Palm Tuesday
Great expectations, much like sequels and the removal of push-up bras, exist to engender disappointment. There are notable exceptions to the rule that immediately surface: eating ice cream, hearing birdsong, taking a walk to clear your mind, and the Augusta National Golf Club. As fortune would have it, I experienced all four simultaneously on Tuesday, April 4th, 2023, while attending a Masters practice round. However, my own expectations earned from nine previous visits initiated an erratic beginning to what emerged as one of the finest days of my life.
In recent years I’ve become enamored with the depressingly factual phrase “everything is a grift,” a byproduct of unencumbered late-stage capitalism, which at the rate we’re progressing may soon mutate into its inevitable epilogue stage. After collecting my paper badge, the idiosyncratic designation for the keepsake ticket I inserted into the plastic holder affixed to a Masters lanyard transported from my coffee table in Connecticut, a brisk ride to the free parking lots spread across the fields on Berckmans Road was confronted with traffic cones blocking each entryway. They weren’t supposed to be inaccessible, especially so early in the morning. Free parking is one of the endless reasons why patrons, as Masters attendees are respectfully christened, find the event inexplicably refreshing. Fretting about losing time just outside the eighteen holes my entire year was spent eagerly visualizing, I hung a U-turn and caved to impulse by pulling into a paid lot excessively annoyed at regular folks profiting while a corporation had excused itself from the bottom line.
Regrettably telling the blasé girl at the entrance that I didn’t have forty dollars in cash (I’m prone to avoid carrying cash because I tend to spend it on frivolous nonsense, which I’d done with sixteen of the fifty dollars in my wallet upon landing in Atlanta), she said I could exit the apartment complex via its opposite end. Idling in the SUV to consider my options prior to leaving, panic seized hold. Where would I go instead? Desperate for a familiar voice, I texted Brian, my one-time boss who’d bought me the badge for helping him all weeklong, in hopes he’d be encouraging about the snafu. He instantly replied with an enthusiastic “Go have fun!”
I approached the same parking attendant and, choosing to make a down payment on fear of karmic retribution, extended my remaining thirty-four dollars to a welcoming, green-stuffed fist. Worried that I’d parked in an incorrect spot, or one capable of arousing a malicious renter and tow truck combination, a plainclothes parking official nonchalantly said the unmarked lot was safe. As I paced in an inattentive hurry toward my destination, an affable sheriff asked both me and the hand-holding elderly couple trailing me, “Y’all lookin’ fer the South Gate?”
Tucked discreetly beside the walkway from the South Gate into the hermitage that is Augusta National Golf Club, hereafter referred to as The National, a fond appellation wielded by locals, is the club’s solitary on-site hospitality location called Berckmans Place, its name a nod to the Belgian family who once owned the acreage on which it resides. Home to five top-shelf restaurants, three replica putting greens plus an additional composite green, and a private gift shop along with club lore on parade (including the stump of the dearly departed Eisenhower Pine—oh yes, enshrined trees are mourned on this property, fitting given three loblollies fell victim to windswept homicide at the seventeenth tee later in the week), it’s insulated by an iron fence and an abundance of shrubbery towering higher than Shaquille O’Neal’s sightline. A white and Pantone 342, or Masters Green, sign, a hallmark of the club, reading “By Invitation Only,” could be criticized by the cynically inclined as a snooty “Keep Out,” but the six-thousand-dollar face value Berckmans badge entitles select elite to the ensconced hideaway. For those like me who are legion in believing the course itself is the star, I nonetheless wrestle with my inner completist who curiously regards The National as a gigantic English muffin where every nook and cranny must be scrutinized but would rue two sybaritic hours adrift from the crushed velvet grassy expanse a tantalizing fifty yards inland.
How had negative thoughts crept into my consciousness as the result of a cordial exchange with a security guard about my digital camera, an item whose omission of cellphone capabilities he authenticated while assuring me that the rule’s inclusivity guaranteed no Securitas employee possessed a phone within the gates either? “I saw one of you guys scrolling on a phone by the ninth green last year,” I truthfully told him accompanied by a grin, forcing a “He must’ve been supervising the rest of us” borderline rehearsed response. In its unwavering commitment to mindfulness, The National bans phones the nine days per year it’s open to the public but permits cameras for the three practice rounds held the Monday to Wednesday prefacing the four-day Masters tournament. My mother loaned me her resurrected digital camera, its unreliable battery charged prior to my flight south, but my assumption about its vitality presented objectionable news: one terrifying bar of electronic life. Two preplanned photos demanded being taken, so I nervously re-zippered it inside the case nestled in my pocket.
My biggest fear preceding the trip was enjoining Tuesday’s projected weather to be accurate. Both practice rounds I attended in 2022 halted early, one precipitated by a deluge-slash-tornado warning and the other zapped by radar screens adorned with foreboding thunder and lightning. I felt uncommon meteorological confidence this year, in part to soothe my psyche—eighty-ish degrees, overcast, and humid wouldn’t be optimal, but it blissfully negated suspicion of a cancelled or shortened round—and chose my attire: an absorbent royal blue Masters hat, a navy blue and white-striped Masters polo shirt, tan cargo shorts, and gray running sneakers. Minutes into walking the left side of the fifth hole in reverse—all sides will be described as if looking at the hole from the tee box—the forecasted sweat began pelting my hat brim.
