be us one day", Woods said, adding with a smile, "and I'll be hitting bombs past him". "My game feels good". I have to keep normalizing to that because that's what I know is fact. "You know what's going on".

The best moment of all the pre-tournament Masters interviews the past three days came from Dustin Johnson, the No. 1 ranked player in the world.

Winning the Masters is a career-defining moment for any player, but for those who have the chance to make history it adds a bit of extra meaning. Watson was able to overcome Louis Oosthuizen in a playoff in that year's Masters, a competitor who he outdrove by more than fifteen yards over the course of that season.

"I got my swing speed up to 143, 144 (mph)", he said. As ESPN's Nick Pietruszkiewicz broke down in detail, several of the fairway hazards that make Augusta National such a hard test for the best golfers in the world simply won't apply to DeChambeau given his distance off the tee. "I've always felt like I had the game to do well around here". And he has no idea if he's nearing the limits or just getting started.

Johnson compares it to 2017, when he was a runaway Masters favorite but slipped and fell on stairs in a rented house at Augusta and hurt his back, forcing him to withdraw.

"I was pleased it was dark, because you didn't see where my ball went", Nicklaus told reporters afterward. Ernie Els never did. You actually need to have quite a rigid game-plan here.

"I have a chance, it will be around here, you know what I mean?" he said on Tuesday. I'm not 100 per cent sure if I'll put it in play because of the unknown - it's so close to The Masters.

"I have no doubt he will play well enough to get on that Ryder Cup team next year and move forward, but at the moment, we are just seeing a bit of volatility, and a lot of it is down to the expectation of being a Major champion".

US Open champion Bryson DeChambeau was set for an early morning showdown with Augusta National's Amen Corner on Thursday in the opening round of the 84th Masters golf tournament.

The pandemic already guaranteed a Masters unlike any other.

Just like most Masters veterans, he is learning more every year about Augusta National, the course he dreamed about winning on as a youth growing up an hour's drive away.

"I haven't put all the pieces together at the same time, whether I've driven well or hit my irons poorly, or I've put the ball striking together and I haven't putted well".

"At the end of the day, I still go based off of my intuition most of the time".

"I will never look at myself as someone that is better than anyone out here until the scores are written in stone afterwards".

While this rule applies to all golfers equally, it's possible that it could affect DeChambeau more than the rest of the field, as he is notoriously meticulous while planning his putts. "I think everybody just has got to get their head together and figure it out".

"After we came back out of the lockdown, there's been really good stuff in there, but there's been some lacklustre stuff, too, lapses of concentration", he said.

I spoke to one of them, Bernhard Langer, on Tuesday and said, "Thank you for showing me a different way of playing Augusta National" and he was like, "What short?"