You want to know what's wrong with the Masters, before you even get to Hootie and Martha?How much time do you have?
The Masters has become Clifford Roberts, that old golf gangster, banishing Jack Whitaker for calling the gallery on eighteen a "mob." The Masters has become CBS letting Roberts do that. And letting Augusta National tell them that Gary McCord can't work the tournament anymore because he said it looked as if they had used "bikini wax" on the greens.
The Masters has become every announcer who nearly weeps over the Butler Cabin and a tradition unlike any other and the cathedral of freaking pines and azaleas, who make everybody in the viewing audience afraid they'll go into diabetic shock.
The Masters has become leaving Magnolia Lane and finding yourself in the middle of Strip Mall, America, feeling as if you're waiting for a NASCAR race to break out.
The Masters has become how long it took for people who looked like Lee Elder to do something besides carry your bag at Augusta National, or maybe serve you a drink.
The Masters has become all that, and now it's become Hootie Johnson and Martha Burk and the circus that came to town last year and will surely be back this year.
The Masters has become Hootie acting as if he is protecting his club from terrorists by keeping women out. He says he is fighting for the rights of private clubs. Martha says she is fighting for the rights of women, acting as if the world will be a better place if she can get Sandra Day O'Connor a tee time. And you know something?Both of them are full of it; they only care about saving face at this point.
And now they are the face of the Masters.
The Masters deserves better than this.
Not because of the people who run it or the secret-handshake members or all the fans who leave every year with yellow-flag-in-Georgia golf shirts and hats and umbrellas.
Certainly not because of the people who broadcast it.
The golf tournament that Bobby Jones started seventy years ago was supposed to be a monument to Jones, to his grace and his spirit. Over time it grew into the closest thing we have to a Super Bowl in golf.
Even more than the U.S. Open, our national championship?Sure. Masters week became the time of the year when the entire country felt as if it was going to a golf tournament, like there was some kind of town meeting of golf going on by the time the leaders got to Amen Corner and the par fives on the back nine on Sunday.
I haven't been to the Masters for a while, but the memories I have of it are as good and lasting as any I've gotten in golf. And I saw Nicklaus versus Watson at Turnberry with my own eyes, and saw Nicklaus come from behind and win at St. Andrews in '78. And watched Davis Love III win his PGA at Winged Foot. And was standing about thirty yards from Corey Pavin when he hit his four-wood stiff at Shinnecock in '95.
I remember being with Dan Jenkins at one Masters in the eighties as he got up from his seat at the head of the table on the second floor of the clubhouse—the real press headquarters of any Masters. "Let's go," he said. "It's time for the lore walk."
Jenkins has only been coming to the Masters for more than fifty years and can make his way through the trees with his eyes closed to where Hogan did this or Byron did that, the exact spot where Jack or Arnie began to make their moves. He is, for my money, the greatest sportswriter of them all, and always did his best work at Augusta.
So we walked out number one and cut across the second fairway to a spot behind the third green, and he told me how pissed everybody had been when the event switched to a thirty-six-hole cut in 1957, and how the rye greens "used to be slicker than the top of Sam Snead's head."
"But nowhere near as fast as bent," Jenkins continued, and then noted that Nicklaus was probably the only player who ever won the Masters on rye and on bent.
"You can write that one down," he added.
Then we were on the back nine, where he told me the story about Dick Siderowf, the great amateur, and how he was playing a practice round in front of Hogan in the old days, and how every time he'd finish his hole, he'd wait to see how Hogan played it. This was when, back in the day, Siderowf was proud that he'd hit enough of a drive on number fifteen to reach the green in two.