Unsure which route I preferred to navigate to the first hole, where I envisioned a full walk of the first and second nines in numerical order, I retreated to the fifth green, viewed the mini ski slope of a downhill tee shot at the par-three sixth hole, cautiously trudged down the path toward the seventh fairway, and then abruptly returned to the same side of the fifth hole concurrently in awe of the angular and cavernous fairway bunkers while feeling disoriented by a sacred place whose land seen in an overhead photo functioned as the desktop background of my work computer monitor for months in anticipation of this exact moment. I knew this place. I lived this place. I walked it during absent-minded drives, conference calls, and at least one bowl of lunch oatmeal per week. Why the hell couldn’t I walk it the right way the one day I was awarded the honor to perform a straightforward task that occupied a generous percentage of my yearly reverie? When a Securitas worker complimented a young boy’s name for being Levi, hinting and hoping that it was a biblical allusion, the kid’s father divulged that his older son was named Luke much to the woman’s satisfaction, but not mine. Here I was in Augusta, Georgia, during Easter week blasphemously succumbing to petty bullshit rather than embracing my personal Eden. This is my beautiful house. This is my beautiful wife. And yet, the identical outcome materialized: My God, what have I done?
★ ★ ★ ★
The Masters and I became bedfellows during my childhood. The sporting world’s major events have long fascinated me by delivering a convenient method to witness history in real time as they canonize unfiltered drama and grand stages. José María Olazábal’s victory in 1994, documented in John Feinstein’s outstanding book A Good Walk Spoiled, a modern classic gifted to me by my great uncle Owen, was my introductory brush with a tournament as venerated for its affiliation with the color green as Kermit the Frog. Owen covered sports for the Hartford Courant, logging a period of his tenure as the newspaper’s senior golf writer. He’d interviewed Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, and Jack Nicklaus, among others, then typed about their triumphs in the Quonset hut that once served as The National’s media center. Owen and I attended the Greater Hartford Open, the June PGA Tour stop in the capital city’s outskirts, sparking his revelation that our home state’s beloved sixteenth hole mirrored The National’s par-three sixteenth, a tee shot over water, an anecdote he disclosed in between bites of a ketchup-drenched hot dog as we reclined on a hill overlooking the bunker-shielded green. A love for athletics, aesthetics, and the father figure I lacked imbued me with an admiration for the game I might otherwise not have latched onto.
There’s no denying The Masters ranked behind passions that starred throughout my teens and twenties, but when scanning April journal entries inked in the 2000s the concluding round routinely arose as a subject of my detailed interest, proof of the tournament’s capacity to galvanize the indoctrinated. It’s impossible to refute popular opinion that the annual spring engagement with the American South showcases an allure scant events can match, its layout a credible centerfold if a catalogue promoting breathtaking venues were unearthed comically sandwiched amid Playboy and Penthouse issues. The National is a season and it is a color. Its uncanny ability to transmogrify into limitless fuel for one’s imagination is owed to members upholding self-imposed criteria rooted in never abandoning the tireless pledge of Bobby Jones, the fairy-tale co-founder, to endure as a pillar of excellence and decency in perpetuity. In short, The National could be renamed The Ideal. Arguments to the contrary will be entertained, but only upon the contrarian in question feasting eyes on the former nursery in advance of positing his or her case. One late afternoon Monday practice round hour in 2013 quickly spawned my conversion.
Finally setting foot on television’s most endearing golf course came pre-packaged with ingrained adjectives. Scribes, my uncle included, have consistently summoned their clandestine poet laureate bona fides to do justice to the panorama’s ineffable qualities that evoke a classical masterpiece inviting you inside its ornately gilt framed canvas, a paradisiacal portal to a horticultural dreamland renowned for its proximity to perfection. Gazing at the embankment perched adjacent to the sixteenth hole, I pondered if the grass was vacuumed each evening. Did fallen leaves or flower petals teleport to the nearby Augusta Country Club seconds before touching the turf? Who had time for golf given the plethora of agronomical anomalies on display? As you’ve likely gleaned, the inclination to continue questing for the epigrammatic Augusta National sentence is eternal. If one hour fails to stir your soul, may I suggest reviving witch trials below the Mason-Dixon Line. Hyperbole aside, emotions run deep in an energetic town whose most noteworthy pop cultural figure, James Brown, is best remembered for celebrating the simple fact that he felt good.
Walking the course in 2016, my seventh visit, cinched my mania for The National as I became as consumed with the place as other obsessives are with deities or Disney. Earlier visits peaked at two hours, but being sanctioned double that time alone yielded a rarity: existence beyond thought, a utopia of the mind. Why were there no leaves on the fairway? How were the lawns so well-manicured? Prudent to think about rhetorical questions later. Deserting reason for pure, unconscious joy birthed an inner peace all people deserve to access all the time. If only. Unfortunately, addiction and recreation are unwanted consequences, which is why the aborted rounds of 2022 and rocky start to this latest trip rattled me more than I believed was possible.
