You don’t know pressure until you know Masters pressure

Augusta National on Masters Sunday is a study in claustrophobia. Not in the psychiatric no-exit sense, although if you’re in the sea of humanity behind the 12th tee when the leaders come, you can get more than a taste of that. More like this: Sunday at Augusta National is tight, on both sides of the gallery ropes. Even down in the holler — 11 green, 12 tee, 13 fairway — the air is thin.

The fans and the moment put the players on edge, and the players and the moment return the favor. The ghost of Bob Jones puts everybody on edge, along with the tee shot on 18 and the prospect of a basement interview in Butler Cabin. That ghost hovers low; that chute on 18 is skinny; that basement gets crowded.

Here’s Francesco Molinari, Sunday morn, 2019 Masters, putting on his work clothes with a two-shot lead. Dark pants, off-white shirt — this is not a flashy man. He looks at himself in a mirror and an involuntary question crosses his mind: How would these colors go with the world’s most famous green sport coat? “Of course, you don’t want to think about that,” Molinari said in an interview several months after that Masters. “But you do.”

You haven’t hit a shot and the tourney is playing with your head.

For a player in contention, the claustrophobia can set in on the first tee. No, before that. It can set in on the practice green behind the first tee. No, before even that. It can start in the clubhouse. Yep, there. You can’t breathe, your skin is clammy and an obsessive plea is running through your head like a Norfolk Southern freight train chugging through downtown Augusta: Please don’t look at me.

This isn’t everybody, but it is a couple dozen players, early on Sunday afternoon: You’ve been to the range and now you’re in the clubhouse, only to use the loo. The clock is ticking toward your tee time, toward Jim Nantz’s syrupy 2 p.m. greeting (Grammy’s watching at home), toward 7 p.m. and the start of 60 Minutes, when this peculiar and exquisite torture will be over and the wait for next year will begin.

And now there’s this nice clubby man in his green coat looking your way. His wife in her yellow floral shirt, looking your way. Their semi-grown kids tagging along like prep-school Mini-Mes. And your worst fear is coming true: The guy is talking to you. He’s saying some wildly appropriate thing like, “Good luck out there today. We’re rooting for ya.” You really don’t know or care what he’s saying. You’re shrinking into yourself.

You know who you are. You’re Jordan Spieth, Rory McIlroy, Max Homa, various others in Category 1. You’re excitable and emotional, and this Sunday-at-Augusta, I-can’t-breathe thing is in your DNA. Or maybe you’re in Category 2, with Tiger Woods and Scottie Scheffler and Bryson DeChambeau, excitable and emotional like your brethren in C1 but more determined to hide it. You are not in Category 3, with Dustin Johnson and Brooks Koepka and Cameron Young and others who can make the Leaders on Parade walk from nine green to 10 tee and barely feel a thing.

But Tiger, man — what gives? You’ve done the Sunday-at-the-Masters thing 24 times. On most of those Sundays, you have killed your pre-round warm-up. You’ve looked good on the putting green. But then you make that walk through that allée of people from the practice green to the first tee and something happens.

We get it. It’s intimidating. You’re surrounded, on that tee. Both sides of the fairway are lined with fans, some with binoculars, and they’re staring holes through you. There are members and guests on the second-floor porch in the clubhouse standing and watching. You’re perspiring, and we really do get it. The real, this-counts world is crashing in and there’s nowhere to hide. Your record, your experience, your exemplary warm-up suddenly don’t mean a thing. In that setting, Tiger Woods would hit, at least on a few memorable occasions, some of the most wildly offline shots you could ever imagine. Sunday at Augusta. You can say this without having a doctorate in clinical psychology: It had to be the stress.

If you have one, as Bhrett McCabe does, you can say a lot more. McCabe is a psychologist who tells the golfers he works with — Jon Rahm, Sam Burns, Billy Horschel — that they need to start thinking about Sunday long before the tournament begins. “By Sunday, it’s too late,” McCabe said recently. “Sunday at the Masters is Alabama and Michigan at the Rose Bowl. It’s an elevated experience.”

On the 6th hole, the downhill par 3, everybody — players, caddies, Pinkertons, fans, tournament officials, camera operators — comes together in the name of ball-in-the-air awe. The green is 100 feet below the tee and the pin is on a wee shelf in the back right. The face-meets-ball acoustics are perfect, but it doesn’t matter, because now that ball is in the air with a mind of its own. For about four seconds, there are thousands of eyeballs on a single golf ball and nobody is saying boo. “There’s total, complete silence,” Jim “Bones” Mackay, the former caddie and now NBC Sports on-course reporter, said recently. “It’s so intense.” And it is. Everybody is in the moment. There are no cellphones. There are no distractions. There’s nothing but that ball in the air.

The next par 3, the short 12th, is even more intense, because, by now, it’s getting late. The fellas come off the 11th green and look left (all together now) to see what the flag on 12 is doing. What the players don’t want to do is look straight ahead at the 12th tee. That’s because the box is small and the crowd is thick. Thick and almost too respectful: the opera-house clapping for contenders and past champions, the deathly silence when a player is over his ball. You don’t like the tee height but you really don’t want to start over. The tension can mess with you. “Twelve,” said Tom Watson, “is the most stressful shot on the golf course.” Does Tom Watson strike you as the sort of person who uses that word casually?

Then there are two moments of exquisite privacy, for the players and their caddies, the 12th green and the 13th tee. On 12, you can actually hear a birdie putt (rare) go in. That’s because the nearest cheering spectators are almost 200 yards away and it takes a split second for their hysteria to reach you.

Then your last break of the day, in the back-of-the-box privacy of the 13th tee. You could practically shout over to somebody playing next door at the Country Club and ask for a hot dog. There’s a restroom back there, the last best one of the day. There’s a bench. There’s often a wait. You might eat something, drink something, do a deep-breath thing. You’re literally in the shadows. For a brief while there, nobody can see you. Then you reemerge into the afternoon sunshine. For the rest of the day, you’re on display, like a movie star at an awards show. It’s showtime, Augusta-style.

You rinse one, playing into the 15th green, and the gallery in the grandstand offers a mournful play-by-play chorus, hope segueing into despair: Oh! Ooh-oh-oh-oh? Urrrrrr.

And sometimes — sometimes — the players become fans. The players, every last one of them, grew up watching the tourney. They know what it’s like, to be a fan. On Masters Sunday, they hear what the spectators hear. Brooks Koepka, Ian Poulter and Webb Simpson were on the 17th tee when Woods played his tee shot on the par-3 16th, when Woods was contending for his fifth coat. Verne was calling it on CBS for Grammy at home, and Michael Phelps, lanky retired swimmer, was about six feet behind Woods, in the first row of spectators, separated from the action by a thin rope. Tiger’s ball took the green’s slope and started trickling down the hill and for a while there it looked and sounded like it might go in. Koepka and Poulter and Simpson heard it all. Walking down 17, Koepka said, “That was f—ing awesome.” Koepka. You wouldn’t think it.

Woods won that year, six years ago. That’s how it goes every year. One guy wins. The other players, pretty much, get out fast, returning to their lives and their regrets, getting ahead of the crowds, leaving the hysteria behind.

Until next April.