Unlike Any Other
“I just have to say I’m honored that you called me from your favorite place,” my friend Naomi told me.
“There are a finite number of people in this world who truly give a shit about us, and the fact that we text every day means a ton to me,” I said.
I was standing opposite the thirteenth hole fairway during my final hour in attendance at the opening round of the 2025 Masters golf tournament, an event commonly referred to as “a tradition unlike any other,” while speaking with her on a brown courtesy telephone free for patron use when inside the gates, a place where cellphones are as forbidden as running, booing, or being in a bad mood, the latter something that had plagued me for a few days, including the night before my visit when I cried in a rental car while talking to my old boss, Brian, a man who considers me his younger brother and entrusts me to help him in Augusta for Masters week each year.
“You know me, but you don’t really know me,” I said to him in between sobs as I bemoaned my ongoing battle with loneliness and intermittent depression, him trying to summon split second advice in hopes that the enigmatic remedy eluding me thus far might surface.
“I feel like you’re attacking me a little,” he said as my voice increased in volume and indignance.
“I’m not attacking you — I’m being as real as possible with you. I’m just so fucking angry at the world, not you or anyone else.”
“Well, maybe tomorrow can help change that,” he said about a day I annually called the happiest of my year.
He had sent me to hand two practice round tickets to an unknown client outside a hotel earlier in the week. After searching the lobby, a familiar-ish-looking old man talking on his cellphone and holding a Styrofoam coffee cup seemed like he might be the guy in question.
“Are you Paul’s client?” I hesitantly asked him.
“I am,” the bespectacled man said in a southern accent.
“What’s your name, sir?” I inquired. I had a hunch.
“Tommy,” he said before pausing. “Tommy Aaron.”
“As in, Masters champion Tommy Aaron?!” I said while shaking his hand.
“That’s me.”
“Are you fucking serious right now?! I’m meeting Tommy Aaron?! Holy fuck! I never do this, but would you mind taking a photo with me? Please?”
“Sure, that’d be fine,” he said with a humble smile, untroubled by my benign outburst.
Moments later, after somehow not cussing when professing how it had been an honor to meet the 1973 green jacket winner, I shared the photo and my giddiness with Brian certain he’d be excited on my behalf fully aware that I derive a slice of my self-esteem from being an unofficial Masters historian.
“Goodness, selfie?” he texted back. “Can you please operate with some discretion? I told you they didn’t want to coordinate through us. Ugh. Please just fucking stop. Don’t take pictures with people I ask you to run errands for. If that is who the tickets are for fucking leave them alone. People don’t like that shit at The Masters. Fucking amateur hour.”
Struggling to weather the nagging sinus infection I’d developed a day in advance of flying south, my impromptu meeting with one of the three Georgia-born Masters champions concluded with an apology for my absurd happiness, describing it to Nathan, the man waiting for me in the rental car and also assisting for the week, as an embarrassing case of “fangirling out.” When Brian acknowledged his overreaction during my teary, rollercoaster chat with him — he didn’t know who Tommy Aaron was even when meeting the man himself two days after my encounter — it reminded me how his perspective is radically different than mine, and that despite his perceived faults, the impulsive invective in his text messages was the fallout from sleep-deprived multitasking and intense stress, not an attempt at character assassination, although good luck explaining that to the self-absorbed asshole who occupies a significant portion of my cerebral side.
“The buildup to Masters week is always so huge for you, I can see where anything less than ideal is a potential disappointment,” my best friend, Moore, emailed me, sage paragraphs I read an hour before walking Berckmans Road to the South Gate, him replying to my complaints about the less than utopian first half of the week also marred by the rental car almost dying in traffic twice. “Nothing can kill joy faster than our own unmet expectations. I hope you can keep in perspective the view that a bad day in Paradise will always beat a cheery walk through the Inferno.
“Funny how our brains work: It is almost always easier to compartmentalize an uninterrupted string of bad events than it is to compartmentalize when bad things occasionally happen in normally ideal situations.
“Can’t do much more than to offer the sentiment that Augusta is one of MY beacons of hope, even living it second-hand.”
