As an enjoyable and life-enhancing experience, watching Ben Crane play a round of golf is right up there with a sharp tap in the privates with the heel of a 5-iron or seeing your shanked tee-shot disappear through the grille of your boss's brand new Bentley.

To call him sloth-like would be an insult to the animal kingdom's more leisurely creatures. The pace, or rather lack of it, of his play invites readier comparison with geological phenomena. Between lining up a putt and getting round to knocking it into the hole, Crane takes an age in which glaciers can melt, global temperatures can rise a couple of degrees, tectonic plates can move miles and entire species can enter the fossil kingdom.

Crane looks at his shots from this angle and that. He wiggles, he waggles, he backs off. He waddles off to have a look at the hole, check the wind, and waddles back again. Unusually among American golfers, he likes the shaven-headed look, but to watch him play just one hole you'd half expect him to have a full head of hair by the time he'd completed 18.

Against which backdrop, there was surely some sort of mischief afoot when the Masters organisers came up with a draw that put Crane, Kevin Na and Freddie Jacobson in the same group. Crane might be in a league of his own as the most biblically slow player on the planet, but you'd never nominate either Na or Jacobson as golf's answer to Usain Bolt.

The word on the street (or fairway or wherever) is that Crane has made a decent effort to address his slow play issues in recent months, although it would be pushing it to say he looked particularly urgent about his business yesterday. Short of carrying a shell on his back and leaving a slimy trail behind himself, the 36-year-old Oregonian could scarcely have made his methods more clear. I swear I've seen starter's huts that move more quickly than he does.

Yet, for most of the day Crane carried the hope of a nation on his shoulders. This was meant to be the year in which America reasserted itself as the pre-eminent golfing nation on earth, but the first day's leaderboard at Augusta rather scuppered that idea as England's Lee Westwood, Scotland's Paul Lawrie, South Africa's Louis Oosthuizen and Sweden's Henrik Stenson made most of the running.

It fell to Crane, setting off shortly before 9am – presumably in the hope that he might be back before it got dark – to turn the tide against these Jonny Foreigner interlopers. And for quite some time he held the fort rather well, a birdie at the second taking him to four under par. He held that station for the rest of the front nine, but then leaked a couple of shots coming home, finishing with a 73, two under for the tournament.

Seasoned Masters watchers get used to these journeyman surges – although surge is probably not the term for Crane's way of doing things. There would be another, soon afterwards, by Jason Dufner, who played some lovely, pin-high golf but fell some way short of convincing the galleries that he had the charisma to be a Masters champion. Dufner is one of those fellows who routinely banks six-figure cheques for finishing tied for 15th in events called the Schlumpfeiffer Dog Biscuits Open, and even got into a play-off at last year's PGA Championship, but has yet to win a tournament on the PGA Tour.

Thank heavens, then, for Phil Mickelson. Just when it seemed that America's contribution to the year's first major was to send every golf lover on the planet into deep and dreamless sleep, Flakey Phil rode to the rescue with one of those brilliant bursts of shotmaking that remind you this game is worth watching after all.

And Phil being Phil, it was a bit of a rollercoaster ride. You'll see Steve Williams's name back on the Tiger Woods Christmas card list before Mickelson delivers a dull round in a major championship. If Mickelson stuck a daisy in the side of his mouth he's be a dead ringer for Ermintrude, the cow in the magic Roundabout, but that benign, ruminant expression disguises something more turbulent within. Phil dishes up the drama like no other player on earth.

It began at the third hole, where a wonderfully well judged pitch gave him a three-foot birdie putt. At the fourth, a testing par-3 where Masters officials had conspired to find the most dastardly pin position possible, another glorious approach brought another elegant birdie. Having started at two-over, Mickelson was back to level-par for the tournament and looking like he could do something special.

Which, in a sense, he did. Backing Mickelson on the basis of a couple of good holes is an error of judgement on a par with farting on Colin Montgomerie's backswing. You just know you'll pay a price before too long, and so it turned out as the man with three Masters titles to his name – Mickelson, not Monty – promptly engaged reverse and was back at two-over by the time he left the 11th green.

But wait. At the 12th he nailed a 12-foot putt for another birdie. At the par-5 13th, his boldly faded drive skirted with the creek down the left side, but a crisp approach and two putts brought another birdie. Another came at the 15th, and yet another at the 18th. Eight holes, four birdies; he was right in the mix again.

And level with Crane. Not that catching up with that particular player should ever be a notable achievement.