Setting my sandwich consumption odds at plus or minus four-and-a-half, no friends offered them bet the under, a passive aggressive solicitation to be a glutton for gluttony. Maybe carbohydrates were the skeleton key to eluding my anxieties. With pimento cheese, ham and cheese on rye, and peach ice cream sandwiches in one hand—and a Diet Coke in the other (since there’s no corporate signage anywhere at The Masters, the anonymous cola is not referred to by name on the placard, but is a taste test-confirmed fact)—I plopped my, no joke, nine dollars and seventy-two cents of provisions on a green trash can in use by two middle-aged patrons. Still, the vibe was undesirable. Wishing to converse, I suffered vocal paralysis, barely managing a half-hearted chuckle when an elderly man neared the residual dining quadrant and humorously asked the couple, like I should have, if he could share the garbage lid with them. Perhaps their ignoring me was the catalyst I required.
Allowing the heavily hyped ice cream to thaw, I spotted a few rows of complimentary payphones by the fourth hole. Thrilled that she had the workday off, I dialed The Ambassador of Happiness and on the fourth ring my girlfriend answered, startled yet delighted at my indulging the anachronistic pleasure of using a free landline beneficently provided on the grounds. Following a purge of the angst incurred by the morning’s inconveniences, Sue marveled at my recollection of her number then giddily echoed Brian’s urging to enjoy myself (and the ice cream). The clouds in the sky lingered, but the ominous nimbus stationed atop my brain dissipated. I bit open the wrapper of my sandwich, took strides with newfound zeal, and one sonorous bird chirped out an aria as some much-needed mirth distracted me bordering the ninth fairway.
Two fetching twenty-something girls walked several feet ahead of me lost in chatter. While savoring the final bite of the suitably praised ice cream sandwich, a peach of a different stripe unexpectedly sprang forth: the blonde girl’s dark-colored thong clearly showed through her virtually transparent capri pants. This moment of levity was why The Universe delayed my parking, wasn’t it? The shiny-haired brunette then lagged behind to adjust her shoe and announced, “Jenny, your undies are showing!” as she doubled over in laughter. Had Jenny forgotten altogether, there would’ve been a nineteenth and twentieth hole to render on the course map.
Although patronizing a tournament round is imperative to what The Masters is, the world’s gold standard golf tournament, my preference is the relaxed practice round environment. Rather than shadow a threesome (no pun intended) hoping to catch a sliver of an unforgettable chip shot or lengthy putt over the shoulders of countless patrons in the gallery, my own pacing and whims are paramount to recapturing that unparalleled Zen-like mindset. Now that all conditions were right, a new starting point cemented itself. Camellia, The National’s tenth hole named for the tropical Asian flowers flourishing on it, beckoned as I focused on the presidential seal above the door at Mamie’s Cabin, the sanctuary where the Eisenhowers resided and played bridge on vacations from Pennsylvania Avenue. Aware that I’d be devoting a previously allotted plenitude of time to the stunner later, hopefully once the predicted sun waved its fire-fangled fingers, I knew a brief interaction with its astonishing elegance would operate as the fulcrum crucial to recalibrating expectations.
By the time I arrived at the eleventh green and neighboring twelfth hole, the latter “the meanest little par-three in the world,” as two-time Masters runner-up Lloyd Mangrum decreed, I was dumbfounded. This image, anointed as the annual emblem decorating the badge hanging from my neck, a cornucopia containing the stone bridge designated in Ben Hogan’s honor and vivid trademark azaleas plus a merciless putting green whose secluded viciousness is easily chalked up to its resting atop a Native American burial ground, has become as synonymous with The National as any other. And on this day, it induced something akin to an out-of-body experience for a few trancelike seconds as I told a hazy outline of myself from a great height that this was the realest thing in the world at that juncture. If that sounds contrived and solipsistic, I blame it on Me Not Me.
A firm adherent to National utilitarianism, euphoria was achieved on each glance: a clouded yellow butterfly happily-go-luckily gliding along the immense thirteenth fairway, a fresh appreciation for the fourteenth hole’s beveled purity, a freedom from sand and water hazards I’d earmarked as inferior in precursory meetings but now acutely treasured, and the fifteenth green’s inverted oasis, a hole protected by two ponds that could be mistaken for dunk tanks awaiting the latest jester’s surprise plunge. Amid relishing the eighteenth hole’s tee shot view, notorious for its narrowness and distant sinistral bunkers, The Masters’ signature scent, a candle not yet seen in the gift shop, raised my eyebrows. An amalgam of cigar smoke, cut grass, and stirred earth, the unmistakable molecular symphony occasioned nostalgia for a bygone saunter through the gardens at Versailles, a comparably atemporal wonderland. Apologies to Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta, but green (with a sprinkle of groan) is the word.
