The losers’ dinner
You can take all your azaleas and your green jackets and stuff them in your peach cobbler. The best Masters tradition is the annual Tuesday Night Losers Dinner.
Held every year at Tammy’s Diner & Nail Emporium off I-20 in Augusta, the Tuesday Night Losers Dinner looks like a convention of men whose dogs just got run over. All of these guys had their Masters won, had the size 42L practically halfway off the hanger, and then blew it, never to recover.
Everybody who was almost somebody shows up.
Sitting at the corner table with a bottle of Pepto Bismol and a spoon will be Ed Sneed, who in 1979 had a three-shot lead Sunday with three to play and somehow lost to a guy named Fuzzy.
At the Sad Supper head table will be Scott Hoch. In 1989, in a playoff with Nick Faldo, he missed a two-foot par putt—that’s shorter than some spaghetti noodles Tammy dishes up— that would’ve given him the green jacket. It’s because of Hoch that all the meat at the annual Losers Dinner is cut into tiny pieces to prevent choking.
Tammy goes all-out for the Losers Dinner. She got it sponsored by Avis, serves only Pepsi (no Coke) and hangs portraits of Al Gore on all the walls.
This is the night we honor all the great players who checked in to Augusta’s Heartbreak Hotel and never left: Johnny Miller, Lee Trevino and the late Tom Weiskopf, who finished second a record four times without eventually winning one.
No Tuesday Night Losers Dinner would be complete without Greg Norman, who came into Augusta every year like a shark and got swallowed like a goldfish. Four times, Norman had a chance to win and lost them all: once by swiping his 72nd hole 4-iron into the crowd to give Jack Nicklaus the greatest victory of his life; once to Larry Mize’s preposterous playoff chip-in on a double-diamond slope at the 11th hole; once by performing his bogey-the-72nd-hole trick to hand the win to Faldo; and once by blowing a six-shot Saturday night lead.
On that awful Sunday in 1996—April 14, the 84th anniversary of the Titanic hitting the iceberg—Norman hit into a creek on 12 and a pond on 16, which is why there’s a standing tradition with the busboys at Losers Night. Norman gets no more water.
Brooks Koepka will host Tammy’s Losers this year as the player who coughed up the title the year before. He had a fourstroke lead Saturday night and a migraine Sunday night after shooting a 75. Koepka has picked a menu honoring how he played that day—pork shanks and fried eggs, followed by a dessert of bitter melon slices.
I can already predict somebody will go up to Koepka, slap him on the back and say, “Brooksie, do you realize that if the LIV Tour had caught on, you’d be Masters champion right now?”
And Koepka will turn and say, “Whaddya mean?”
“Because,” the guy will say, “they play only 54 holes.”