This is why I keep a Larry David poster at the end of my hallway, the man staring at a half-full glass of water with the caption “It’s all a matter of perspective.”
In short, never take for granted the people in this world who truly give a shit about you.
★ ★ ★ ★
I’d potted eight yellow pansies and placed them on the front steps at my house beside a floral-patterned Masters flag, a method to send myself off full of good fortune that was countered by three days of rain that inhibited six of the plants from blooming, along with reading a Masters essay at a town library open mic, an over-the-limit lengthy reading interrupted halfway through by a woman in the room answering her cellphone as I stopped and said, “Are you fucking serious right now?! Turn that shit off!” The Monday practice round I’d attended in 2024 had been as life-affirming as any day I’d lived, but the laws of The Universe implored me to recall that every positive action is met by an equal and opposite reaction, or more plainly: so it goes.
Resting on my left elbow on a comfortable mattress in a rented home a mile from Augusta National Golf Club, I finished reading the penultimate chapter of a biography of saxophonist Wayne Shorter, an optimistic man known for pondering life and creative impulses via metaphor and abstraction, and listened to his signature standard, “Footprints,” to gear up for ten-plus hours at my favorite place in the world. The National had become like jazz for me, each year’s trip a variation on a theme of rejuvenating, improvised, harmonic bliss, a reset switch used to source as much hope and joy as humanly obtainable, stowing an abundance of it in reserve for fifty-one weeks afterward to ameliorate my psyche when navigating the inevitable bad days and suffering innate to being human.
Brian snarled at my semi-faded blue Masters hat as I declined to don a new green one he’d gifted me the day before, too committed to the tried and true, as he told his cousin Alex and me to have fun. The two of us were being sent into Thursday’s round together, and as much as I disliked the idea of attending with someone else, complaining would be the height of ingratitude. Luckily, the same cousin who Brian had called a knucklehead wanted to purchase an inaccessible gnome in the gift shop, my desire for solitude being granted minutes after walking through the entrance. Despite an aversion to jewelry, I’d navel-gazed about deconstructing a Masters keychain and affixing the event’s American flag-based logo on a gold chain around my neck, my version of bearing the cross as I prescribed divinity to a golf course that had previously bestowed on me an out-of-body experience, uncanny signs from my dead girlfriend on her birthday, and birthed a friendship with a father figure from Long Island who I’d run into on the course a year prior and then attended a New York Islanders game with at Christmastime, a trinity of tangible phenomena I analyzed by implementing Occam’s putter: Augusta National or Augusta Miracle?
Sitting in the fifth hole grandstands absorbing a sunburn that would greet me in a bathroom mirror later in the afternoon, I entered into an unspoken friendship with two gravel-voiced middle-aged men from Lubbock, Texas, behind me, both guys taking turns spouting hilarious Masters misinformation: how Tiger Woods had shot twenty-three under par in 1997 (he shot eighteen under par); how Jordan Spieth had won two green jackets (he should have, but merely owned one thus far); how Scottie Scheffler was trying to win his third Masters in a row (he’d won two of the last three, but not consecutively); that Amen Corner is holes ten through sixteen (it’s holes eleven, twelve, and thirteen); and that the fifth green had no bunker (they realized it did when one man blasted a ball from the unseen trap and sprayed sand in the windless, seventy-five-degree air — “I thawt that was a beeg practice backswink for bein’ in da rough,” one of the Texans drawled). However, it was their perverse commentary that cinched my love for them.
“He really put some jee-izz on that one,” one of them emphatically said about an approach shot that stuck in place near the day’s difficult-to-reach pin location, an emission unlike any other.
“Shore did,” his buddy replied, as unphased as the crowd around us.
“Some what on it?” I thought while chuckling to myself, imagining snail trails of semen decorating holes far removed from the ones endemic to ejaculate. “Hope the kids nearby learn about the birds and the bees today.”
