PROFIT & DROSS
How does the Masters get away with its archaic and pompous absurdities? In a word... money
BILLY PAYNE, the chairman of Augusta National Golf Club, has a drawl that could have drifted off the set of Gone with the Wind. His southern accent is thick and faithful to somewhere hot with tradition and history. So obsessed is the golf club he fronts with its routines that part of his address to the media this year dealt with trying to re-grow parts of a tree that was destroyed on the course in February last year.
Dead wood was celebrated at the biggest sports event taking place anywhere in the world this week.
The Eisenhower Tree, named after club member and US president Dwight D, was ruined by an ice storm.
But the big news around here was that, according to Payne, ‘we have been successful, so far, in preserving this famous tree’s genetics’ – the surviving seedling was not made available for media comment.
However, Payne was not done with the kindling, as a cross section of the departed tree, contained in a glass case, was unveiled. It is now to be presented to the Eisenhower Presidential Library.
If it only had arms they could put a green jacket on it.
The quality of sport is enough, year after year, to overcome the absurdities around this tournament. And, if some of the traditions of Augusta National are rightly criticised, it is accurate, too, to note that the painstaking curation of its own history adds irresistibly to this week.
Payne’s hymn to a seedling is the latest curiosity at the Masters but calculation is as important to Augusta National as its sweet old myths and the stories of yore.
A radio programme on a local Augusta station discussed the business of the club. It claimed that in the past year alone it has spent $65 million buying up properties near the course.
As interesting as that fact, was hearing this reported on a show being broadcast from the city. Sometimes it appears as if the entire region is obliged to think nothing but happy thoughts about the Masters.
This is not an evidently prosperous city. Parts of it look irredeemably rundown, and more of it simply careworn. Data for the year 2013
showed the per capita average income for Augusta was more than $5,000 less than the national average.
Many Augusta businesses generate more than half of their annual business during Masters’ week. Everyone connected with the place realises the value of these four days each April, and the days of practice and ceremonies that precede them.
No other Major is played on the same course every year and Augusta has capitalised: most of America’s golf carts are made in this city, and the organisational expertise required to run the Masters has spread towards other sports, with one of the world’s largest triathlons now held here.
It has been estimated that the value to Augusta of golf and the Masters in particular exceeds $5 billion every year, with over 60,000 people employed in industries connected to the tournament and the sport.
Raising difficult issues about the Masters locally is not necessarily good for business, but talking about mildly challenging ones like the reported ambitions for expansion of Augusta National is not widespread, either.
But Augusta National is an ambitious institution. An apartment complex adjoining part of the course was purchased for over $8 million in 2013 and then knocked to create a car park.
Since Payne became chairman in 2006, the club is reported to have spent in excess of $13 million on building facilities for corporate entertainment.
It has been claimed this is a strategy to keep the land around the course free of property and one observer noted that the club would ‘like to move to the country. If they can’t move to the country, they are moving the country to the course’.
ITS l ocation is interesting, sitting as it does alongside Washington Road, one of the busiest routes in the city and less than five miles from the downtown area of Augusta. It is an idyll hiding itself from an adjoining world of traffic jams and high emissions.
The club is paying contractors for a public road project designed to improve future access to the course, with the city levying a sales tax to raise the money to pay forit. Augusta’s leaders wear their influence in this society heavily.
No matter how low opinion of Tiger Woods plummeted after the exposure of his seedy personal life, it was tough not to feel sympathy when Payne lectured him publicly before his return to the Masters in 2010.
The chairman announced that the player will ‘never again be measured only by his performance against par, but measured by the sincerity of his efforts to change’.
It was bumptious drivel, but one of the best golfers to ever live, and one of the richest and most famous men in the world, could do nothing but take his censure. Upsetting the brotherhood that run this place made no sense; Augusta and the Masters are buried too deep in America’s affections.
Critics of the tournament find a point of attack in the rules and traditions petrified in an earlier age, but they also mistakenly presume that the entire operation is a kind of antebellum fussiness.
It is, rather, one of the most successful and relentless businesses in the world of sport. The wealth and influence that then result allows people like Billy Payne to wallow in the past and celebrate the seed of a tree – and not give a damn if everyone else is laughing at him.