Why do I love The Masters?
A diatribe filled with both adoration and confusion.
I write this not as a dedicated Golf fan, but rather as a irregular background observer.
I don’t dislike the sport for any major reason (barring the fact that golf courses have generally been found more devastating to the environment than all of America’s vaping Hummer drivers put together), nor do I truly love the sport (Mainly because I could never strike a ball with anything above a wedge consistently well enough to be good at it).
I used to enjoy playing more regularly than I do now. My uncle is a solid Golfer (I have to say that because he reads these), and his infatuation with the game in my youth drew me towards the game.
I remember watching Shane Lowry win the Irish Open at Baltray as an amateur, just out the road from my home town, and announce himself onto the world stage. I remember clipping golf balls up and down my grandparents back garden. I distinctly remember shanking a ball directly at my mother’s head once. Thankfully she shot a hand up just in time to prevent any major damage, but needless to say, I was no child prodigy.
However, I have noticed a phenomenon, in which every year during The Masters, I not only like Golf, but I fall in love with the game. Not only am I glued to the events playing out across my TV screen, but I even go so far as to get urges to put on all the ridiculous clothing, stick a cap on my (massive, not the right shape to ever wear a hat on it) head and get out to play at the courses and ranges in my area.'
A Tradition Unlike Any Other
It’s no surprise that Augusta National felt the need to trademark Jim Nantz’s famous Masters line – “it’s a tradition unlike any other”- because it’s a place unlike any other, in how far it goes to maintain its mythical reputation year after year.
The gatekeepers of Augusta have created sport’s equivalent to the Truman Show, a multi-million dollar yearly production where a bunch of old guys in green jackets swan around abiding by a list of rules almost as long as those that govern the sport itself. They are the guardians of the realm, and the mythology is the director.
Much like in the Truman Show where Jim Carrey’s character, existing inside a man-made bubble – a world created solely around him – Augusta National in itself is a studio rolled out once a year for the riff-raff to fawn over. The luscious lawns and tall pines would make you believe that this land had been set down in the wilderness by the Golfing Gods themselves for only the best to play on.
It’s a secret world where nothing short of perfection will do.
If the grass isn’t green, they paint it green. If the water is looking murky, they’ll dye it blue. If the birds don’t sing their musical mating noises of late spring, they plant stereos amongst the Magnolias and make them do it like they’re a drugged up popstar. It’s a place where the azaleas bloom on command every April regardless of the weather.
In reality, the course is just an unnervingly bright patch of green in the middle of Augusta, Georgia, surrounded by strip malls, Freemasons, and Christian book stores.
It’s hard to believe anything that anyone tells you from inside those verdant gates because just by being there, you’ve been handed a neon yellow ticket to the chocolate factory, and only a fool would risk losing that.
Players and journalists alike dare not speak ill of the golf course, for to anger the hosts would be to anger the very earth beneath your feet!
When they have done in the past, they’ve swiftly apologised, running back with their tail between their legs (*AHEM* Sergio Garcia, 2009 *AHEM*). Meanwhile the members of the press are so stuffed up on sandwiches in a media centre more akin to a palace than a press office (just look at the pictures of it below) that they’ll go along with just about anything for fear of missing out on dessert.
All of which means it won’t be until after what has to be the most unintentionally funny/cringe-inducing winner’s ceremony in sport, where the latest recruit to the Stonecutters secret society gets draped in a green coat in the Butler Cabin, that golf analysts wake up from their azalea induced comas and smell the bloody roses.
Augusta National Golf Course was designed by legendary golfer Bobby Jones along with Alister McKensie. The course opened in 1933, and a year later the first Masters (known until 1939 as the “Augusta National Invitation”) was won by Horton Smith. The Masters is one of the four major tournaments in the world and the only one that is played on the same course every year.
A lot of people don’t like the Masters. The tournament kept a lot of the feel and tradition of the old south alive for much of its history. Lee Elder was the first Black player in the tournament when he broke the color barrier in 1975. Fearing for his safety, he hired body guards and rented two houses in Augusta that year and moved back and forth frequently between them during tournament week.
Lee Trevino refused to play there for a couple of years in the ’70s. He said the course didn’t suit his game, but given his Mexican-American heritage, everyone knew there was more to it than that. After Jack Nicklaus talked him into returning to the tournament in 1972, Lee still refused to go into the clubhouse to change his shoes.
Until 1983, golfers were required to use Augusta National official caddies, who were, of course, African American. The Augusta National Golf Club admitted its first Black member in 1990 and still does not allow women to join.
I love history, but studying injustice and prolonging it are two different things.
The Masters seems to hold on to the wrong stuff from the past for far longer than it has ever needed to.
The Augusta National Club is full of rich, white, old men, many of whom have attitudes about people outside of their small group that vastly differ from my own. Their utter cuntiness is ever present, but that’s really what private golf clubs are all about anyway.
I’ve always had a great deal of ambivalence about the game in general, loving playing it, while being turned off by many of the other people who play it.
The Masters brings those feelings front and center.
For all its quirks though, I really do love The Masters. In spite of itself, and in spite of myself. There are so many memories that it has deeply ingrained into my mind forever…
Watching Mickelson’s shot between two trees on Hole #13 in 2010 live…
Rory McIlroy’s complete collapse on the final day of the Masters in 2011, which will make me cheer him on for that missing piece of the Grand Slam for the rest of time…
Curled up in bed in my dad’s on a school night and staying up way past when I was meant to be asleep to watch Bubba Watson shank his drive into the pine straw in 2012, only to magically power his way to the green for the winning putt…
Perhaps that’s the biggest compliment I can pay the tournament; that in spite of all the artificial bollocksology, the elitist façade, the dark past and the banning of mobile phones on the property allowing the organisers penchant for propaganda and censorship to walk wild (as running on the property is also banned). In spite of all that, the stories the masterfully designed course builds, the sound of Jim Nantz’s dulcet tones ringing through the screen, and the legends of the game it honours, it still comes up top of the pile, for me at least, over every other tournament year on year.
As we get started *at time of writing* on the final two days of the 2024 edition, with long range slugger. and guy who looks like the stereotypical “High School Jock” character from an early 2000s American teen drama, Bryson DeChambeau, bookies favourite and World #1 Scottie Scheffler, and “Where’d you get your diploma?” Max Homa tied for the lead on -6, this fascination with Augusta National and The Masters as a tournament illudes me.
Maybe my love for this imperfect chase for perfection will always remain as some source of confusion to me, unlike any other… a rite of spring. The azaleas and dogwoods waking the world from a winter slumber…Wait, what the hell is this? And though the world is ever changing, and there is so much pain on our planet right now, for but a moment, there is hope… What is happening? I swear I’m not typing any of this. My fingers aren’t even mov… that in time, all of us can feel as one again, and come together to celebrate our annual tradition unlike any other...
Welcome to The Masters!