In between watching threesomes play through the hole, stunned by one amateur accidentally knocking his ball twenty yards into the right rough on a practice swing, a one-in-a-zillion misgiving that earned the crowd’s audible sympathy, I channeled Ralph Waldo Emerson’s wisdom that The Truth is experienced in nature and derived from the god living within each of us, the fences of prodigious magnolia trees protecting the fairway literally larger and more awe-inducing than any patrons or pros on the land, an intimation that one’s own reality is the holiest of holies even if the concept of individuality is an illusion, that no man matters without everything he comes in contact with, and that selflessness is the optimal blueprint when regarding one’s surroundings. Whenever hearing people on the course engaged in small talk about tariffs or workplace gossip or a golf outing planned the subsequent day, I flinched due to my belief that they were squandering the greatest reality I had unearthed in my world, surely a solipsistic view that disdained their need for convention even if my eleven previous walks inside The National proved one of Emerson’s hypotheses true: “It is easy in the world to live after the world’s opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
Immediately after clutching the trunk of the palm tree beside the fourth green, a ritual begun in 2023, I turned a corner and heard, “Hey, Adam!” as Alex carried a chair in one hand and clear bag of gift shop goodies in the other, him declining my fingers-crossed-he-says-no overture to walk together, opting to trail a golfer he loves but I loathe. Brian had purposely timed our flights to land almost simultaneously in Atlanta to start the week so Alex could provide me company for the two-hour ride east, welcome generosity that ignored how the kid, twenty-three-going-on-ten, managed to get on my nerves by being his authentic self, one too oblivious to offer a hand when bringing in groceries or observing the overflowing trashcan. I told Alex that if a statue were erected of him, a cellphone would be gripped in his left hand, a fact he didn’t dispute, triggering my respect for him.
“What’d you mean about it being a ‘helluva day to be born’?” my friend Josh asked me during another courtesy phone call, the question concerning his fifth son (and seventh child) being born two days prior on April 8th. “Isn’t any day a helluva day to be born?”
“Of course it is, but April 8th is Sue’s birthday,” I said.
“Oh shit, sorry, I forgot all about that!” he said, a man who had turned forty-two himself on April 6th.
“That’s alright, bud. I’m sure you’re exhausted.”
Birthdays were a theme in Augusta because Brian’s often occurred during Masters week as well, him bitching that he’d rather celebrate it anywhere else, a self-effacing guy fond of noting at midnight that his birthday had officially ended. Brian and I first met in person in Augusta in 2013, a relationship generated by the ticket world, him later luring me to work for him in autumn of 2014, a nearly four-year tenure that led to fights via text, yelling-fueled phone arguments, and my noncompliance when invited to visit his Manhattan office and attend the company Christmas party in my final year in his employ, myopically focusing on my own contempt, accusing him of beating a dead horse with a second dead horse during arguments, behavior that a hiatus in our codependence clarified, said departure spawned by him selling the business and awarding me a substantial payout while generously claiming he couldn’t have sold the place without me. There were days when he paid me the kindest compliment one hour then made me feel as worthless as I ever had the next hour, a bipolar approach to communication that induced a stockpile of anxiety, confusion, and self-loathing at a time when I wasn’t mature enough to handle it better than by thinking I was no different than a beaten dog who craved being loved more than almost anything else, the truth being that I was also a beaten dog who needed a paycheck.
When we reconnected in early 2022, it was due to his desire to return to Augusta, a man with trust issues who required reinforcement from someone inured to handling the rigors of seven hairy days in the south. He’d also changed to some degree, lightening up a bit despite still largely loathing editorializing and blue humor, two necessities I relied on when trying to find common ground with anyone, later recommending me to his friend for a job opening then offering to visit me to show support following Sue’s death, acts of extreme benevolence, like when he also told me he loved me and would do anything he could to help. Continuing to check in several times afterward confirmed his sincerity, the ultimate kindness being him gifting me a trip to Berckmans Place when attending the 2024 Masters on Sue’s birthday, the same day as a total solar eclipse. The once tin ticket man had a heart big enough to forgive us both for our past actions. What a mensch.