★ ★ ★ ★
Common knowledge may lead one to assume that The National is a bulwark of strict conservatism, but a look at the revamped par-three course reminded me that a progressive doctrine abides. The club had boldly reconfigured the layout the preceding summer to accommodate patrons aplenty squeezing in to relish enhanced sightlines for the lone Wednesday per year when an exhibition tournament is staged the afternoon before the main event on the supplementary loop, a contest encouraging participation from their wives and children that a surfeit of golfers deems the most fun day on their work calendars. En route to the first hole I studied the prodigious green-and-white umbrellas, similar to floating breath mints, that shade members dining with their enviable guests on the terrace. An official instructed nobody in particular to travel around the corner to be photographed in front of the South’s oldest cement structure, better known as The National’s elegant clubhouse. I’d had my snapshot taken three hundred and sixty-four days prior enlarged to poster size, one frame of film showcasing a human being at his happiest, and hung the framed portrait on my wall, my right hand signing “I love you” to a building preserving ninety years of the club’s labyrinthine administrative secrets. When researching the yellow pansies planted on the lawn shaped to depict a map of the United States, widely established as the Masters logo, and learning heat-resistant marigolds were subtly swapped in their stead during the dog days, Sue gifted me three dozen of the fragrant flowers to coexist with the hydrangea and rhododendron bushes I’d acquired partially due to The National’s boundless influence on my green thumb.
At the terminus of the first hole, its fairway bunker resembling a humongous, graffitied S on this walk, spontaneity struck. Determined to refuel my aching limbs, I procured a creamy egg salad sandwich to be washed down by a Diet Coke refill and secured an aisle seat in the eighth hole grandstands, my first dalliance with the tournament’s temporary open-air lounges. I later spoke with a badge-holder who lamented how his wife had grown disinterested in attending, but if she were to be lured out of retirement, he said it would stem from her enchantment with The National’s egg salad recipe. The elevated angle generated a surreal perspective of the imposing greenside mounds that were crashing breakers in another life cycle, discarded in 1956 by the co-founder and original chairman, Clifford Roberts, but subsequently reconstructed, the one bogey he made throughout his pioneering four-and-a-half decades overseeing The Masters, his innumerable innovations reimagining how spectators continue to absorb the modern game in person and on television.
My best friend, Moore, and I chatted the ensuing afternoon about the impeccable logistics as I detailed how sandwich wrappers are green not merely to uphold thematic consistency, but to ensure that should a careless patron drop one on the ground it blends in with the surroundings until its imminent trash can deposit by a fastidious groundskeeper. Apple slices are sold instead of whole apples so tossed cores don’t attract nettlesome rodents and loud chomps evade CBS’s microphones. “Nobody does efficiency like dictators!” I said in jest to my knowing pal who used to be a warehouse supervisor, affording me the opportunity to conjure the old saw that Roberts was a benevolent autocrat. No french fries will ever be bargain priced at the concession stand because the man, keen on chicken breast sandwiches, consommé, and toasted pound cake for lunch, rated the dish as too unhealthy and slovenly. The requisite hero worship faded into a half hour of serene observation that had the favorable effect of my desiring a sequel.
Course architect Alister MacKenzie, the self-identified Scotsman who sadly never beheld his labor of love in the flesh, regarded the deceptively short third hole as his masterwork. Finished walking the decanter-like second hole, its cloistered downhill fairway dramatically unfurling a vast, liberating green, I was stunned to spy a herky-jerky squirrel jitterbug across the third hole fairway bunkers into a protective bush. There was no time to analyze this aberration because my date with the ultimate National Easter egg could wait no longer. To the right of the fourth green stands a sclerotic palm tree, bent at its waist as if poised to stretch due to the strain accumulated from being the sole survivor on a hole first named in deference to nature’s symbol for triumph. (It’s now named for flowering crab apple.) This was one half of the photogentsia [sic] I promised myself I’d capture, a regal insignia intertwined with the arboreal history innate to the landscape. Certain I’d find a kindred spirit, I inquired to the greenside custodian to ascertain how many palms once decorated a hole inspired by the eleventh hole at St. Andrews, golf’s birthplace. “There ain’t been any other palms in my twenty-two years at this spot,” the gentleman told me, this letdown further extending my efforts to file an elusive factoid into the National portion reserved in my hippocampus.
Since it was 4/4 on the calendar, I decamped to a new aisle seat in the fourth hole grandstands as if I had a choice. As the lovable Tony Finau, smiling as is his custom, tested a variety of practice shots, my gaze repeatedly drifted to the palm’s fronds swaying in a light breeze, not the postcard-worthy iconography one expects to bring a patron to the cusp of happy tears. I recited Wallace Stevens’s palm-centric final poem to myself, a conscious reminder to be grateful for beautiful things solely because they’re beautiful. An irritating car alarm sounded from the Berckmans Place parking lot, not that the sonic salvos could disturb my peace, an invisible hand swiping them out of mind. Calm prevailed as the greenside bunkers-as-eyes engaged in a staring contest with the blanketing fog. When chatting with an exquisitely coiffured National employee named Trinity about this sequence, she was caught off guard that my unspoken nickname for the place might as well be Augusta National Geographic.
