Because You Never Asked

THE MASTERS

     (This essay was written in 1996. With the sporting world now tainted by the buffoonery of a Terrell Owens, the steroid brouhahas in the Olympics, cycling and Barry Bonds’ baseball, along with the judging controversies in figure skating, the match fixing scandals in cricket (cricket!) and the off field loutishness and criminality of many famous athletes, perhaps it is more timely than ever.)

     Once a year, upon making my annual pilgrimage to New York to visit my family, I go to a driving range with my golfer brother and bang out a few balls. My singular interest is the long ball and I only use the driver. Unfortunately, golf balls are like young dogs fresh off a leash, going where they please for no apparent reason. At times, I will hit one in the direction I am aiming, an occurrence whose joy is mitigated as I watch it skip and hop the pathetic distance a ground ball will consume. I am neither a golfer nor golf enthusiast,

     but I love The Masters golf tournament.

     I write this piece on the Saturday morning of the 1996 edition of one of the world’s signature sporting events. This essay will make no mention of competitive golf, of who’s ahead, who missed the cut, or this or that spectacular shot or costly flub. The golf is secondary. What really matters is “The Masters” and what it stands for.

     The Masters has not been without controversy over the years, stemming from a certain degree of residual racism left over from its southern American roots. In the long run, such negativity pales in comparison to the positive grandeur of the event.

     The Masters is America’s version of Wimbledon. It has remained a pristine pond of high standards in a bottom line world of commercial mind pollution. Like a great artist who has never compromised its values for pecuniary gain, its integrity, along with the quality of its work, has survived intact. This is not the “Weed-Eater-Bud-Bowl-Masters”, this is The Masters! It stands pure and unadulterated on its own merits. There are no glittering cars sitting in the middle of a lake, waiting to be claimed with a hole in one. There are no Snoopy-Beer Blimps hovering overhead. There are no corporate tents or promotional high jinx. The winner couldn’t care less about going to Disneyland. My God! --- for as far as the eye can see there is not a single McDonald’s logo, not the faintest hint of a corporate theme anywhere on the course. This is Shakespeare and Cervantes, it’s Picasso living strictly on the income his own concept of art will fetch, free of market pressures, of commercial prostitution. This can only happen when something is so good, it is able to rise above such groveling.

     The Masters is that good.

     The most compelling feature of The Masters is the course itself. In a world that has been given over to chemically preserved, artificially flavored food, dispensed with a notable lack of romance at the local drive-thru, The Augusta National golf course maintains the highest standards of home cooking. Compared to Augusta, many of the courses we now see on the pro tour seem cut from the same monotonous stencil. They are usually blatant intrusions into the natural landscape, having no relation at all to the ecosystem they’ve rudely interrupted. They’ve been gouged out of the desert, pounded into the seaside, carved into a leveled forest, their contrived island greens dumped into the middle of an artificial lake. They are like stage props that could be hauled away in an Allied Van.

     But then there’s Augusta.

     Augusta seems to belong to the ecology of its place. It lives in harmonious fraternity with the woods and streams that surround and flow through it. The trees have real, scaly bark, and the course seems to have been constructed around the water hazards, and not the other way around. Many of these streams and ponds have names and can be seen as a natural part of a real watershed, flowing predictably downhill to a bigger stream, which is a tributary of a river that flows to the sea. They actually seem to follow the natural contours of the land.

     If we could imagine a golfing version of the baseball movie, “A Field of Dreams”, Augusta National would be the course. When night fell over The Masters and the golfers and their fans had gone home and all the golf bags had been snugly stowed in the locker room, out of the darkened forest would emerge the Native Americans who once inhabited this land, with their spears and bows, patiently fishing and hunting the streams and forests of Augusta, as if nothing had really changed.

     There is a spiritual quality here that that brings out the best in people, that makes them behave as if they were in church, as if they wouldn’t want to “dis” the hallowed ground of such a mystical shrine. Augusta is living proof that the more we distance ourselves from our natural roots, the more we fill in the marshes and swamps, the more we level the forests for another Cinema 6 or Wal-Mart, or for another brand new stadium to replace the one we’ve grown tired of in just 20 years, the more insecure and neurotic we will become. The Masters is security and continuity. The Masters is the cyclical renewal of something we can count on, set into the natural rhythms of nature, planned to coincide with the mysterious appearance of the azaleas and dogwoods which splatter the landscape with their glorious colors. The golf would become so much less consequential without this unconsciously assimilated natural beauty, a beauty we are drifting further and further from all the time.

     Can there be any doubt that for those amongst us who are golfers and make the “cut” into Heaven, the course “up there” would be Augusta National?

     I had originally intended to end this essay on that note. Having now seen the completion of this year’s tournament, I shall reverse my stance with regard to talking about the golf, but only as a way to corroborate what I’ve already said about the uplifting qualities of The Masters.

     This year’s edition was plump with the anguish of a Greek tragedy. Greg Norman, arguably the world’s finest golfer, agonizingly blew a big lead on the final day with all the rhythm of a Chinese water torture. Although his reputation as an athlete may have been tarnished, his stature as a man has been enhanced. For the final two hours, as he plunked balls into ponds, quivered over short putts and frittered it all away, he never lost his dignity, never acted like a jerk, never quit trying to right a sinking ship. Finally, when all was lost and that final putt sealed his ignominious fate, he warmly embraced his conqueror in a scene I’ll never forget. The Masters, while providing Norman his most humiliating defeat, had also made him a better human being.

     At a time in our history where much of what is crass and prurient in our society is reflected in the sporting part of our culture --- the “student-athlete” charade in our universities, the teams jumping from one city to another, the millionaire players and owners stealing the game from the fans, the utter lack of loyalty to one’s team, the self-centered clowning on the field that used to be considered in poor taste, the devaluation of sportsmanship and the win-at-all-costs attitude, even at the youngest levels --- one can still turn to The Masters and say, “hey, this is an American thing, this is what we are capable of if we could ever remember what is really important again”.

     Any nation capable of staging The Masters, cannot be considered a totally hopeless entity.

     Amen.

     (Other relevant essays include “Tiger Robinson” and “Coed Augusta?”). 

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Email: JerryG@postcman.info