★ ★ ★ ★
“Take a load off…the wah-ter’s fiiiine,” Augusta’s tall black fire chief said to two elderly white men already planted beside him upon sitting down with his wife at the fourteenth hole grandstands.
I’d been as bug-eyed as Rodney Dangerfield on a cocaine bender when I glimpsed the man, identity then unknown, detach his cellphone from the holder clasped to his belt, a neon pink sticker with a four-digit numerical code affixed beneath the camera lens noting it was essential in case of emergency calls, a disclosure worthy of the tongue-in-cheek Internet jargon “huge if true” since everyone knows Firethorn (aka hole fifteen) is more urgent than any fire. The chief’s wife, sporting jeans, had just pled for him to hang up on a brief call he made as the security guard unhooked the rope to allow entry to patrons waiting by the staircase after one threesome exited the green, the sight of a phone on display, never mind in use, as perplexing as a hypothetically topless woman walking through the grandstands with a large tray containing green cups of beer for sale covering her breasts. Both old men had laughed at the chief’s line and commenced a getting-to-know-you gab session with the local official, reportage on the greenside happenings and discussions of their sixty-odd years as patrons mixed in to the thrill of my pad and pen, one stinging observation spoken about how in the pre-color television era The National failed to sell the full daily ticket allotment, a shocking fact those desperate to partake now would kill to see in sequel form.
I stared without a thought in my head at the Chinese fir and pine trees on the opposite side of the fairway, a cardinal flying out from one, the caveman-as-Emerson logic being that a thing was in a thing at the thing with other things, all of them equally vital to reality, of mere being. A man had been reading a British history book by the fourteenth green when I first walked by it earlier in the morning, the single strangest etiquette at The Masters I’d yet to witness, instantly causing me to wonder how the exchange went down with the security guard as he placed the hardcover in a gray pseudo-dog bowl to be inspected. Perhaps the security guard, an unexpected bibliophile, had begun summarizing her Goodreads profile or recommended an airport bestseller, or maybe, better yet, did the right thing and asked the man, “Pardon me, sir, but what the fuck is more important at The Masters than The Masters?” There’s nothing The National likes more than their keenly preserved and commanding power and control, my conspiratorial guesswork about their intentions during conversations with Nathan throughout the week ending with him contending that Chairman Fred Ridley should bring me in for a fact-finding declassification session, my attention to their attention to details ranging from nearly cultish support (the food isn’t worth Michelin stars, but it’s fresh, cheap, and easy to consume on the go, plus the logistics rule) to cautiously idealistic cynicism (RFID chips on the plastic patron badges cryptically linked to concession stand and credit card gift shop expenditures as a data mining operation to confirm if actual badge-holders are in attendance for each of the four tournament days, a precedent likely to end in the event’s more monopolistic evolution into hosting excess corporate-affiliated connoisseurs, a drastic diversion from President-in-Perpetuity Bobby Jones’s nearly century-old mission statement about how the meek shall inherit the course). Such is the mostly fawning detective work of an acolyte in the digital age.
Since it’s The Masters, it would be unfair to not indulge purple-ish prose about the springtime spectacle, a walk through the garden that marked my first time spotting juniper cones on the namesake trees by the sixth green; reverence for the mighty pampas bush at the seventh hole, its gigantic, feathery protrusions doubling as arrows ripe to be plucked from a quiver; halting to watch one golfer hack out of the yellow jasmine tangled in the eighth hole’s left side pine straw-anchored bushes; touching and smelling the pink camellias tucked adjacent to the trees to the right side of the tenth hole’s jigsaw puzzle piece of a fairway bunker, dazzling clusters of the blooming beauties adding trademark exotic vivacity behind the curtain; being whelmed by the eleventh hole’s white dogwood, the “master dogwood” should the inevitable Masters race-baiters have their way, mainly because the second hole’s pink dogwood is flat out prettier; and finally, identifying a batch of a dozen marigolds planted near the entrance to the concession stand beside the second hole fairway, flowers I love for being sturdy, protective, seemingly infinite, vibrant, and radiant, an elite bio if a horticultural dating site existed. Should the prose be too purple for dendrophiliacs, mea culpa.