Now with a rejuvenated headspace, a third rendezvous with the fifth hole earned awestruck ganders as it anthropomorphized into a prone beast primed to pounce. In opposition to my leadfooted stomps to the sixth hole in the morning, I practically floated to its tricky Redan-style green, a multitiered fortification sporting a bunker simulating an Easter Island statue in profile. Bummed that the flowers atop the pampas bush on the seventh hole weren’t in bloom, the compromise was its bunker-laden green looking like it had been besieged by five enormous biscuits. Rorschach tests are The National’s rabbit hole. The tranquil free association stroll triggered hunger for ancillary carbs as I ambled to a different concession area with phones, opting to call my mother in advance of weighing my forthcoming culinary selection. Like Sue, she was also shocked to hear my radio-ready monotone from the promised land as I shared my jubilation with the second of two persevering people who is receptive whenever Masters minutiae is directed her way. Despite my general distaste for barbecue sauce, a socialistic menu methodology resulted in gleefully inhaling a pulled pork sandwich to the delight of those who bet the over.
A perspiring hike up the hilly staircase that is the eighth hole landed me back at the scene of Jenny’s undies, the slender ninth fairway, its approach shot arguably the course’s most jaw dropping as the tree lines disperse to present an expansive vista marking a metaphoric rebirth on the second nine upon conquering the bitchy, sloping green. Unable to locate the indigenous Carolina cherry trees, I prompted a less standoffish gallery guard to single them out and was kindly redirected to a more knowledgeable volunteer. While pointing at a latticework of limbs, he struggled in vain then humbly said they’d been buried amongst the magnolias, possibly spooked by their longstanding link with George Washington’s prepubescent hatchet. With eighteen holes checked off, the impatient plastic native to my wallet awoke the inveterate merchandise maven within me. Give me stuff! George Carlin, eat your heart out.
★ ★ ★ ★
When I declared that I live The National, you may be astounded by how literal the statement was. Embodying The Masters begins with a sip from whichever Masters coffee mug or commemorative plastic cup is in rotation, careful not to spill a drop of my drink on one of the softest long sleeve tee shirts I own (three navy, two gray, and one maroon, all Masters-branded and well-worn, they comfort me daily in the fall, winter, and any cool enough evening), then donning one of twenty-two reverential Masters hats, and potentially grabbing my black Masters rain jacket from the closet, its door hook housing my bathrobe advertising a Masters pin on the furry lapel, overseen from atop the dresser alongside it by four watchful stuffed Masters teddy bears. In my den is a Masters chair, a framed flag from 2013 bedecked with that year’s paper badges home to a visage silhouetting a monolithic Bobby Jones-like black and white figure putting at the inescapable twelfth green, and a sturdy, unassuming coffee table. Attempting to keep a low profile, opening the doors on either side exposes the Masters locale away from The National that continuously fills my heart with love.
Fred Ridley, the current chairman, oversees The National’s certifiable bibliography, but I’m willing to guess that my assemblage might produce his double take. Front and center is a Masters shoehorn, a symbolic salute to walking the course, and surrounding it are copious pounds of paper. From Dawson Taylor’s three illustrated histories, Frank Christian’s pictorial scrapbook with commentary (the digression about Cliff Roberts’s defensive fondness for cookies slays me), a day-by-day chronicle of the 1970 Masters authored by Dick Schaap, The National’s self-published book spotlighting crisp course and floral photography and their stately volume housed in a box resembling the building itself dedicated to Berckmans Place, George Lucas’s yardage guide, a scrapbook lauding Arnold Palmer’s 1964 victory, an oft reissued cookbook featuring a delectable curried chicken Florentine recipe that I’ve plated, annual yearbooks from my years in attendance, a Sears Catalog-level thick media guide, multiple spectator guides handed to me at the gates, perennial hardcover retrospectives issued by the club in tribute to said year’s tournament, Travelers insurance-sponsored viewing guides, blank scorecards, Augusta Chronicle copies, a first and second edition of Roberts’s semi-confessional history of The National (one copy signed by the curmudgeon himself), and a hardcover book published in 1952 privately gifted to devotees extolled for their contributions to the tournament, among a couple dozen other tomes. Sometimes I like to ironically believe that The Masters’ wing of the Library of Congress can be found on my property even if my absurd fantasy is to become the imposter Gideon who persuades America’s hotel chain proprietors to substitute Masters books for bibles.
As a man who proudly fancies shopping malls, the dazzling main gift shop’s hospitable organization, constant replenishment, glowing skylights, and shimmering hardwood floors make the crisply air-conditioned merchandise facility a welcome conduit to consumer sensory overload. Ample zigzagging up and down a maze-like corridor past wall-mounted screens doling out facts about The Masters’ involvement with the Asia Pacific and Latin America Amateur tournaments blossoms into an unofficial expenditure treasure hunt worthy of being soundtracked by, as was ESPN’s go-to for promotional tournament ads, the Philly soul earworm “When Will I See You Again,” a convincing counterargument to keep treating oneself. A compliment I’ll always cherish unfolded when a shopping mall store owner proclaimed about my green Masters headwear, “You’re wearing the one hat I’ll never be able to sell in here,” a sage tip of the cap to this shop’s exclusivity.
