First practice round at Masters is a washout

The first full day at the Masters turned out to be a short one.

Augusta National was open for only two hours because of storms, still enough time for a few players to see some of the changes to the golf course – even though this was supposed to be a year with really no change at all.

The ice storm in February that led to the demise of the famous Eisenhower Tree also cost the club countless other trees, giving Augusta a slightly different look. Instead of a forest of Georgia pines, players can see from the 10th fairway all the way across to the 15th fairway. Players couldn’t help but notice the number of trees missing from the right side of the narrow, claustrophobic seventh fairway.

“You don’t feel like you’re going down a bowling alley as much,” Brandt Snedeker said, his hair wet from wearing a visor in the rain.

The club lost thousands of limbs that were damaged from the ice storm, so many that Jimmy Walker said he saw workers up in the trees with chain saws when he came to Augusta a few weeks ago for a practice round.

“I haven’t played here a ton, so I kind of got the feeling you could see down through the golf course a little bit better than you used to be able,” Walker said. “I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.”

Some things never change. The course was starting to burst with colour. The greens already had a tinge of yellow to them. And there was a buzz about the Masters, even without Tiger Woods around for the first time in 20 years because of recent back surgery.

Still, nothing stood out quite like the 17th hole.