“Are numbers twelve and fourteen long sleeve tee shirts?” I asked a cute, freckle-faced teenage girl about two elevated busts at the main gift shop.
“They sure are!” she said.
“May I please have one of each in XL?”
“Mmhmm,” she said with a grin and pulled shirts one friend swears are like wearing a cloud out from knee level compartments in front of her. “Can I ask you somethin’?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Where’s your accent from?”
“My accent?”
“Yeah, you have an accent. Don’t choo?”
“I dunno, but funny story. I recently met my friend’s Iranian boyfriend. He came to the U.S. from Iran as a teenager. He’s in his thirties now. He told me that I enunciate my words more clearly than any American he’s ever met. Maybe that’s it.”
“Could be cuz I agree. You have the clearest voice of anyone I done met this week.”
“No kidding? Well, thank you. I hope you enjoy the rest of your week.”
“You too,” she said, fist bumping me farewell.
An Australian man in Augusta had also praised my elocution, a case of peak irony coming from a man with far less than crystalline delivery. My clogged sinuses weren’t aiding my “no accent” case, nor did I respond until a man softly brushed my shoulder and prodded me to step aside as I accidentally interfered with a scene he was directing in the gift shop, a casually dressed cameraman filming a burgundy-haired woman in a lipstick-on-a-blonde vividly red dress doing remarkably realistic performative shopping presumably to be posted on the tournament’s Instagram page, a shrewd modern day marketing move by the old-timer brass who remain dedicated to being praised for how special they make people feel, and additionally, broadcasting in almost real time how magical patrons look when they feel special inside The National. There’s something to be said about aura, I suppose.
Greeting a genial, round-faced black girl running the register, I complimented her purple eyeglasses and asked her co-worker, a thin, exhausted-looking teen, if she was enjoying herself. “NO!” she said while comically furrowing her brow and audibly stomping her feet yet nonetheless managing to bag my items with the precision the shop is famous for, conceding how tired she was at the week’s midway point. Upon returning to the rental home later, Brian asked to see what I’d purchased and told Nathan, “Adam always buys the coolest shit,” affording me the opportunity to joke how my tastes aligned with those of postmenopausal women’s doting wallets, extracting from my bag a milk-colored porcelain serving tray adorned in Augusta icons as well as a pimento cheese sandwich-shaped stuffed animal, fresh garden flag, and two soft pink-hued open collar sweaters for Nathan’s co-workers in Oklahoma City, delighted that I could facilitate some faraway Masters cheer. Neither of the guys questioned why I bought ball markers, my refusal to play a round of golf unwavering, a contradictory stance that fascinates most who know about my Masters obsession. Feel free to pencil in the Walt Whitman chestnut about multitudes now.
“Brother Biscuit!” I said to Anthony, my friend and co-worker I’d affectionately nicknamed Dry Biscuit after he could barely down a bite of an oversized one, calling him from the second hole courtesy phone.
“How’s the day treating you?” he asked.
“About to eat my second peach ice cream sandwich,” I told him. “It’s been a week, though, man. The market’s all fucked up. Short spec sellers and The National cracking down have ruined prices. We’re fine, but other guys aren’t. I’ll tell you more when the powers that be aren’t listening.”
“I gotchoo, bro,” he said in a strained manner while inhaling on his vape pen as I asked if he was traveling to Los Angeles to see his girlfriend for the weekend, chatter about another place I loved on a level comparable to the ground on which I was standing.
A day later, I’d sit in an SUV in the Walgreens parking lot on Washington Road, a half mile from The National’s main gate, behind the broker who would become most synonymous with the secondary market meltdown, a man who earnestly expressed how sorry he was about defaulting on sales and proclaimed that he hadn’t gone into hiding, instead pursuing feasible resolutions, like the time-sensitive and uneasy deal I’d been shoehorned into, the successful conclusion occurring across the street outside a smoothie shop, but not before he eased the tension by asking me an altogether different question: “What do you call a blonde turned upside down? A brunette with bad breath.” It struck me as contrition unlike any other.
