Immelman is showing them something at Masters

The man leading at the halfway point of the Masters was not talking about a club or a swing.

He was talking about a scar.

"Most guys have seen it."

The man leading after two rounds of the Masters wasn't talking about a ball or a tee.

He was talking about a tumor.

"I went from winning a tournament to lying in a hospital bed waiting for results on a tumor," Trevor Immelman said. "So definitely it made me realize that golf wasn't my whole life."

Maybe not his whole life, but it certainly will be his entire weekend, this South African who stands 48 hours from joy only four months after despair.

Trevor Immelman is leading the Masters by one stroke with a slice that is not in his game, but in his back.

In the third week of December, he was playing in a pro-am in his native South Africa when he felt discomfort in his rib cage. He finished the round only with a golf bag full of painkillers.

The next day, the pain increased such that he could barely breath. He withdrew from the tournament, climbed into an MRI machine, and climbed out thinking about a death sentence. "The doctor said there was something that had to come out," Immelman remembered.

That something was a tumor that, according to Immelman, looked like a golf ball on a tee.

Four days later, he underwent surgery, surgeons entered through a seven-inch incision in his back.

Two days later, those doctors announced that the calcified fibrosis tumor was benign.

Then, for the world's 29th-ranked golfer who makes his living with much help from his midsection, it really got hard.

The pain and uncertainty stood in steep contrast to Friday's blooming dogwoods and chirping mockingbirds.

Back then, it took him two weeks to walk again.

"It's a little bit degrading when you have other people washing you morning and night," he said.

Four months later, he calmly strolled Augusta National with five birdies Friday to finish with an eight-under 136 and a one-stroke lead.

"Once I kind of worked my way through all the morphine and stuff they had me on, it seemed to come back fairly quickly," Immelman said of his recovery after surgery.

When he finally started swinging a club again in January, it felt like he was holding a foreign object.

"I came out and hit a few chips and putts and came home and said to my wife, 'I don't know what's going on,' because I was skulling them and duffing them," he said.