AUGUSTA, Ga. – It must’ve been a bit surreal for most golf fans to turn on coverage of the Masters on Saturday and watch players wearing winter hats, rain gear and their caddies following with umbrellas. Of course, it has rained here during the Masters before—and yes, it’s been cold and wet in the past (2007 comes to mind).
But we don’t often get to see Augusta National blanketed in rain, wind and cold. Toward the end of second round play Saturday morning, it almost seemed like an Open Championship broke out.
Though the players didn’t love it, golf fans certainly did. Our photographers battled the elements to capture the scenes—and reaction from the players themselves kind of sum up just how brutal it was on Saturday.
Cameron Young’s quote is probably our favorite about what it was playing on Saturday morning:
“I mean it’s basically impossible. I don’t really know what you’re supposed to do. It’s playing so long. I think — I mean, I hit a great shot on 18 (it went 245 yards), I think it handed in a puddle.”
Here’s Adam Scott, who said he had 186 to the front on 18 and hit a 3-iron, which “usually flies 240.”
“I feel like I just survived.”
Here’s Patrick Reed, whose drive only went 244 yards at the 18th hole, on his approach into the home hole:
I hit a solid drive off of 18 and sitting there with hybrid not knowing if it was going to be enough from the fairway with not really much wind.
Leave it to an Irishman to tell everyone to stop complaining:
“Look, I’ve been around the game long enough to know what to do in these situations. So it’s just kind of take the rough with the smooth and just go out there and do as best you can when you are out there. Like the stop on 11 for 10 minutes yesterday and then obviously on 14 yesterday evening, it is what it is. We knew we were going to come back out and play in some pretty bad weather and to be honest it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be this morning. But it was still very tricky out there.