Kaylynn, one of the teenage girls tasked with holding a security rope and politely requesting patrons pause in place for a few unplanned minutes, leaked that a heat sensor tracking system implemented to alert the brass when to bestow access to antsy bodies processed incoming data expeditiously. In the middle of her next semi-inaudible spiel, she untied the rope and the clientele, dependably dignified, hustled but shunned running toward a receipt total that, unbeknownst to some, would reacquaint them with couch cushions they hadn’t flipped in ages. Hellbent on surveying the uppity “Clubhouse” sector exhibiting lavish silver wristwatches and gold cufflinks encased in glass, my optimism about a hardcover book hastily vanished. The exultant tradeoff was pinpointing a navy blue Masters hooded sweatshirt, a coveted item last surveyed on the wall in too tiny a size a decade earlier, and a pink and green garden flag.
Sporadic “Oh geez, sorry”’s from an inadvertent elbow or heel tap were met with pleasantries like “You’re fine,” “Me too,” and the ubiquitous “No worries.” Gifts for a privileged group entered my basket—a pink magnolia-patterned Tumbler mug for my mother, a green hat for a co-worker, two navy blue hats for a different old boss (one for his brother), a long sleeve green shirt with a scoreboard on the backside for a fellow Masters-entrenched friend (one for me as well), and a pink-and-white azalea-embroidered bucket hat for Sue to sport at the nursery where she works—then a chipper steward steered me in the direction of the “Classics” collection, a separate courteous clothier soliciting permission to caress my shirt to reference when comparing it to the fabric I’d been chasing. She volunteered that the pinkish orange herringbone polo shirt’s preshrunk cotton was a “fine choice, my favorite one we have,” a plausible white lie that scanned as genuine due to the setting.
Bountiful swag morphed my right arm into a plunging anchor: one butter- and two peach-colored adjustable hats (plucked from seventy-two enticing options), a powder blue tee shirt marked by an animated clubhouse drawing, a trio of Masters golf balls, a miniature footlong putter a stuffed caddie bear could handle if necessary, a funky metal logo sign fit for a garage wall that I couldn’t forgo, binoculars (a visual companion for my shoehorn), and a tote bag to shelter oversized memorabilia. True to gift shop tradition, a pair of high school-age girls on Spring Break beaming in retail paradise stood side by side beside the register: one to scan barcodes and one to bag the wares with boot camp precision, the former pointing at the bin stacked with yearly annuals I’d neglected but said I needed. Combing through the neatly folded list kept hidden behind my license for weeks, the bagger joked that I was “checking it twice,” her cute comment summarizing a Black Friday-like frenzied retail atmosphere in addition to doubling as a spot-on encapsulation of the alchemical and stereotypical adolescent sense of Christmas-esque yearning palpable in the room. Elated about my haul, I asked the teens when they’d be walking the course to learn that breaks granted their escape, both habitually selecting to rest their inactive legs instead. I hoped they glimpsed hundreds of flashes via Masters osmosis, a generously priced bottle of which could unquestionably be sold by the pallet whether as a deodorant, suntan lotion, cologne, and/or perfume. We the Patrons demand that The Masters be our essence!
★ ★ ★ ★
One question surely persists: Where’s the golf? Time for the big reveal, which is that I’ve yet to play a hole, never mind a round, of the game in my life. Of course, I know the rules, the clubs (and when, in theory, to use what), and the etiquette inherent to the sport, but whenever I’m tricked into contemplating a round at the modest nine-hole course in my hometown, a friend’s candid advice looms: “It’s an expensive way to get frustrated.” As my fortieth birthday encroaches, why start now? Saturday rounds of televised golf are often recorded for nighttime unwinding coupled with views of standout American designs. I’ve trekked to Shinnecock Hills for a U.S. Open, the par-three eleventh hole grandstands furnishing extensive entertainment, and caught three holes at a rain-soaked, abbreviated PGA Championship round at Baltusrol, consciously trying not to rate either paragon against The National, a no-brainer means to deprive myself of their delights. So, yes, I love golf, but fear mulligans aplenty would be a surefire buzzkill for my resolute fandom.
The aforementioned loop at TPC River Highlands, grounds I’ve walked a half dozen times since Owen’s transcendent company rapidly brought me into the golf architecture fold, reaped my hosannas for a back nine teeming with highlights: the downhill par-three eleventh hole, train tracks backgrounding the pondside thirteenth green, and the tee to green excitement enlivening the two hundred and ninety-six-yard par-four fifteenth hole, my number one pick until embarking to The National. Owen, a seven-time Connecticut Sportswriter of the Year winner, feted me on my inaugural walk, chaperoning me to a roped off area where I met local newscasters on a smoke break as he parted the media tent’s weighted flaps-as-doors housing his big-hearted peers, two of whom I idolized from my daily newspaper sports section reading that stopped typing to spoil a kid who dreamed he too could get paid to walk golf courses and summarize what transpired for a living someday. My uncle quizzed me on the ride home about the locations of famous courses, pantomiming a swerve of the steering wheel when I remembered that Hazeltine National was in Chaska, Minnesota, and asserted that should my idolatry abound, Augusta ought to be at the top of my getaway list. And to his credit, he never intimated more than once that I should take up golf as a leisure activity, aware that the pen is mightier than the putter.
