New Year’s Day for Golfers

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http://philldiscgolf.com/inc20k1.php The modern golf season never ends, but it does begin. When the first contestant tees off at Augusta National Golf Club on Thursday morning during Masters week, golfers all over the world reset their internal clocks. The first page in a golfer’s calendar is April.

For the world’s best players, the Masters divides one season’s aspirations from another’s. A tour victory means recognition, money, autograph requests, endorsements, exemptions—and an invitation to Augusta. As the first full week of April draws near, winless players juggle their schedules to maximize their chances, and television commentators count down the tournaments remaining. When the Masters begins, every competitor has a theoretical chance of matching Bobby Jones’s unduplicated feat of winning all four major tournaments in one year; when the Masters ends, the Grand Slam field has shrunk to one.

For tournament spectators, the Masters is an annual reunion where the passage of time is measured not in years but in the names of champions. The principal viewing areas have the settled feel of old neighborhoods; the course is as familiar as a friend’s backyard. In countless gatherings beneath the pine trees, acquaintances are renewed and records are brought up to date: deaths, marriages, children, grandchildren, new houses, old jobs. The dogwood blossoms are compared with the dogwood blossoms of previous years. A rebuilt green is examined and approved. Two veterans discuss the careers of Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer—and then Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer walk by. A guest once said, “I rode here in the front seat and will be in the back seat going out so I can stay as long as I can.”

For distant golf fans, the first glimpse of Amen Corner on TV is proof that winter is gone. Northerners who haven’t swung a club since Halloween scrounge an old ball from the garage and roll a few wobbly putts across the family-room carpet during commercials. A swirling gray New England sky stops looking like a vestige of December and begins to seem like a harbinger of spring. The hours crawl from Saturday evening till Sunday afternoon. Meetings and social engagements are ignored or rescheduled; no avid golfer was ever married on Masters weekend. In 1987, two fans from Olympia Fields, Illinois, named their new daughter Tori Augusta National.

For sportswriters, the Masters is the plum assignment of the year. It is the first trip entered in a reporter’s appointment book, and it is written in ink. Journalists take the Masters personally. Herbert Warren Wind, The New Yorker’s incomparable golf correspondent for many years, once stopped another reporter upon arriving in Augusta’s airport and anxiously inquired about the state of the greens: “Are they firm?” Senior golf writers postpone hip replacements and cataract operations until just after the tournament, giving themselves a full fifty weeks to recover.

For non-golfers, the Masters is the one tournament of the year that compels attention. Over breakfast on Sunday morning, a golfer’s non-playing spouse may suddenly offer an informed observation about the chances of Woods, Mickelson, or McIlroy—the result of an hour’s seduction by the sports page or the TV. The beauty of the setting makes one’s love for golf comprehensible to the game’s antagonists. For four days, the national flower is the azalea.

Gary Player once said, “The Masters is the only tournament I ever knew where you choke when you drive through the front gate.”  The trip down Magnolia Lane may be the most dreamed-about entrance in sports. Although the Masters is not ancient as golf goes, no contest runs deeper in the imaginations of participants. Sam Snead once told me, “If you asked golfers what tournament they would rather win over all the others, I think every one of them to a man would say the Masters.”

ANGC clubhouse

4 thoughts on “New Year’s Day for Golfers

  1. Why were Dustin Johnson, Sergio Garcia, and Jason Day all wearing the same groovy designer green golf shirt with lotsa stripes today? It was totally confusing while watching the broadcast this afternoon figuring out who was playing. I assume you are down there right now, so please, enquiring readers need answers.

  2. WordPress is under some sort of hacker attack–North Korea’s first concrete step toward world domination?–so I can’t get in to my website. But I can tell you that clothing manufacturers have begun dressing their pro players in coordinated “collections.” I saw several examples on mannequins in the studio at the Golf Channel on Tuesday, when I was there to talk about the history of Augusta National on Morning Drive. The mannequins were in what was supposed to be a golf pose, but because they weren’t holding golf clubs they looked more like they were doing the watusi. I suggested facing them toward each other, in pairs, rather than facing them toward the camera, so that they’d really look like they were dancing. But no one else thought much of that idea. Gone is the era when Arnold Palmer could win the Masters while wearing pants with belt loops but no belt. And I should tell you that I am watching the tournament from home this year. That’s not very different from what reporters do when they’re there, since most of them never leave the press building. One year in Augusta, I watched the final round with Dan Jenkins on the TV in the living room of one of the houses Golf Digest had rented in a gated subdivsion on the outskirts of town.

  3. Thank you for that mental image of the Watusi Mannequins, and I can’t imagine why the Golf Channel didn’t jump on your dancing golfers facing each other idea.

    As for the wardrobe replication problem, if manufacturers are going to be providing “collections,” they’d better pay a little more attention to their starlets, I mean golfers, not wearing the same outfit on the red carpet, I mean on the green fairways. It’s just not right.

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