For Couples, It Was a Real Game of Inches : Golf: He somehow avoided a Masters disaster at the 12th hole when his ball didn’t go into the water.

The ball just sat there in the tall grass, a few inches above a watery grave and a few yards below the flagstick.

It was close enough to the first to remind Fred Couples of all the disasters in his golfing past, too far from the second to guarantee that the future would be any different.

“I was just nervous because I knew if I got by that hole,” Couples said, “I really felt like I was going to win.”

He turned out to be right. After spending 15 agonizing minutes in the lengthening shadows of Sunday afternoon negotiating his way from tee to green on the 12th hole at Augusta National--a span of time he would later describe as the most heart-pounding few moments of his young life--the 32-year-old Couples indeed went on to win the Masters.

He left the first tee at 11-under as half of the day’s final pairing and was the tournament leader at one stroke better than that when he reached the middle of the famed three-hole stretch known as Amen Corner.

Clawing his way through an up-and-down front nine in 35, Couples had already left his playing partner and the third-round co-leader, Australian Craig Parry, in his wake. And in front of him, the half-dozen others within shouting distance of top line of the leaderboard -- a prominent collection that included Raymond Floyd, Ian Baker-Finch, Nick Price and Cory Pavin -- were finding it difficult to stay afloat.

But as he had so many times in the past, Couples promptly threw his competitors life preservers.

He stood on the 12th tee, a par-3 fronted by a tranquil ribbon of water known by the harmless-sounding name of Raes Creek. He heard his caddy call out a distance of 155 yards and went into his bag for an 8-iron. Couples knew better than to aim at the sucker position way out on the right side of the thin green, but that is exactly where he sent the ball.

“I knew in my mind to aim away from the pin,” Couples said, “but my swing just came around and my body just sort of turned toward it. I could see it was coming up short.”

The ball struck the manicured turf of a bank several yards below the green, barely above the hazard line. Then it began a slow, agonizing roll through the rough cut of longer grass, at the bottom of which the blue-green water waited to swallow it up.

Though the huge gallery shoehorned into the corner gasped -- then began pleading for the ball to stop -- Couples did nothing more than let out a low whistle and then tried to stare a hole into the side of the hill in which the ball could nestle.

The list of victims whose balls came to rest at the bottom of Raes Creek at the most propitious moment of past Masters would keep a driving range in business for a year. For a brief moment, Couples envisioned his name being engraved at the bottom of it.

Then the ball stopped. Incredibly. Miraculously. Nervously.

“It was the biggest break of my life. . . . If it had hit any closer to the green, it probably would have gone in,” Couples said.

The entire time that Parry spent lining up and hitting his tee ball Couples spent screaming at himself. But fate took a much more favorable approach, granting him yet one more chance. When Couples finally crossed the bridge over Raes Creek and arrived at the ball, he found a good stance, albeit just inches from water’s edge, and a perfect lie. And that was when the really hard part of the bargain was struck.

People who never knew what Fred Couples was really like thought that he went through life on a pass, always getting a good stance and a perfect lie. He had money, good looks and a good-looking wife. He had the sweetest swing in golf. He seemed to have everything but trophies. Couples’ list of spectacular failures -- the crash-and-burn act at the 1989 Ryder Cup was only the most notable -- would make good reading, if you were Stephen King.

He erased some of those memories in last fall’s Ryder Cup and earlier this year by putting together the most dominating stretch of tournament golf since Tom Watson went on a tear in the late 1970s.

But as he took his stance over the ball Sunday, Couples knew that if he blew this chance to claim his first major, people would have said all the same things again:

That for all his gifts, his easy-going manner might have been his biggest blessing of all; that he didn’t care enough to try any harder, to do any better, or twist himself into knots worrying why. It turns out they wouldn’t have known Fred Couples at all.

And so he hit a high flop shot within one foot of the flag, then smiled broadly and looked back in the water at his reflection. A moment later, he fished another ball out with his wedge, inspected it briefly and dropped it back on the bank.

The ball rolled toward the water and, like his own shot, stopped. With a backhand swipe, he plunked it into Raes Creek, calmly walked to the green and made his par putt.

Then, without so much as a single “Amen,” Couples turned to his caddie and said, “Let’s get out of here.”