WOODS RETURNS TO MASTERS

It was a mesmerizing first round of the Masters on Thursday, with leaders stacked up like cordwood, roars cascading across the greensward and enough big names popping out of the past and onto the big boards to give veteran Augusta National watchers whiplash. Fifty-year-old Fred Couples snapped more than a few heads back as he strolled around sockless in tennis shoes and did an old soft-shoe on the course for a six-under-par 66 to take the first-round lead. In his 26th Masters, Couples shot his lowest score — a feat that did not even make the top two in the contest for the day’s biggest surprise. Tiger Woods and Tom Watson took the double-take award for biggest surprise of this or any other first round of the Masters. Woods, playing his first competitive round in five months after a self-imposed exile from the game that resulted from the fallout over the revelations of his extramarital affairs, merely went out and shot his best first round in the Masters (68). That was just one stroke higher than the score turned in by Watson, the 60-year-old ageless wonder who took only 24 putts. Watson did not bogey a hole as he shot his lowest first-round Masters score in 20 years.