Setting the pace: Couples took route 66 to leadWhat a start. If the rest of the weekend lives up to the opening round at Augusta we're in for a treat.
Tiger's back in the hunt, the golden oldies are showing how the game should be played and English pair Lee Westwood and Ian Poulter are right in the mix.
All eyes were on Woods as he made his competitive comeback after his self-imposed five-month exile and the world No 1 was in blistering form with two eagles in a four-under-par 68 - his lowest opening round at the famous course.
Fred Couples, 50, produced his lowest round in 26 Masters to lead the way on six under while 60-year-old Tom Watson shot 67, 52-year-old Sandy Lyle managed 69 and Bernhard Langer, the same age as the Scot, took 71 to go round.
Westwood recovered from two early bogeys to shoot a 67 with Poulter one shot back.
Phil Mickelson, KJ Choi and YE Yang joined Westwood and Watson one shot off the pace set by Boom Boom Couples.
What a leaderboard. What a day's play and what a weekend ahead of us.
Couples is back on the course at 2.40pm (BST), Poulter goes at 3.24pm, just ahead of Tiger, and Westwood tees off just before 6pm.
A very different Augusta National was lying in wait for the Masters field today - and Lyle and Simon Dyson were instant victims.Lyle, the 1988 champion and one of the golden oldies to shine on the opening day, resumed in much colder conditions only three behind Couples, but undid much of his good work by starting out again with a double bogey six.
Everybody was expecting much tougher pin placings for the second round and the very first one was just over the guarding bunker on the left of the green.
Lyle, 'chuffed' with his round yesterday, pulled his approach so badly it finished in front of the ninth tee and from there his chip-and-run up the steep bank ran 30 feet past the hole.
To make matters worse he then three-putted to drop back to one under par.
Dyson, setting off again on five over, also three-putted and, having come up just short of the green, that meant a six as well.
On seven over his debut looked like ending tonight rather than on Sunday as he had hoped.
Work to do: Dyson on the secondBristol's Chris Wood, round in 78 on his first appearance, was in danger of dropping a shot or two as well when he failed to find the green as well.
But the 22-year-old, who earned his spot by finishing third in The Open last year, chipped to two feet to salvage his par and then birdied the long second - a four-stroke improvement on his previous visit to the hole.
Couples was out at 9.40am local time and Tiger Woods, joint seventh and only two behind in his first tournament for almost five months, just under an hour later.
Lyle was obviously hoping things would improve, but they didn't. He had another six at the long second and then a third in a row.
Two more dropped shots there saw him crash from three under to two over in under an hour.
Dyson, on the other hand, birdied the second, fourth and fifth, but at four over there was still a lot of ground to be made up just to survive the halfway cut.
source: dailymail
