As warm-ups go for the Masters, Lee Westwood and Ross Fisher got a lot more than they had bargained for on the flight from Houston to Augusta on Sunday evening.
As the private jet the two Englishmen had chartered took off from George Bush Intercontinental Airport, the cockpit started to fill with smoke and the pilots were forced to return to the ground, chased along the runway by fire engines.
The players were accompanied by their caddies, Billy Foster and Phil Morbey, and Andrew “Chubby” Chandler, Westwood’s manager. A normally lively bunch — particularly at the end of a tournament — the silence on the plane spoke volumes, particularly when it was noted that the pilots had donned oxygen masks.
Even so, Westwood could still not resist the urge to tweet. “Do the fire engines normally follow you down the runway? Only when there’s smoke in the cabin I guess!!!”, he wrote, adding: “Gone a bit quiet on here.”
After a three-hour wait and a change of planes, the journey was resumed without incident. “We were a couple of minutes out of the airport when it started,” Westwood said. “It was a bit scary. And it never looks good when you can smell smoke and you turn round and see the pilots have put the masks on.
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“The smoke was coming from the cockpit and they told us later they couldn’t drop our masks because they feed oxygen into the cabin and if there was a fire it would have fanned the flames.
“The plane came down in a bit of a nose-dive because you obviously have to get down as quickly as you can. There had been a small fire somewhere in the instruments and we had the three fire tenders chasing us down the runway, although I think that’s just a precaution.”
Westwood, who had been playing in the Shell Houston Open, has endured an emergency landing before — when the landing gear did not come down properly on a flight to Switzerland — but has yet to lose his sense of humour.
“I was having a bit of a chuckle about it afterwards because I’d come off the 18th green steaming after ripping the ball all day and then sticking my ball in the water on 18,” he said. “After missing a stack of putts, I thought that was the perfect way to end a rotten day. But it hadn’t ended yet. I knew it wasn’t my putter on fire in the hold or anything like that! I was all right, but Ross and Billy didn’t look too good. Billy crossed himself a couple of times and he looked terrified when we went into the nose-dive.”
After that, Augusta National could well prove to be a walk in the park. Westwood finished runner-up to Phil Mickelson last year and played superbly all week. This time he hopes to go one better — and with his life having flashed before his eyes (well, not quite) he should at least have a spring in his step when he steps on to the 1st tee on Thursday.