even the best sandwich on the grounds. That would be the Georgia peach ice cream sandwich, Heaven’s dessert. No, the single best thing about Au- gusta National is the enforced absence of cellphones. It is a glorious directive, made greater for how fanatically it’s enforced. A patron wearing his ball- cap backwards will be asked to turn it around, sir, please and thank you. A patron who pulls out a cellphone will never be seen again. Not a lot about the Masters can be described as quaint anymore. Were it less perfectly managed, today’s Augusta National would feel a bit like a golf-themed amusement park. Instead, it stands in testament to how smoothly something can run if you throw bottomless resources behind it. Three trees can fall, and overnight every other tree on the course can be checked for its stability, allowing golf to be played the next day, largely commercial-free for the good folks back home. Reporters used to bang away at type- writers in a Quonset hut with a cor- rugated tin roof. Now they walk up a double staircase in a 10-metre high atrium to make their way to a gorgeous amphitheatre with a panoramic view of the driving range and enough brass to instrument an orchestra. It’s worth spending an hour in the similarly new and expansive gift shop to marvel at the excess. Last year, there were whispers one man spent $36 000 on souvenirs and didn’t walk out with that many bags. Luckily, the caretakers of Augusta National have made enough nods to- wards its former quaintness to bulwark the romance of the place: manual leader boards maintained by old men on lad- ders; white coveralls on the caddies and green jackets on the winners; affordable food and a host of unfailingly lovely vol- unteers only too happy to help; unfor- gettable, untouchable Magnolia Lane. However, when it comes to keeping today’s Masters feeling like the Masters of yore, the phone policy might be the best of their firmly held lines. You’ll likely approach Augusta National along Washington Road. One moment, you’ll be stuck in traffic, threading your way past the Arby’s and Olive Garden. The next, you’ll cross through a towering hedgerow into a small, self-contained universe where, for the first time in
sacred territory in the middle of one of its most storied tournaments, and all of it had happened so quickly and discreetly that it was possible to join the gallery in the thin haze of Moving Day morning, stand in the spot where hours before people had fled for their lives, and wonder less at the fine line between life and death than the one that separates memory from dream. Visiting Augusta National for the first time had been disquieting already. It’s strange to know your way around a place you’ve never been, to recall events in sharp relief that you didn’t witness. Your first day at Augusta won’t give you a daylong case of déjà vu, exactly. It will leave you with a beautiful ache, a bittersweet mix of gratitude for having arrived somewhere you’ve always wanted to go and mourning for the different place your imagination has made it. You will feel lucky and sad. You will feel joyous and unnerved. You will feel a sense of community and unbelonging, as though you’ve been in the company of friendly ghosts. Even for its most famous repeat visitors, Augusta National has an uncanny knack for being familiar and other-worldly at once. “To just look at the golf course, it looks like it’s been here for over a hundred years and hasn’t changed,” Tiger Woods said during his pre-tournament press conference last year. “And each and every year we come here . . . ” He stopped, and then he started again. “Everything has changed since I first played here,” he said. Woods had played No 17 when it still had the Eisenhower tree. He can close his eyes and remember curling shots around an obstacle big enough to have been named for a president but is no longer there. Soon the same hole would have three fewer trees. The suddenness of their absence would make Augusta National feel even more like a place that always was and never could have been. SOME PEOPLE WILL TELL YOU THAT the single best thing about Augusta Na- tional is the pimento cheese sandwich, still sold wrapped in green plastic for $1.50. Those people are lying to you, and you should never trust them again. The pimento cheese sandwich isn’t
T
Today, nearly a year removed from the 2023 Masters, it seems impossible that three Augusta pines fell in front of the 17th tee and didn’t find any of the thousands in attendance on that wind- swept, knife-gray Friday afternoon. One woman was caught between them, where she stood frozen to the spot, able only to cover her head with her hands, and even she escaped unscathed, like Buster Keaton finding the open window in a collapsing house. The dark humour that follows near misses was as instant as the relief: Maybe, someone joked, she was afraid of breaking Augusta Nation- al’s policy against running. By first light Saturday, the fallen trees had disappeared, removed by an army of workers who had fired up their chainsaws before Friday’s crowds had finished filing out. The craters left by their upturned root beds had been filled and levelled and covered with green wood shavings, rendered invisible to anything less than close inspection, and every pine cone and needle had been picked up as though with tweezers. The only remaining sign of the trees were the impressions their trunks had left on the rain-softened ground. It was a sobering lesson in expendability. Three Augusta pines had stood, approaching 30 metres tall and straight as ship’s masts, and then for an hour or two they were the world’s most famous windthrow, and then they had evaporated from some of golf’s most
44 GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA
MARCH/APRIL 2024
Made with FlippingBook - PDF hosting