Saving the best for last, I unashamedly strapped my colossal green tote bag over my shoulder like I’d stolen the Statue of Liberty’s purse and headed to number ten, code name Bo Derek, the hole’s sumptuous greenery intermittently bathing in shards of resplendent late afternoon light. My usual routing, the left side that launched our torrid topographical affair, was enforced earlier so I patrolled the dextral scenery instead, pausing to address the mammoth, manually operated scoreboard abutting the oak tree that bifurcates the tenth and eighteenth holes. Not as esteemed as the triumvirate that follows it, the blossoming dogleg left four hundred and ninety-five-yard par-four descends roughly one hundred feet from the tee until converging with its slightly exalted putting surface, a mandatory cosmetic arrangement to aid with drainage. The fairway boasts the MacKenzie bunker, a monstrosity reminiscent of a drunken thought bubble or an illiterate person’s signature or a postmodernist’s masterful attempt at deconstructionist landscaping, a threatening sand trap neutered when Perry Maxwell expertly augmented the hole in 1937, but its virility still able to stimulate one’s fantasies. In bittersweet news, MacKenzie detested useless manmade hazards, meaning his namesake stamp posthumously contradicts one of his ardent engineering theses.
Luckily for him, or so I like to selfishly postulate, the singular bunker is my supreme gateway to joy on the course, and where I can only hope my ashes are scattered. Craving a comprehensive hour awash in its radiance, I picked an isolated post by the misshapen, vaguely croissant-like greenside bunker near the azalea bushes as a Securitas watchman commenced a one-sided gab session with the gallery guard ten feet to my right. Compelled to say something, anything, to the chatterbox, I asked if he recalled when Martin Kaymer hit his second shot into my future urn several years ago, and when he demurred, I interrupted the guardsman’s reticence. “What’s it like to spend your entire day staring at the most beautiful golf hole in the world?” was greeted with a pregnant pause, slight smile, and deliberate, “Sure is sumthin’.”
The tanned, stoic sentinel, a retiree named Keith Johnson who orated warmly in irregular intervals, confessed that he dwelled on a private island off the South Carolina coastline three hours northeast, and had volunteered for eight straight years to gain gratis admission. Upon hearing about my home state’s geography, he wasted no time on his snarky retort: “So, when ya leavin’?” As I removed my wet hat and carped about the unrelenting humidity, Keith, semi-slouched in a comfortable looking folding chair and wearing a yellow hat with GALLERY stitched in green on the side, a green windbreaker, khaki pants, and almost imperceptible socks concealed in his white golf shoes, offered a bemused, “Nah, it ain’t bad,” in tandem with a flippant smirk concerning my complaint. Ten or fifteen agreeably speechless minutes passed, beats savored sedately admiring four white-suited caddies with pencils and notepads rolling balls to appraise the green’s frightening curvature mixed with the subordinates softly verbalizing their findings to one another, until a loquacious patron rankled Keith’s subtle demeanor.
“This isn’t a very sexy hole,” the stranger pontificated and, on the brink of incurring my mock ire, the frequent attendee bemoaned how as The National’s most historically difficult hole, it withheld birdie chances, his primary motive for plunking his chair at the third green. “What’s wrong with that?” Keith earnestly replied, his snug jacket crinkling on his thin frame as he half-turned toward the man. The gray-bearded instigator swiftly did an about-face and avowed his seemingly heartfelt affection for the hole, listing Ms. Derek’s incomparable attributes, the natural amphitheater of pines encompassing the green and close-at-hand scoreboard, restrooms, and concessions of equal value to him, graciously thanking Keith for his time as he tucked his tale and scampered off. Preoccupied with ogling, I moved my right knee and grazed the camera, rescuing it to snap a fairway picture Moore said he’d draw in colored pencil to memorialize the faux homecoming.
A furtive reappearance from the Securitas officer led to him hypothetically debating how deep the foregrounded bunker burrowed, its treachery a fashionable topic when daydreaming about the course’s forty-four granular outposts. The bunkers, filled with quartz essential to computer chips, are sweetly correlated with bowls of refined sugar, their whiteness imported from an otherwise unfamiliar North Carolina golf club’s stash. Memorizing nuggets like this is my defense when neglecting how to attach windshield wipers or claiming I couldn’t find time to replace threadbare socks. “If there was a Masters Jeopardy! you’d get all the questions right,” Brian said to flatter me later in the week, an allegorical green jacket for this trivia aficionado that metamorphosed into brutal irony when he needled me for a hole in my shirt soon thereafter. Eavesdropping that the round was close to its inexorable conclusion, I shook Keith’s hand farewell and, as he no doubt wished for, silently expressed sun-soaked gratitude for the unmatched camaraderie. Ten out of ten.
