Beneath Augusta National, the world’s most exclusive golf club and most venerated domain of cultivated grass, there is a vast network of pipes and mechanical blowers, which help drain and ventilate the putting greens. The SubAir System was developed in the nineteen-nineties, by the aptly named course superintendent Marsh Benson, in an effort to mitigate the effects of nature on this precious facsimile of it. When the system’s fans blow one way, they provide air to the densely seeded bent grass of the putting surface. This promotes growth. When the fans are reversed, they create a suction effect, and leach water from the greens. This promotes firmness. The professionals who arrive at Augusta every April to compete in the Masters Tournament, the event for which the club is known, expect to be tested by greens that are hard and fast. Amid all the other immodesties and peculiarities of Augusta, the greens, ultimately, are the thing. Herbert Warren Wind, who for decades covered the sport at this magazine and at Sports Illustrated, once asked a colleague, on arriving in Augusta, “Are they firm?” The antecedent was understood. In 1994, Gary McCord, a golf commentator for CBS, the network that has televised the tournament for sixty-three years, said on the air, “They don’t cut the greens here at Augusta, they use bikini wax.” He was banned from the broadcast.
It is by now hardly scandalous to note that Augusta National—called the National by its members and devotees, and Augusta by everyone else—is an environment of extreme artifice, an elaborate television soundstage, a fantasia of the fifties, a Disneyclub in the Georgia pines. Some of the components of the illusion are a matter of speculation, as the club is notoriously stingy with information about itself. It has been accepted as fact that recalcitrant patches of grass are painted green and that the ponds used to be dyed blue. Because the azaleas seem always to bloom right on time, skeptics have propagated the myth that the club’s horticulturists freeze the blossoms, in advance of the tournament, or swap out early bloomers for more coöperative specimens. Pine straw is imported. Pinecones are deported. There is a curious absence of fauna. One hardly ever sees a squirrel or a bird. I’d been told that birdsong—a lot of it, at any rate—is piped in through speakers hidden in the greenery. (In 2000, CBS got caught doing some overdubbing of its own, after a birder noticed that the trills and chirps on a golf broadcast belonged to non-indigenous species.)
You hear about this kind of stuff, before your first visit, just as you get the more commonplace spiel that everything is perfect, that the course is even more majestic in real life than it is on TV, and that, in spite of all the walking, you’ll put on five pounds. Pimento-cheese sandwiches, egg-salad sandwiches, peach-ice-cream sandwiches, MoonPies, underpriced beer. You are urged to adopt the terminology favored by the tournament hosts and embraced by CBS. Spectators are “patrons.” The rough—longer grass that lines the fairways—is the “second cut.” (And it is controversial, because its abundance contravenes the wishes of the patriarchs, who designed the course to have a dearth of rough. Gary McCord may have been onto something.) The traps are bunkers, and what appears to patrons and television viewers to be the whitest sand in golf is technically not sand but waste from feldspar mines in North Carolina.
Augusta National is sometimes likened to Oz. For one thing, it’s a Technicolor fantasyland embedded in an otherwise ordinary tract of American sprawl. Washington Road, the main approach to the club, is a forlorn strip of Waffle Houses, pool-supply stores, and cheap-except-during-the-Masters hotels. In the Hooters parking lot during tournament week, fans line up for selfies with John Daly, the dissolute pro and avatar of mid-round cigarettes and booze. But step through the club’s metal detectors and badge scanners, and you enter a lush, high-rent realm, where you are not allowed to run, talk loudly, or cheer a player’s mistakes. Order is maintained by security guards, who for decades were provided by the Pinkerton detective agency. (Though Pinkerton was acquired by a Swedish company called Securitas, in 1999, many patrons still refer to the guards as Pinkertons.) In 2012, a fan who stole onto a fairway to take a cup of bunker sand was thrown in jail.
I showed up on a Monday afternoon before the tournament, just as a series of storms swept in, and as the spectators, there to witness the first rounds of practice, were being herded off the grounds. Owing to the threat of lightning, play was suspended for the day and the club was closed to visitors. The throngs poured out of the gates into the real world, just as I was leaving it. I took refuge in what the club calls the press building, a recently constructed Taj Mahal of media mollycoddling. This columned, ersatz-antebellum megamansion, in operation just ten days a year, has got to be the fanciest media center in sports. It has state-of-the-art working quarters, radio and television studios, locker rooms, a gratis restaurant with made-to-order omelettes for breakfast and a bountiful hot lunch, as well as a grab-and-go counter with craft beers, artisanal cheeses and jerkies, and a full array of Augusta’s famous sandwiches, each wrapped in green paper.
