Tiger Woods still sees chance for jacket

Tiger Woods is a dozen shots off the pace, but he’s conceding nothing.

After an opening 73, Woods bounced back with 3-under-par 69 in the second round of the Masters Tour­na­ment. With his 2-under total, he is 12 shots behind leader Jordan Spieth.

“I’m 12 back, but there’s not a lot of guys ahead of me,” said Woods, a four-time Masters champion. “And with 36 holes here to go, anything can happen, you know. ’96 proved that.

“There’s so many holes to play and so many different things can happen. And as I say, we don’t know what the conditions are going to be tomorrow, what the committee is going to do.”

In the 1996 Masters, Greg Norman led Nick Faldo by four at the midway point and by six after 54 holes, but Faldo came back in the final round to defeat Norman by five shots.

Woods won the Masters a year later and added green jackets in 2001, ’02 and ’05. If he’s going to add another one this year, he will need to go low this weekend.

The 39-year-old made strides Friday with his best score since posting 69 in the third round of the Hero World Challenge in December. He was even for his round when he rolled in a 27-foot birdie putt at No. 7. Woods added birdies at Nos. 8 and 11 and parred in from there.

After hitting 11 of 18 greens in regulation Thursday, he hit three more greens in the second round. And for the second day in a row, Woods needed 28 putts. He said he and playing partners Jamie Donaldson and Jimmy Walker struggled with the slower-than-expected greens.

“I had a hard time getting the ball close to the hole. We all did in our group,” Woods said. “We were talking about that again today. We talked about it all day yesterday. … You expect certain putts to roll out, but they’re not rolling out. They just don’t have quite the same roll out, and especially some of the downhill putts. We left a couple short coming down the hills and so you’ve got to make the adjustments. And our group didn’t really do a very good job of it.”