AUGUSTA, Ga. – With late-stage greatness comes delusion. The world recognizes when time steals the greatness. Only the great often can’t concede it, looking in a mirror and seeing only a false promise of more glory smiling back.

Sometimes that’s sad. Other times it’s stirring.

Tiger Woods lives somewhere in between those poles.

Friday was a very good day for this 48-year-old, post-surgery, everything-hurts version of Woods. He put 23 more holes of golf on his battered body without needing to be towed off the course. He battled the slopes of Augusta National and a hard wind that blew the fine white sand of its bunkers up every uncovered orifice to come away with a very workable understanding with par.

By the time Woods rounded off his rain-delayed first-round 73, then turned around some 40 minutes later to shoot 72 in the second, he had easily made an historic 24th straight Masters cut.

Knowing the pain – much of it his own making – that comes with the leg he mangled in a 2021 car accident and a spine that could be nothing but fused, you’d have to call it a wonderful feat to get this far.

“All the cliches you hear about him and all the old stories about how he will grind it out, it was fun to see that in person,” said his verbally gifted playing partner, Max Homa.

Then, there’s the delusion.

To Woods, there was only one meaning to the cut record.

“It means I have a chance going into the weekend. I’m here. I have a chance to win the golf tournament,” he said.

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