AUGUSTA, Ga. — His yellow lanyard had a single and accurate word on it in black ink: PLAYER. The player himself needs no introduction. The silver hair, the white sneakers posing as golf shoes, the tanned no-glove left hand. Fred Couples had a first-round 71 in his back pocket and he was feeling good.
He was feeling good, his caddie was feeling good, his wife was feeling good. Other caddies, other players, other player wives, every last green coat, assembled writers, gathered fans — Fred Couples shooting a good first-round score in his 40th Masters was bound to spread joy, and it did. There’s something about the guy. There always has been.
“I’m 65,” Couples said. He gains some weight, he loses some weight, his back hurts, his back is OK, his caddies change, his swing does not.
“I don’t feel 70, I don’t feel 50. Friday, you know, could blow, it could rain, it could be difficult,” Couples said. “But I don’t feel like I’m going to go out there and forget how to play.”
He will never forget how to play. (He started as a parks-and-rec golfer in Seattle.) He will never forget that the Seattle Mariners won 116 games in 2001. (The Seattle Pilots were once his team.) He will never forget what Raymond Floyd said to him about how to play par-5s: Hit your second shot somewhere on the green. Floyd, Tom Watson and Lee Trevino are three of his golfing role models.
Couples was playing with two players who could drive it 30 and 40 and 50 yards past Couples, who won this event in 1992 when (all together now) his ball stayed up on the bank over the creek on 12. But it was Fred who holed out from 185 for an eagle on 14 for a 2. It was Fred who had the honor on 15, 16, 17 and 18. It was Fred who ended the threesome’s day by burying a 4-footer for par.
Couples knows you don’t have to be perfect to be good at golf. You don’t have to hit 393 shots on the range. You don’t have to have a two-minute conversation with your caddie before playing a slice 6-hybrid shot from the rough. It’s just not that complicated.
“Hybrid, rescue, whatever you want to call it,” Couples said after his round, standing on a riser, talking to reporters. It wasn’t like he had turned back the clock, though he’s been doing scrums like this one forever. He holed out on 14 for an eagle with a 6-rescue, 6-hybrid — whatever you want to call it. It’s his 185-yard club.
You might know this routine, the male golfer of a certain again, at a cocktail party, looking to say something wildly insightful, will say, “I just find I can relate some much more to what the women do on that LPGA circuit.” Well, Fred is moving in that direction. That is, our direction. He plays a yellow ball.
His bag, from longest club to shortest: driver, 3-wood, 5-wood, 3-hybrid, 4-hybrid, 5-hybrid, 6-hybrid, 7-iron, 8-iron, 9-iron, pitching wedge, gap wedge, sand wedge, putter. Yes, conventional putter. He needed only five putts over the last five holes, with a spectacular up-and-down from the greenside, pondside trap on 16. The bunker shot was half-fat. The downhill, slicing 4-footer for par was nothing but net. His Houston Cougars lost the NCAA basketball title to Florida on Monday, but life goes on.
He played a nine-hole, back-nine practice round on Tuesday with Brooks Koepka, Adam Scott and Justin Thomas. Three current stars, and one from yesteryear. Three generations of fans, from a farm in South Dakota, were making the scene, each of them for the first time: Papa and Nana, their daughter Natalie, Natalie’s daughter Olivia, a high school golfer. They watched Koepka and Thomas and Scott. They could not take their eyes off of Fred.
“There’s just something about him,” Natalie Braun, a nurse practitioner, said. People, women and men, have been saying that forever. “He doesn’t walk too fast, he doesn’t walk too slow. He has his own pace, his own way of doing things. He came off 18 and people are cheering for him and clapping for him and he’s waving but looking down.”
It’s a keen insight. Fred Couples does not like attention and does not like to be fussed over. He’s a listener and an observer, and he doesn’t miss much. Couples played with Harris English and the Canadian golfer Taylor Pendrith, a bomber who shot 77 in his first round at the Masters. A writer asked Fred about Pendrith’s game, and this is what Couples said:
“I watched. He hit a lot of really, really good shots. Sounds like you know him, like you’re going to talk to him. He’s going to tell you he gave away four strokes with nothing really bad.
“Did he drive it bad here and there? Of course he did. But he hit two beautiful shots on 15 and three-putted from a brutal spot. That green is so fast and hard. He’ll be fine. He could shoot 69 tomorrow no problem.”
Those sentences tell you a lot about Pendrith, and something about Fred, too. Do you know how long Pendrith’s three-putt on 15 is likely to stay lodged in Fred’s head? Probably forever. Anyway, he’d rather talk about somebody else than himself.
Fred is a listener. He’ll talk, but he’d rather listen, and he can listen in more than one direction at the same time. At dinner, if the conversation to his left is about modern art and drivable par-4s to his right, he can stay engaged in both. Tiger Woods, at least in places, is the same way. A lot of their conversation is about playing golf and watching baseball. Fred loves playing with Tiger and vice-versa, not that they get to do it that often.
Where he plays, and who he plays with, matters a great deal to Fred. On Thursday, he played Augusta National with Harris English and Taylor Pendrith. He liked his playing partners, the tournament they are playing in, the course it’s played on every year. He’ll very likely be playing again next year. There had been some chatter, and some confusion, about whether this 89th Masters would be Fred’s swansong. There’s no reason to think it will be.
“I just love this place,” Fred said. “I love coming here.”
Michael Bamberger writes for GOLF Magazine and GOLF.com. Before that, he spent nearly 23 years as senior writer for Sports Illustrated. After college, he worked as a newspaper reporter, first for the (Martha’s) Vineyard Gazette, later for The Philadelphia Inquirer. He has written a variety of books about golf and other subjects, the most recent of which is The Second Life of Tiger Woods. His magazine work has been featured in multiple editions of The Best American Sports Writing. He holds a U.S. patent on The E-Club, a utility golf club. In 2016, he was given the Donald Ross Award by the American Society of Golf Course Architects, the organization’s highest honor.