Such generosity and care, for the journalists, reflects the role that so many of them have played in burnishing the mythology of the Masters; it also suggests an effort to keep them away from the course and the clubhouse. The press is provided with every disincentive to venture out. The gang’s all there. Even the bathrooms are capacious, and staffed with attendants. Each member of the media has a work station with a brass nameplate, a leather swivel chair, a pair of computer monitors, and a surfeit of real-time tournament footage and information—far more data than one would be able to gather out on the golf course, especially because, outside the press building, reporters are not allowed to carry cell phones. (The phone ban, strictly enforced and punishable by immediate removal from the grounds, applies to patrons and members, too. One morning during the tournament this year, a story went around that the club had done a spot inspection of staff headquarters and found that an employee had hidden a cell phone between two slices of bread.) The golfers and the tournament officials appear dutifully for press conferences; why bother heading out to the clubhouse to hound them for quotes? No phones are allowed at the press conferences, either. The club wants control over sounds and pictures—the content. The club can tell who’s who, and who’s where, by rfid chips affixed to each press badge.
The working area faced the practice range, which the players had abandoned, once the rain began hammering down. As dusk approached, the rain briefly let up, and a battalion of men in baggy white coveralls—the official caddie costume at Augusta—fanned out across the range, to retrieve the hundreds of balls that the players had struck there earlier in the day. In the gloaming, these white jumpsuits, moving irregularly amid the deep green of the manicured grounds, brought to mind an avant-garde film about a lunatic asylum: the inmates, in their hospital gowns, out for a constitutional.
The course was still closed the next morning. I caught a ride to the clubhouse on a golf cart with a member, a so-called green jacket, named John Carr, an oil magnate from Ireland, who told me that he was on the media committee.
The members in attendance during the tournament (and at dinner, whenever they visit) are required to wear their green blazers. The club’s founders decreed, in the earliest years of the tournament, that any members present had to make themselves available to patrons who might be in need of assistance. The jackets tell you who the members are. It is an oddity of the place that its members insist on secrecy—there are some three hundred, but there is no public list, and omertà is strictly enforced—and yet here, at the biggest golf tournament of the year, they parade about in uniform, wearing name tags: Roger Goodell, Sam Nunn, Rex Tillerson.
The jackets themselves never leave the grounds; they hang in the members’ lockers. Each winner of the Masters gets a green jacket, too, which is presented immediately after the victory by the club’s chairman and the previous year’s winner, in an awkward ceremony staged for television in the basement of a house called the Butler Cabin, near the eighteenth hole. The solemnity surrounding this perennial observance suggests the initiation ritual of a really square fraternity. Jim Nantz, the longtime host of the CBS broadcast and of the Butler Cabin sacrament, has perfected an air of unctuous self-satisfaction that signals even to the casual viewer that there is something batty about the whole enterprise. The way that Nantz repeats the tag line—“A tradition unlike any other”—assumes a sinister, cultish edge. Everyone associated with the club seems to take all this very seriously. On the official Masters podcast, the host, Marty Smith, said to the celebrity chef David Chang, as though reciting a prayer, “The respect for the grounds and the reverence for the event permeate us as human beings and we thereby disseminate that same respect to our peers.”
“It’s a beautiful thing,” Chang replied. “It almost restores my faith in humanity.” As one long-standing media-badge holder told me, after he’d spent ten minutes singing the club’s praises on the record, “These guys are out of their fucking minds. They think it’s supernatural.”
[ed. See also: If Brooks Koepka Is the Future of Golf, What Does That Future Look Like? (The Ringer).]
It is by now hardly scandalous to note that Augusta National—called the National by its members and devotees, and Augusta by everyone else—is an environment of extreme artifice, an elaborate television soundstage, a fantasia of the fifties, a Disneyclub in the Georgia pines. Some of the components of the illusion are a matter of speculation, as the club is notoriously stingy with information about itself. It has been accepted as fact that recalcitrant patches of grass are painted green and that the ponds used to be dyed blue. Because the azaleas seem always to bloom right on time, skeptics have propagated the myth that the club’s horticulturists freeze the blossoms, in advance of the tournament, or swap out early bloomers for more coöperative specimens. Pine straw is imported. Pinecones are deported. There is a curious absence of fauna. One hardly ever sees a squirrel or a bird. I’d been told that birdsong—a lot of it, at any rate—is piped in through speakers hidden in the greenery. (In 2000, CBS got caught doing some overdubbing of its own, after a birder noticed that the trills and chirps on a golf broadcast belonged to non-indigenous species.)You hear about this kind of stuff, before your first visit, just as you get the more commonplace spiel that everything is perfect, that the course is even more majestic in real life than it is on TV, and that, in spite of all the walking, you’ll put on five pounds. Pimento-cheese sandwiches, egg-salad sandwiches, peach-ice-cream sandwiches, MoonPies, underpriced beer. You are urged to adopt the terminology favored by the tournament hosts and embraced by CBS. Spectators are “patrons.” The rough—longer grass that lines the fairways—is the “second cut.” (And it is controversial, because its abundance contravenes the wishes of the patriarchs, who designed the course to have a dearth of rough. Gary McCord may have been onto something.) The traps are bunkers, and what appears to patrons and television viewers to be the whitest sand in golf is technically not sand but waste from feldspar mines in North Carolina.