When I hung up with Anthony, I dialed my pal Ken, the aforementioned father figure I’d befriended the previous April. Ken had also braved the loss of the love of his life, wisely osmosing his buoyant philosophy to me during a few phone calls and at the hockey game, proof that empathy is only real when a person has endured a situation almost identical to your own, the fact that we’d crossed paths in Augusta adding weight to his words, especially when he said, “I hope that today helps you find a way to smile any time you think of Sue going forward.” As an admitted Luddite, it’s fair to ask the obvious: How does anybody enjoy a day on the grounds without seeking the mystics operating from distant switchboards? Ken and I also conversed about meeting at a summer concert and the upcoming Ryder Cup, a friendship bonded by our mutual passion for attending events. Perhaps Brian knew best all along as The National’s script doctors edited my rehabilitated attitude, once again swaying me that it was okay to be happy at the world too.
I pinched a leaf from a magnolia bush then admired the second hole fairway, envisioning how carefree it would be to go sledding down its declining slope, crashing out in a greenside bunker like a clueless, giddy child. Tempted to sit at the third green, the final threesome had already played through, meaning most action to catch would be found on the second nine, so I reversed course to the tenth hole, first stopping at the ninth fairway to file my yearly mental daguerreotype of the approach shot, as subtly sublime as a Bruegel the Elder landscape painting, the entire world contained in a few hundred yards, its visible ups and downs coexisting with its natural and artificial wonders, the refreshing lack of noticeable change peculiar in an epoch that has normalized the insistence on moving rapidly while many yearn for prolonged and imperative placidity, for a time when things weren’t all necessarily better, but the ones that mattered most were, a routine victory for nostalgia, naturally, and also a quixotic yet defensible yearning for regression at a moment when confronting the present felt as urgent as ever outside the gates, it thankfully not mattering whatsoever when the preserved halcyon comfort of yesteryear erased any hint of chaos inside them. Following my library reading, a man said how he wished to be reincarnated and do it all over again. “I don’t,” I said, “unless I can return as an owl or a tree.” Make me a Carolina cherry at nine and I’m game for four more decades.
“When did you find out Sue was sick?” Brian asked me as we watched the third round in the living room on his birthday.
“May 5th, 2023. She never complained once. I don’t know how she did it.”
“There are two types of people in this world, Adam,” Brian said, detailing a rare personal anecdote. “My one grandmother was poor her whole life and never had anything, but she was happy to be alive every day. My other grandmother had everything but complained all the time. People are either gracious or they aren’t.”
“There’s gotta be room for a third type in the middle, no?”
“You’re missing my point. Even if you’re the third kind, the point is to be gracious as much as you can. Like Sue.”
On Tuesday morning, or Sue’sday, the day that would have been her fifty-fifth birthday, I silently exited the house at 8:44 and walked to the sliver of Rae’s Creek running through our backyard opposite an RV parking lot, nobody in sight as I removed a red sandwich bag with her ashes from my pocket. Taking a sip of coffee from a yellow Masters mug, I poured them into the brownish water and relaxed as the bubbly cloud slowly dissolved, five of Sue’s beloved Adirondack chairs behind me as I reclined in the fourth one from the left in deference to her favorite number, grateful to have sprinkled her essence at cherished locales in Connecticut, Rhode Island, Maine, California, and now Georgia. She may not have been able to swim, but I’d told her numerous times how funny it would’ve been if she took lessons, reminiscing about it at the creek while siphoning humor at all costs.
