“Off The Porta Potty”

Okay, so it wasn’t off of a Porta Potty (a la Tin Cup) – it was off of a Georgia pine.

Still, Angel Cabrera’s “tree shot” on the first playoff hole during yesterday’s memorable final round at Augusta was the difference-maker.

After slicing his tee shot deep into the woods on the Eighteenth, Cabrera’s tournament hopes seemed finished.

His two playoff opponents – Chad Campbell and Kenny Perry – had parked their tee shots perfectly, smack dab in the middle of the fairway, and both appeared to be in position to birdie this fiendishly difficult hole.

Approaching his ball from several angles didn’t change the math for Cabrera.

His ball was stuck behind a tree. A Magnolia, to be precise …

There was simply no way to get it where it needed to go.

“Can’t get there from here,” as Georgia favorite son Michael Stipe of R.E.M. once sang.

And yet El Pato did.

Punching it to the right of the Magnolia, Cabrera thwacked his ball loudly off of a pine tree and landed it in the middle of the fairway – safely out of purgatory.

Meanwhile, both Campbell and Perry pushed their second shots right, meaning if Cabrera was able to get up and down in two, he would live to fight another hole.

He did – striking a perfect third shot and then tapping in for a most unlikely par.

With Chad Campbell bogeying the hole, that put the fate of the entire tournament on a second playoff hole between Cabrera and hard-luck Kenny Perry, which Cabrera won with an anti-climactic two-putt for par.

In so doing, he became the first Argentinian to capture a Masters’ championship – and the first South American to win multiple majors (Cabrera previously won the 2007 U.S. Open).

It was a dramatic conclusion to the only four days of the year when CBS announcer Jim Nance is even remotely tolerable, and a well-deserved green jacket for Argentina.

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