San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Magical, mystical world inside Augusta National
The media center for the Masters golf tournament is located on the northern edge of the property, an expansive, modern building with an elegant wood ceiling and a wall of windows looking across the practice range.
To reach the course, you ride in motorized green carts through what seems like the backlot of a movie studio or Disneyland. There’s a loading dock, there’s the back of the merchandise store and main concession area, there are some hospitality chalets, there’s a stone-lined underpass. You get dropped off behind a row of hedges, then walk down a winding path under a magnolia tree.
You emerge from the shadows, turn right and, blinking in the sunlight, there it is before you in all its technicolor grandeur: Augusta National.
My first thought as I strode onto a heavily trafficked apron next to the first fairway was, smart, they put down matching artificial turf because this is where most patrons enter the course.
Second thought: Wow, they really matched the seams well with the fairway grass.
Third thought (reaching down and touching it): Wait, this isn’t fake. This is real grass.
It’s that manicured, that pristine, that perfect.
“The turf condition,” Augusta National Chairman Fred Ridley beamed earlier this week, “is excellent.”
Everything is, of course. The azaleas and dogwoods are always in bloom. Circles of pine straw are at the base of every tree. Birds chirp incessantly. A maintenance crew hides in the bushes behind the 12th green, magically appearing between groups with blowers and whisps on long sticks to remove the stray pine needle or grain of sand that dared sully the immaculate surface. The trees are filled with thousands of pine cones that, gravity suggests, will drop, except by the next morning there aren’t any on the ground.
They say the most noticeable difference in the course between real life and the distortion of the television camera is how hilly it is, how steep the climb is up to the ninth and 18th greens.
And it is. The course drops 145 feet from just the 10th tee to the 11th green, the equivalent of a 14-story building.
But everything is bigger, bolder, brighter at Augusta. The grass is greener, the azaleas pinker, the flags yellower, the sand whiter (specially imported from North Carolina with a high quartz content), the ponds darker (thanks, reportedly, to dye), the fairways wider, the lips on the bunkers higher, the banks on Rae’s Creek steeper, the Georgia pines taller, the birds louder, the humidity thicker.
When three-time champion Gary Palmer turned off Washington Road and drove through the iron gate onto Magnolia Lane, he made his grandsons turn down the car radio so they could ride in silent reverence under the world’s most famous tree canopy. Usually, he gets out of the car and walks past the 61 magnolia trees on either side.
“As a sign of gratitude,” Player says.
England’s Lee Westwood played in his 20th Masters this year.
“I still remember the first time I came here like it was yesterday, really,” Westwood said. “The walk over the 11th down the hill, seeing the 12th in the distance, it still sent chills down my spine just to see Amen Corner in the distance there. It’s a very special place.”
It is golf ’s Mecca, Shangri-la, Valhalla, Xanadu, Olympus. Magical, mythical, mystical.
Cellphones are strictly verboten on the course among the fans, ahem, patrons. Personal cameras are allowed only during practice rounds and banned during the tournament as well.
“I know that we have now become an outlier,” Ridley said in 2019. “But I think it’s part of the ambience of the Masters. I read (where) Rory Mcilroy … said it was really nice to be out there on the golf course and not seeing everyone looking down at their hand with their cellphone.
“I don’t believe that’s a policy that anyone should expect is going to change in the near future, if ever.”
It does something else, though. It forces your focus to be entirely on the course, to recording images of the azaleas framing the iconic 12th green in your mind, to detaching from the world outside the gates and soaking in the majesty of Bobby Jones’ masterpiece.
Pimento cheese sandwiches still cost $1.50. Beers are $5 (domestic or imported). Tee boxes are marked by nondescript logs. Caddies wear white coveralls. There are no electronic scoreboards, only men and women sticking their hands through holes in the back on manual ones to hang red and green numbers. You can only purchase merchandise here, during the tournament.
The only intrusion from the outside world is the occasional police siren piercing the hushed silence, or a small jet overhead banking into its final approach to Augusta Regional Airport.
Which is amazing, considering how close Augusta National is to Augusta, Ga.
Across Washington Road is a Circle K and CVS Pharmacy. And an Exxon gas station. And Arby’s, Wendy’s, Hooters, Little Caesars, Mcdonald’s, Vallarta tacos, Krispy Kreme donuts, Curry Hut. There’s a barber shop and nail salon, a Jiffy Lube and tire store.
Just down the road are several depressed neighborhoods, with vacant lots and shuttered businesses. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 23 percent of residents lived below the poverty line in 2019 compared with 13 percent in the state. The per capita income was $22,709.
It’s not like Torrey Pines Golf Course, host of the U.S. Open in June, which is an extension of the picturesque bluffs above the Pacific Ocean, fully visible from the road and the hospital and the university campus and the glider port and hiking trails.
Augusta National chose to grow bamboo along Washington Road, and you generally grow bamboo, which shoots up fast and thick and tall, for one reason: Because you don’t want people looking in.
You can dine at the Olive Garden on Washington Road, and have no idea you’re a pitching wedge from golf ’s Garden of Eden.
But that’s just it, the contrast — the stark juxtaposition — that makes the azaleas pinker and the chirping birds louder. That heightens the senses, that intensifies the ambiance, that summons the goosebumps.
You walk off the course, down the winding path under the magnolia tree and get in a motorized green cart for the ride back to the media center with its stadiumsized video screen and giant electronic scoreboard, with two smaller touch screens at each wood-paneled work station, with wireless internet, with cellphones permissible.
And you wonder: Was it real?