They dye the water at Augusta to make sure the ponds are just the right shade of blue. They paint the grass green, too, in the patches where it wears, and the sand in the bunkers is really quartz brought in from a quarry in Carolina, which is why it shines so white. The colours are all supposed to be just so. But this year everything seems just a touch brighter, warmer and more brilliant.

Golf is always more vivid here when Tiger Woods is in town. Ticket prices are up, by 20% according to the online retailers, and TV ratings will be, too. His Sunday round at Valspar a fortnight ago drew a bigger audience than the final rounds of any of the last three majors.

‘Walking miracle’ Tiger Woods calms talk of Masters comeback victory Read more

This is Woods’s first major since the 2015 PGA at Whistling Straits, he has finished in the top five of his last two tournaments and says he has not felt so good in “seven or eight years”. No doubt this is a different man to the one who last played here in 2015, when he finished T17, let alone last year, when he came just for the champions’ dinner and was in so much pain he found sitting down unbearably uncomfortable “because my nerve was on fire, it was going down my leg and it was just burning”. Back then, Woods’s body was so shattered he could not even get out of bed on his own.

In 2015, Woods’s daughter found him lying flat on his back on the practice range outside his house. He fell while he was practising a flop shot, he could not get up on his own and he hadn’t brought his phone. So he just had to lie there until someone came along to help.

He says now that the idea he might have played the Masters in 2016 and 2017 was “just a big pipe dream”. He was taking cortisone shots, epidurals, “anything to take away the pain so I might be able to withstand a week”. When Woods was arrested for driving under the influence last year, the toxicology report found Woods had two painkillers, and Xanax, and Ambien, in his system.

It was not just Woods’s body that was broken, his trust in it was, too. Woods is unusual in that he does not visualise his shots before he plays them. “I couldn’t do that. I never could. And I still can’t,” he wrote in his book Unprecedented. Instead he plays by feel. “I had to learn to accept that my nature was to feel a shot with my hands and body. I felt what I wanted my hands to do at impact and trusted that the feeling would create the motion to hit the ball where I wanted.”

This is a man so in tune with his own body he was able to make the most minute adjustments in the time it takes him to make a swing.

“When I was playing well I could feel exactly what my body was doing during my swing and what was wrong when I was out of position,” Woods wrote. “The science says it’s impossible to make a change inside of a motion that takes a second and a half or so. But I believed I could, on the way down, or halfway down, or right before impact.” So he would decide to slide his hips forward or push off his right foot, or delay his hands, speed up his left arm or straighten his right. Now his body had failed him. And that feel, that absolute faith that it would react the way he wanted it to, was gone.

At that point, Woods says, he had pretty much given up on the idea he would ever be able to play the same way again. “I thought, prior to the surgery, that that’s pretty much it. I’ll have a nice comfortable and great life but I’ll never be able to swing the club like I used to, speed-wise, just there’s no way.” Yet here he is, “a walking miracle”.

The big difference is that he broke the habit of a lifetime and actually listened to his doctors when they told him to take time off. Woods has had a lot of surgery over the years, four major back operations, three major leg operations, and until now he has always made the mistake of rushing back into competition.

Play Video 0:38 Ian Poulter insists he has no expectations ahead of the Masters – video

When Woods was 18 he had surgery on his left knee, to remove two cysts on his saphenous vein. They told him not to play but he went out anyway, on the Navy Course in Cypress, even though he was wearing a big green leg brace. He played the front nine, in excruciating pain, and shot a six-under 31. “That’s what we do as athletes.” he says. “We want to compete. We want to get out there and mix it up. And part of being an athlete is dealing with pain. Unfortunately, we’re pushing the boundaries of our bodies and minds, and unfortunately a lot of times we go over the edge and we break.”

This time, Woods took his recovery slow. It took him time to get to know his own body again. It was only in December, eight months after the surgery, that he first thought he might be able to play here this week. And even then he felt cautious about it. “I started getting used to what I could do and then I started putting the pieces together,” he says. “Then I started competing and keeping score and posting numbers, and all of a sudden I started getting my feeling back.”

His feel, his speed, his swing, it all came back to him, just like that. Turn on, tune in, Tiger is back.