★ ★ ★ ★
There are scant pleasures I know as satisfying as walking the tenth hole, five hundred yards I could rhapsodize about until Merriam and Webster threw in the towel, but I’d grown fond of my time alone on it during practice rounds, now spying hundreds of patrons arced in a semicircle around the hillock green. Rather than stand on my tiptoes, I sat beneath a loblolly on the left side with an unimpeded view, my hands splayed behind me acquiring temporary scars from the pine straw on which I rested them, the resulting perpendicular patterns akin to a polygraph machine having a seizure. An hour at ten is mandatory, and this time the extraordinary quietude overwhelmed me, assuming Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Harold Lloyd were playing through in each of the day’s final threesomes, not due to any comedic shenanigans, but because patrons collectively either “ahh”-ed, “ugh”-ed, or roared, clapping like elated early silent cinemagoers at the golf world’s topographical Helen of Troy, one hole many patrons overlook due to its seventeen undeniably fetching sisters. When one pro in the day’s last trio sank a par putt, I looked at a man to my right, a doppelganger for Raymond Floyd in part due to the visor he wore, and simply muttered, “Greatest golf hole in the world.” He smiled, nodded, and began walking to the eleventh tee, my cue to quickly get up and tail him.
Shadowing the final group, I witnessed one caddie piss into the trees on the left side of the eleventh fairway, better than him cumming, not that those Texans would concur. Since we’re now immersed in phallic imagery, I’ll mention that a banana is the first thing I eat every day of the year, but as I was about to pull into Kroger to grocery shop the day prior to my trip inside, Brian called demanding I pick him up by gate ten, him fresh off eating lunch with Jordan Spieth’s father on the terrace outside the clubhouse, a staggering humblebrag that made me more jealous than if he’d gloated about a mid-afternoon ménage à trois with Anna Sawai and Lisa from Blackpink. In short: no morning potassium, so in a symbolic move, I purchased a banana to begin my five concession stops, the top third of it poking out from my right cargo short pocket as it played footsie with my knee all day, ignoring it as I ingested six sandwiches (egg salad, chicken salad, pimento cheese, ham and cheese on rye, a fried chicken cutlet, and a Masters club on a sesame seed bun), two peach ice cream sandwiches, one fruit cup with honeydew melon, strawberries, and pineapple chunks, a bag of trail mix, a caramel pecan chocolate cluster, and an oatmeal raisin cookie, washing it all down with a cup of black coffee, three diet colas, one unsweetened iced tea, and four bottles of water. Eight sandwiches in one day set a new Masters record, indispensable when walking a half marathon, but I skipped the Aleve on sale by the bananas — organic, no doubt — because I’d snuck in a packet of Goody’s headache powder to minimize the lingering pressure being applied by the sinus infection.
“It’s going to snow tomorrow,” Naomi had also told me during our phone call, a fresh reminder that any type of day in Paradise beats a walk through an igloo.
Rory McIlroy, the shiny-toothed Northern Irishman who would make history when winning the tournament in a playoff three days later, played through as I suggested Naomi and I make plans to return to a gorgeous restaurant home to an outdoor patio that mimics the inside of a greenhouse, traditions best formed while inside a place beholden to them. I dialed Sue’s best friend, Nichole, afterward, the other woman in the group chat with Naomi where we dispensed nutrition tips, self-deprecating jokes, familial sidebars, and a plethora of other trifling asides, the stuff that’s long helped people form order for the world around them. Unknown to me at the time, I would watch McIlroy’s victory with a high school senior from Augusta named Kayden, a kid Brian hired to drive around town and make my final ticketing night saner, the skinny ginger-haired golf aficionado consuming five of Brian’s leftover birthday cupcakes from a box I set on the living room table while he answered any questions I sent his way, including a digression where he confessed that he no longer spoke to his father but loved his stepfather despite the man’s disinterest in sports. He hoped to play Augusta Country Club the next morning and showed me videos taken during a recent round he’d played there, one impressive downhill par-three making me speculate about how the entire city should’ve been transformed into as many golf courses as permissible post-Reconstruction.
I’d begun the day’s courtesy calls by dialing Brock, the guy who ran StubHub’s Masters operation during my two years working the event for the company, the friend who I’d chosen to will my Masters collection to should I predecease him, sending him photos of a Japanese Nintendo 64 Masters video game and the official 1972 Masters sixteen-millimeter film reel, two oddball items I’d purchased to add to my shrine, joking each time that they were really his, part of my morbidity scorecard that had been flipped back to zero the second I was handed the annual spectator guide at the course’s entrance in the morning. When one girl with considerably wide legs walked to a phone during our chat, I said, “I thought two pines unmoored themselves from the ground, but it’s just Lindsay,” the type of mock misanthropic joke he loved hearing me utter as much as I loved hearing his hearty laughter, wondering if he’d like anything from the gift shop and later grabbing him a one-thousand-piece puzzle.
