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AUGUSTA, Georgia -- People who lead the Masters, even for only the briefest of moments, do not come from where Carlos Franco did.

They do not come from places like Paraguay, with all of three golf courses, nor grow up in poverty so humbling that what little food is there for a family of nine gets shared while sitting on the dirt floor of a one-room shack.

They do not learn to play the game barefoot, with borrowed clubs. They do not salvage golf balls from a water hazard, with fish nipping at their hands and snails slicing the soles of their feet, just to have something to play the game with.

"Who doesn't risk anything, doesn't win anything," Franco said Thursday.

Thirty-three-year-old Carlos Franco didn't win anything Thursday, unless moral victories count for something. He left Augusta National's clubhouse behind with the sun climbing in a late-morning sky, quickly piled up birdies at Nos. 3, 4, 8 and 11, and looked up to find himself leading the first round of the Masters.

"I was aware," Franco said. "And then I felt the pressure."

The first time it happened was the very next hole, No. 12, where he made bogey. It happened next at No. 15, where Franco hit a 5-iron flush, but watched it dive into the pond fronting the green. He wound up making double-bogey there, added another at No. 16 and signed for even par.

"I have a lot of confidence, I think I can create something special here," Franco said. "But I need to know more about the golf course."

The only tip he got coming into Augusta was from Spain's Seve Ballesteros. "He helped me a lot, telling me to hit everything into the middle of the green." Then Franco paused, and shrugged his slight shoulders. "Is not easy."

Franco began playing barefoot.(Allsport)

Carlos grew up as one of seven kids of the late Francisco Javier Franco, the greenskeeper at Asuncion Golf Club in Paraguay. To say his brood had a gift for the game doesn't tell the half of it. Today, there are only 28 golf professionals in the whole country, and five of them are Carlos' siblings.

In Carlos Franco's case, he said recently in a wide-ranging interview with Golfweek magazine, it started at age 8 without shoes and with whatever golf clubs and balls he could scrounge around the club. He won a pair of used shoes in a caddie tournament at age 14, when he was already a scratch player. Even so, he didn't own a full set of irons until a friend gave him one at age 18.

By 1994, Franco was good enough to play on the Japanese tour and by last year, good enough to have secured a living, five wins and the No. 40 spot on the World Golf Rankings. Last November, Franco went through the U.S. PGA Tour's qualifying school, in part because he prefers to make the 7-hour commute from his home in Asuncion to Miami, rather than the 26-hour trip to Tokyo.

Franco's best result in five starts since was a tie for third at the Honda Classic last month. But just when his game seemed to be peaking, he missed successive cuts, the first at The Players Championship. Franco did not make any excuses, but that was the same week that the assassination of Paraguayan Vice President Luis Maria Argana rocked his homeland, followed by the resignation and exile of the president and a military strongman widely blamed for the murder.

"That's something on my mind," he said. "But for my job, it gives me no concerns. My concerns are for the poor people back home. For them, it is hard."

His heart was lightened a little bit Tuesday, though. Franco was playing a practice round by himself, getting his first look at Augusta, when six-time Masters champion Jack Nicklaus rolled up in a golf cart alongside the 12th tee.

Franco's first memories of this place were of watching Nicklaus on television, and here was the legend himself, still recuperating from hip-replacement surgery, asking to borrow a 6-iron. Nicklaus surveyed the distance one more time, switched to a 5-iron and knocked it on the green.

Watching the ball land, Franco began applauding. Considering how he got there, maybe it should have been the other way around.