Friday’s second round of the Masters Tournament featured one particularly harrowing moment as the South’s unpredictable springtime weather wreaked havoc on the tournament.
Early on Friday afternoon, the tournament suspended play as a storm system began to roar through Georgia. The temperatures had been more like early summer throughout the day, but a cold front began to march through, bringing high winds and storms with it.
Shortly after 4 p.m. as play resumed, the high winds moving through the area brought down a cluster of three century-old pine trees near hole No. 17, known as Nandina.
Television cameras captured the scary moment, as patrons scrambled to get out of the way of the trees.
It’s not every day you see a tree falling down at the Masters. ⛳️ 🌲 pic.twitter.com/BVAxYdHXm5
— Rod (@rod27614) April 7, 2023
Tree falling at The Masters pic.twitter.com/oaxZ5GrrE9
— Catastrophic Failure (@ohshidt) April 7, 2023
The falling trees prompted tournament officials to suspend play for the rest of the day, as the wind increased and temperatures plummeted.
#themasters pic.twitter.com/QI16LEw3hQ
— The Masters (@TheMasters) April 7, 2023
Remarkably, it appears that nobody was injured, which is surprising for an event with a crowd upward of 40,000 patrons, sponsors, players, media, and security.
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The Augusta Chronicle spoke to one patron who came close to disaster.
“It fell on my chair,” said Sylvia Martin, who was attending with Jodi Streff, both of Frisco, Texas. “We were sitting under the umbrella because of the pinecones. We were kinda laughing and joking it was raining pinecones and pine needles.
“All of a sudden, the people behind us were paying attention,” Martin continued. She later added, “We heard cracking. Everyone started running, so we were trying to get over the rope (into the fairway). We had nowhere to go because people were behind us.”
Martin, Streff and others at the scene credited Deshey Thomas, a patron from Fuquay-Varina, North Carolina, with alerting people as the trees were about to fall and getting people out of harm’s way.
“Pinecones were hitting us in the back, we turned around and looked up and heard a huge cracking noise and the tree basically crushed 10 chairs that were sitting there,” Thomas told the Chronicle. “Luckily we got everyone out of there. We were blessed.”
“I was sitting, looking, waiting for the next group to come up to the tee and it fell maybe 8-10 chairs to our left,” another patron, Megan Hill, said. “I stood up and screamed and thought, ‘Is it going to fall on me? It fell to the left of us and it was so scary. If the wind had been blowing a slightly different direction, we might have got hit.”
The tournament continued on Saturday morning, finishing the second round and determining which players failed to make the cut before kicking off the third round later in the morning. Saturday’s weather will be remarkably different from what the players experienced the rest of the week, with temperatures 30-40 degrees cooler than Friday, plenty of wind, and rain threatening throughout the day.
The weather changes are forcing the tournament to adjust in order to avoid extending the Masters to Monday. The third round will feature portions of the field starting at hole No. 10 (Camellia) while others start from hole No. 1 (Tea Olive), allowing more golfers to start the round at once.
At the end of the second round, American Brooks Koepka led with -12 strokes for the week to date, with Spain’s Jon Rahm two strokes behind him. In third place was amateur Sam Bennett at -8, with one of the inspiring stories of the tournament.
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