★ ★ ★ ★
One more for the road? I was hopeless to resist gorging on a club sandwich—untraditional club fare composed of turkey, ham, cheese, mustard, and mayonnaise on a sesame seed bun—and an unsweetened iced tea to complement my studying the recently lengthened thirteenth hole tee box. In a weird twist, the drunkest man I’ve ever detected at The National, clutching a stack of green cups, kept yelling “JOHN!” to his friend petting the air, the international signal to pipe down. Beer is in green cups whereas nonalcoholic liquids are in clear cups, another form of damage control. A nearby security guard stared obliviously into the distance while I felt awful for the punchy fool, haunted by my own inebriated decision-making at a bygone concert or two, certain he’d have fleeting remembrances with a self-loathing chaser. Unwilling to mine a shred of schadenfreude from the messy spectacle like some onlookers had, I searched for a gallery guard to answer a pair of last-minute questions.
Three of them lazed alongside the fourteenth fairway chewing the fat when I cut in like the friendless guy at a party. Fairly confident I was in the know, I asked for confirmation that the wooden structure semi-hidden at the eleventh green was a pumphouse that controlled the flow of water from the tributary of Rae’s Creek, the hazard that additionally defends the twelfth green and left side of the thirteenth fairway, nicknamed Amen Corner. “Is that what that is?” one flummoxed guard said to his colleagues, the oracle of the three affirming that National overseers dammed the flow during downpours to avert flooding. “I’ll be damned,” the first guy said with a straight face. Incapable of uncovering any Chinese fir trees, the cypresses for which the hole is named, I trailed the man’s pointer finger to a duo mingling in plain sight with interchangeable conifers on the fairway’s opposite side. Sensing that their collective day was ready to wrap, I encountered a security guard by the seventeenth fairway who assumed my blank-faced bliss meant I was lost.
“I had a Masters first today,” I said to the friendly man. “I saw a squirrel!” He told me that he too had been bewildered when spotting a fox squirrel in the morning before I suggested that they’d both likely been fed to snakes by now, earning a wry laugh. The pungent smell of sulfur pervaded the air as I refilled my empty cup at the water fountain near the sixteenth green and read the plaque honoring Jack Nicklaus. Owen had unsurprisingly informed me that seeing the Golden Bear’s legendary comeback to win the 1986 Masters was the most compelling event he covered in person. A quick march to the eighteenth tee for a second peek at the tree-lined fairway tunnel was the day’s maraschino cherry, offsetting when the final concession cashier I paid had to deliver the unfortunate news that ice cream sandwiches had sold out in the middle of the afternoon.
At 5:30 I resigned myself to decamp via the South Gate, purposely slowing my pace to avoid scaring a mother and son speaking French ten yards ahead of me as groundskeepers sprinkled a powdered green mixture on fifth hole fairway divots like an assembly line of bakers dusting confectioners’ sugar. How does one bid adieu to a sublime stretch that exceeded such lofty expectations? A lady in repose by the gate muttered an amiable goodbye, a laconic sendoff that struck me as the quintessential contrast to the apprehension that overpowered me seven hours prior. The same parking official recognized me and said he’d checked on the SUV periodically to ensure its safekeeping, causing me to regret not having a few bucks to tip him as a thank you. Moments after she texted me, I dialed Sue to recap the day and found her predictably ecstatic about every step of the half marathon I walked. When we disconnected, the screen reported that our call had lasted forty-four minutes, just another slice of numerological synchronicity to add to the day’s tally.
It'd be safe to speculate that dinner wasn’t a significant concern, but with only bananas, oranges, and roasted peanuts at the hotel, I drove the extra miles to North Augusta to grocery shop in my bud-for-an-hour Keith’s home state, my maiden trip to South Carolina. While eating a Cobb salad and watching the Golf Channel’s nonstop Masters coverage, I browsed the yearly annual and read a recap of Adam Scott’s playoff win in 2013, the first time I’d been in Augusta for Masters week. How could I have known a decade ago that one golf course’s magnetism would become a fundamental part of my personality? As perfunctory as it may scan, The Masters simply isn’t a golf tournament to me, it’s a philosophy.
The moveable feast ended with a Cliff Roberts curtain call: a slice of butter pound cake. Wednesday morning would begin with a reset countdown to my next reunion with The National, not that I’d ignore the par-three and main tournament coverage while still in town, riveted by their brilliant verdancy and high drama on television, as is tradition. The weekend would contain Sue’s birthday and Easter, two reminders that each new day gives reasons to celebrate. As time ticked past midnight and I reluctantly readied for sleep, an image flickered in my head until burning bright. The search for the tree of life, or mine anyway, was over. I began making plans to revisit it next year, but in the interim, I’d be basking in its revitalizing properties at the fourth green in my mind.