It had to end somewhere, this year at the fifteenth hole, a lonely turtle resting at the edge of the front greenside pond as I asked an older lady in a gauzy white blouse for the time, her looking back at me more than once and smiling, maybe intuiting my fondness for older women as I used the umbrella I’d purchased as a cane when heading to the nearby water fountain. Moore had asked me to mail him a spectator guide, but the two security guards at the gate informed me no others would materialize until the next morning, a predictable reveal, but I would’ve hated myself if I’d neglected to try. Walking Berckmans Road to the rental home, a black man with dreadlocks driving a golf cart encouraged me to hop in and asked where I was from.
“Connecticut. Moments like this remind me why I love people in the south. We New Englanders have a reputation for being salty and mean whereas I find people down here friendly as hell. All you gotta do is be nice to people. One on one, they’re alright. Just talk to ’em, ya know?”
“I feel you,” he said. “People are mostly good.”
“You from Augusta?”
“No, sir. Columbia, but I call Augusta home now. I love it here.”
“Can’t front on that,” I inexplicably said as he braked until the foursome walking in front of us parted to the grass on either side, him dropping me off at a rotary soon afterward. “I’ll walk from here.”
“Have a good night, my brotha,” he said.
“You too,” I told him while shaking hands and feeling guilty I had no cash on me, choosing to believe the ride was furnished by pure generosity and goodwill, stuff the year’s happiest days require to continue earning their designation.
“HOW WAS IT?!” Brian hollered from his computer monitor fortress in the dining room when I walked in the door.
“Happiest day of the year!” I said as I made a beeline for him through the kitchen to return my badge, giving him a fist bump and saying thank you, him waving me off, tired of how many times I said it.
“Alex came back a little after one,” Nathan said moments later. “I told him and Brian there was no way we’d be seeing you before seven knowing you’d be getting your steps in. I was right.”
“I’ve got another eleven hours in me if they’d let me go all night.”
Life was good again. Hell, it was perfect.
“I think I’m a reasonably intelligent guy,” Brian said about a forgotten topic two days later, which served as a natural entry point to something I’d long wanted to tell him.
“You know, whenever I try explaining you to my friends and family, my go-to line is that you’re the only genius I’ve ever known closely.”
“You’re just buttering me up because it’s my birthday.”
“No, I’m not. I genuinely think you are a genius.”
“Well, thank ya, bud. That’s awfully kind’uh ya.”
A modest reaction wasn’t surprising, the beguiling man fond of keeping me guessing. It’s tempting to believe that his most genius move, at least as it concerns me, was consistently letting go and seeing the best in me, undoubtedly forgetting our past grievances with one another, too unimportant to dwell on anything ungracious, the crystal ball of his mindset that took me a dozen years to decode, and I didn’t even do it — he did, of course he did. Would I withstand more brotherly love, biting my tongue while remembering his actions were impetuous, not malicious, conduct he reserved for the inner circle he knew could handle it? Sure, I would, a tradeoff for being gifted the happiest day of the year, a day that ensured my hallway glass always held at least fifty-one percent water inside it. I had to applaud the man one more time: Brian saw me for one week per year yet knew me, at least on some fundamental level, as well as anyone I called during the round. It was time he typically lacked, time to stop living to work, time to stop embracing his visionary ideas, time for the other people he loved, and time when his solace proved how much he truly gave a shit about me, as if the time without him inside The National wasn’t proof enough.
I’ve now found grace in still being good for the occasional fucking amateur hour. At least there’s no better place for it, Brian’s last words before he left embedded in my ears: “See you next year here in Augusta, Georgia!”
And that? That is submission unlike any other.