Injury forces Mark O'Meara to withdraw from Masters

Mark O’Meara was hoping he could play through a recent injury to his back and ribs, but it flared up Thursday morning and the 1998 Masters Tournament champion withdrew just before his first-round starting time.

“It’s a bummer,” O’Meara said as he was leaving the course in his courtesy car with an ice pack around his stomach. “It’s not like I’ve withdrawn very much in my career. I hate it. It’s the worst feeling not to be able to compete, especially at a tournament like this.”

O’Meara, 55, has been trying to play through a “little bit of a slight tear in the intercostal between ribs 11 and 12” on his right side, he said.

“For a week-and-a-half, I’ve been struggling with it,” he said. “It hasn’t been much fun. It’s one of the most painful things. As soon as you turn, it feels like somebody is driving a knife in there.”

O’Meara played practice rounds starting Sunday and in the Par-3 Contest on Wednesday.

“It was OK, it wasn’t great,” he said of his injury. “I hit it actually pretty well. You can only get away with that for so long. It just didn’t pan out the way we wanted it.”

O’Meara, a two-time major championship winner, said he hit “40 or 50” balls on the practice range Thursday morning in preparation for the first round.

“It was way worse on the range than it had been,” he said. “If it was the way it was a couple of prior days, I could have gone out and played. I’m not saying I would have played great, but I could have played.”

He was scheduled to tee off at 11:08 a.m. with Chez Reavie and Martin Laird.

“I didn’t want to (withdraw), but I think the best thing is to rest it,” O’Meara said. “Especially as big as this course is and at my age, you can’t be out there hacking it around. I didn’t think it was fair to me or the tournament to try go out there and play at 50 percent, to play three holes and then walk off the course. So I decided to do the prudent thing and pull out.”

As a Masters champion, O’Meara has a lifetime invitation to play in the tournament.

“The good thing is I get to come back next year,” he said.

O’Meara doesn’t think he’ll be able to play in the Champions Tour’s event next week in Tampa, Fla., but hopes to be ready for that tour’s Legends of Golf event in Savannah, Ga., the following week.