Bubba.

“From what I’ve seen of him, he’s long, and a lot of times it doesn’t have a zip code on it.”

With last night's excitement behind us,
PBPost sportswriter Brian Biggane looks ahead to the Masters, and how last year's champion Bubba Watson beat Louis Oosthuizen.
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... On the second hole of a playoff with Oosthuizen after both had finished at 10-under-par 278, Watson put his drive into a thicket of trees. The left-hander then miraculously hooked a wedge shot over a sand trap and onto the green before two-putting for a par and the title.

“I hit my gap wedge, hooked it about 40 yards, hit it about 15 feet off the ground until it got under the tree and started rising,” Watson said later. “Pretty easy.”

A self-described country boy from the Florida Panhandle who enjoys video games and wakeboarding, Watson, 34, returns to this year’s Masters as one of the most unlikely champions in recent years. But for all the struggles the four-time winner has endured in his eight years on the PGA Tour, he shouldn’t be crossed off the list of contenders when the tournament begins Thursday at Augusta National.

“He’s a great fit to play well around this place,” said Matt Kuchar, who finished in a tie for third last year. “As far as he hits it, as high as he hits it … he’s a good fit, and a guy who, if you’re in a pool, you’d be glad to have him as your guy with a chance to win.”

Added Golf Channel analyst Brandel Chamblee: “Looking back on it now, it’s not as big of a shock that he won. He’s the type of player who does well at Augusta: His swing is upright, he hits the ball high and long, and can shape it in both directions. He can do things nobody else in this field can do.”

During his early years on tour, Watson wasn’t known for much more than his prodigious drives. As Arnold Palmer put it at Bay Hill last month,
“From what I’ve seen of him, he’s long, and a lot of times it doesn’t have a zip code on it.”
While Watson’s driving average of 301.5 yards ranks seventh on tour, his driving accuracy of 53.9 percent fairways hit is 155th.

But Augusta’s wide, forgiving fairways last year offered Watson the opportunity to play aggressively, and his length put him in position to make birdies. Chamblee said it was on the par-5 13th hole on Saturday that he began to see the potential for Watson to make the Masters his first major win.

“He drove it to an area that I thought was inaccessible,” he said. “I can never remember seeing anybody get to where he was, partly because if you’re right-handed it would be so hard to hook a ball down to where he got it, which was around the corner on the flat.

“From there he had an 8-iron to a front pin. It was close enough to where he could stop it, and he did. He got it to 8 feet for an easy birdie.

“The old Tiger (Woods) could do that, but Tiger’s not that long anymore and he probably wouldn’t take that risk anymore. Nobody else could do what he did.”