Augusta National is sometimes likened to Oz. For one thing, it’s a Technicolor fantasyland embedded in an otherwise ordinary tract of American sprawl. Washington Road, the main approach to the club, is a forlorn strip of Waffle Houses, pool-supply stores, and cheap-except-during-the-Masters hotels. In the Hooters parking lot during tournament week, fans line up for selfies with John Daly, the dissolute pro and avatar of mid-round cigarettes and booze. But step through the club’s metal detectors and badge scanners, and you enter a lush, high-rent realm, where you are not allowed to run, talk loudly, or cheer a player’s mistakes. Order is maintained by security guards, who for decades were provided by the Pinkerton detective agency. (Though Pinkerton was acquired by a Swedish company called Securitas, in 1999, many patrons still refer to the guards as Pinkertons.) In 2012, a fan who stole onto a fairway to take a cup of bunker sand was thrown in jail.
I showed up on a Monday afternoon before the tournament, just as a series of storms swept in, and as the spectators, there to witness the first rounds of practice, were being herded off the grounds. Owing to the threat of lightning, play was suspended for the day and the club was closed to visitors. The throngs poured out of the gates into the real world, just as I was leaving it. I took refuge in what the club calls the press building, a recently constructed Taj Mahal of media mollycoddling. This columned, ersatz-antebellum megamansion, in operation just ten days a year, has got to be the fanciest media center in sports. It has state-of-the-art working quarters, radio and television studios, locker rooms, a gratis restaurant with made-to-order omelettes for breakfast and a bountiful hot lunch, as well as a grab-and-go counter with craft beers, artisanal cheeses and jerkies, and a full array of Augusta’s famous sandwiches, each wrapped in green paper.
Such generosity and care, for the journalists, reflects the role that so many of them have played in burnishing the mythology of the Masters; it also suggests an effort to keep them away from the course and the clubhouse. The press is provided with every disincentive to venture out. The gang’s all there. Even the bathrooms are capacious, and staffed with attendants. Each member of the media has a work station with a brass nameplate, a leather swivel chair, a pair of computer monitors, and a surfeit of real-time tournament footage and information—far more data than one would be able to gather out on the golf course, especially because, outside the press building, reporters are not allowed to carry cell phones. (The phone ban, strictly enforced and punishable by immediate removal from the grounds, applies to patrons and members, too. One morning during the tournament this year, a story went around that the club had done a spot inspection of staff headquarters and found that an employee had hidden a cell phone between two slices of bread.) The golfers and the tournament officials appear dutifully for press conferences; why bother heading out to the clubhouse to hound them for quotes? No phones are allowed at the press conferences, either. The club wants control over sounds and pictures—the content. The club can tell who’s who, and who’s where, by rfid chips affixed to each press badge.
The working area faced the practice range, which the players had abandoned, once the rain began hammering down. As dusk approached, the rain briefly let up, and a battalion of men in baggy white coveralls—the official caddie costume at Augusta—fanned out across the range, to retrieve the hundreds of balls that the players had struck there earlier in the day. In the gloaming, these white jumpsuits, moving irregularly amid the deep green of the manicured grounds, brought to mind an avant-garde film about a lunatic asylum: the inmates, in their hospital gowns, out for a constitutional.
The course was still closed the next morning. I caught a ride to the clubhouse on a golf cart with a member, a so-called green jacket, named John Carr, an oil magnate from Ireland, who told me that he was on the media committee.
The members in attendance during the tournament (and at dinner, whenever they visit) are required to wear their green blazers. The club’s founders decreed, in the earliest years of the tournament, that any members present had to make themselves available to patrons who might be in need of assistance. The jackets tell you who the members are. It is an oddity of the place that its members insist on secrecy—there are some three hundred, but there is no public list, and omertà is strictly enforced—and yet here, at the biggest golf tournament of the year, they parade about in uniform, wearing name tags: Roger Goodell, Sam Nunn, Rex Tillerson.
The jackets themselves never leave the grounds; they hang in the members’ lockers. Each winner of the Masters gets a green jacket, too, which is presented immediately after the victory by the club’s chairman and the previous year’s winner, in an awkward ceremony staged for television in the basement of a house called the Butler Cabin, near the eighteenth hole. The solemnity surrounding this perennial observance suggests the initiation ritual of a really square fraternity. Jim Nantz, the longtime host of the CBS broadcast and of the Butler Cabin sacrament, has perfected an air of unctuous self-satisfaction that signals even to the casual viewer that there is something batty about the whole enterprise. The way that Nantz repeats the tag line—“A tradition unlike any other”—assumes a sinister, cultish edge. Everyone associated with the club seems to take all this very seriously. On the official Masters podcast, the host, Marty Smith, said to the celebrity chef David Chang, as though reciting a prayer, “The respect for the grounds and the reverence for the event permeate us as human beings and we thereby disseminate that same respect to our peers.”
“It’s a beautiful thing,” Chang replied. “It almost restores my faith in humanity.” As one long-standing media-badge holder told me, after he’d spent ten minutes singing the club’s praises on the record, “These guys are out of their fucking minds. They think it’s supernatural.”
by Nick Paumgarten, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Leo Espinosa[ed. See also: If Brooks Koepka Is the Future of Golf, What Does That Future Look Like? (The Ringer).]
