When somebody asks me, "So what do your parents do?" I like to answer that my dad Mark is an amateur golfer who moonlights as an anesthesiologist. He certainly spends more time on the links than in the operating room; as he points out, it's a good week in his book when the number of rounds of golf that he plays exceeds the number of cases that he works.
Like many avid fans of the sport, my pop is hooked on televised golf. Personally, I prefer watching paint dry or curling, but there's one notable exception to my dislike of watching golf - the Masters. To a blue-blooded golf fan, Augusta is Mecca, and there's something truly impressive about stately Augusta National that gets transmitted through a television screen, even to my indifferent eyes.
So you might be able to imagine my dad's reaction when a friend scored two tickets for the Masters and gave them both to him. He claims it was a less momentous occasion for him than the birth of his first-born son (me), but I have my doubts. After all, there's not a more difficult ticket to obtain in all of professional sports - it's easier to get Super Bowl or World Cup finals tickets than it is to make it past Augusta's wrought-iron gate during the Masters, and it's definitely easier to have a kid. You do the math.
When I talked to him on Sunday, after the final round, the first thing he mentioned was the staggering beauty of the course. Even on high-definition TV, there's apparently something about Augusta's famed azaleas and rhododendrons that can't be fully appreciated except in person.
Personally, I find it cool that not a blade of grass is out of place, which is all the more impressive when you consider that tens of thousands of people are tromping all over the course for four straight days. The only way to keep the turf looking that sweet is around-the-clock work from the instant the last golfer is off the course till the moment the first twosome tees off the next day.
I worked at a golf course over the summer, and as such, I'm intimately familiar with the spectacular suckitude of mowing greens and raking bunkers at 3:30 in the morning, which is the only way to keep the course in decent condition during a major tournament. I bet none of Augusta's greenskeepers jackknifed their power carts down a hill, tore out a huge swath of grass, rammed through a wooden fence and demolished it in the process, and nearly got fired during the first day of their major tournament either. So here's to them because I know it's a mistake that anybody can make.
Anyway, the second thing that my dad found to be neat was the tradition of leaving people's staked-out spots unmolested. If you arrive at Augusta right as the gates are opening to the public at 8 a.m., put your folding chair down right next to the rope between the gallery and the 18th green, and walk the course for the rest of the day, when you come back to your chair, nobody will have moved it and nobody will be sitting in it even though it's primo real estate. That attitude goes hand-in-hand with the dead silence that occurs when a golfer addresses the ball at Augusta National. As my dad said, "You wouldn't believe how quiet 10,000 people can be. It's more silent than a church."
Everybody is incredibly respectful; it's like people's basic instincts to be jerks who are out for themselves get cowed by the weight of all of Augusta's history. Somewhere Hobbes is scratching his head in puzzlement.
The tournament has some other pretty interesting traditions. Caddies are allowed to walk the course to scout the lay of the land each morning before golfers tee off, but they're forbidden from going up to the green to see the pin placement for the day. It's an endearingly archaic rule backed up by lots of humorless course marshals.
Also, as Billy Payne, the chairman of the board of Augusta National, doesn't want a bunch of drunken yahoos running around, beer sales at the Masters don't start till 12:30 p.m. and get cut off at 4 p.m. If you've never seen any footage of the Phoenix Open, then you might not understand why this is vital, but I'll describe it this way: you'll find the guy from "Happy Gilmore" (1996) wearing the shirt that says "Guns don't kill people - I kill people" at the latter tournament and not the former, and Mr. Payne would like to keep it that way.
For my dad, the Masters was the single most memorable sporting experience of his life, and this is coming from a Portland Trail Blazers and Cincinnati Reds fan who attended Game Six of the 1977 NBA Finals in the Memorial Coliseum, when the Blazers won their only NBA championship, and saw Pete Rose shatter Ray Fosse's collarbone during the 1970 MLB All-Star Game. I guess "A tradition unlike any other" is more than just a catchy tagline.
Matthew Mertens is a sophomore who has not yet declared a major. He can be reached at Matthew.Mertens@tufts.edu.
