His first round was nearly halfway complete and Matt Kuchar's Masters was going nowhere. Standing on the eighth tee, he was already 2 over par on a day that Augusta National was yielding some scores. So he steeled himself to find some of that action for himself.
That, of course, is not true. The Masters doesn't work that way. Kuchar is in second place when the championship resumes Friday because he made a bogey early on when it might have been worse.
By day's end, his 4-under 68 tied him with Tony Finau, two shots behind Jordan Spieth. But it couldn't have happened without some early trouble-shooting, which is where good things often start.
"I got pretty fortunate on the fourth to come away with a bogey," Kuchar said. "I made a 15-footer for bogey and I felt that kind of made things OK. I was staring a double-bogey in the face and thought this was going to be a rotten beginning to my Masters.
"But I make that, I'm still in it, I hadn't ruined my round and I played some pretty good golf, particularly from 8 in."
From the eighth hole in, Kuchar recorded six birdies, including two back-to-back on No. 15 and 16. A 10-footer for the last birdie on 18 concluded a 31 on the back nine. Though he finished fourth here last year and took third in 2012, Kuchar has never finished a round in second place here, dating back to his first Masters in 1998, when he was still on the Georgia Tech golf team.
And if you're still looking for the artful shot that energized his birdie run, you won't find one. His 11 Masters have tutored him otherwise.
"You're always on edge," he said of playing Augusta National. "There are place where you can be a little bit aggressive but you're always one edge, when it's a fine line between a shot being great and a shot being terrible.
"And so I don't know that you ever sense, hey, I got it, let's keep firing at pins. Every shot, you try to execute the best you can. You try to take as much trouble out of play that you can."
Which how he birdied the par-5 8th hole, knocking his second shot to within 27 feet for a two-putt 4.
"You try to make sure you leave yourself either a chance for birdie or at least a place where you know you can get up and down for par," he said. "This course, it's never one where you feel all that comfortable or confident, saying, you know, I've got it figured out. I've got it. It's my day."
Even though in short time, it started to look that way. He dropped under par with a birdie on the par-5 13th and then began advancing up the leaderboard. He birdied the par-5 15th, getting up and down from 25 feet behind the green. On the 16th, where his hole-in-one on Sunday last year charged his closing 67, he nearly did it again, settling for a birdie from four feet. After a sand save for par on No. 17, the closing hole provided a 10-foot moment of truth with caddie John Wood.
"He's done great with ... I don't remember what you call it ... when you read it with your feet and get a sense of how much slope and break there may be," Kuchar said. "He's been great. If I bring him in a half dozen times during the round, we almost are on the exact same page. This was one of the times we weren't on the same page. He had it fairly straight to a right-edge putt."
But after watching playing partner Rickie Fowler's putt take a harder turn, Kuchar asked Wood for a re-read.
"We got on the same page with a little more break and hit a great putt," Kuchar said. "I heard that guys were missing it low all day and I feel awfully glad to have made that and gotten in a 4 under."
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