The green jacket that comes with winning the Masters at Augusta is the most sought-after prize for golfers
GOLF: Jon Swift
THERE is surely no professional golf tournament which concentrates the mind of the world’s top players more than the Masters at Augusta National. There is little time to stop and smell the azaleas along the way.
Over the years, the tournament has been synonymous with two names: the originator, Bobby Jones, and its most frequent winner, Jack Nicklaus.
The great Nicklaus has, so it is rumoured, built a special cupboard for the green jackets which are the signal mark of the winner. If he hasn’t, he should do. Nicklaus has six.
The jacket, more than any other single thing, any speck on the record books, singles out golf’s premier player over the superbly landscaped piece of Georgia Jones picked out as the site for his tournament.
Nicklaus was part of the great triumvirate of the Sixties, completed by Arnold Palmer and Gary Player, that lifted professional golf from the status of watching the servants play to watching the artists at work.
It was a major transition which netted the trio a round dozen Masters titles from 1958 when Palmer won the first of his three through to 1986 when Nicklaus won his sixth.
And over the span of two decades from Palmer’s first victory to Player’s third in 1978, the trio only allowed nine other golfers to break the stanglehold they held on the event. Together, they gave it a very special aura. An intensity of competition which did much to take the edge off the upper-crust Dixie image of the tournament.
And in doing so made this one event, perhaps more than any of the majors, the one the players prize most. “I’ll take any major I’m given,” Nick Price has said, “but if I was to pick one, it would be the Masters.” It is a wish which has so far eluded the Zimbabwean. It is a tournament which has not treated him kindly even though he has always geared his build-up to Augusta. This year, perhaps, it will be different.
Price completed his build-up with a joint third place finish in the Bellsouth Classic, two shots behind winner Paul Stankowski, and although he played the last 36 holes to par, could just be finding his best form.
It was a finish that left Price a shot better than Fred Couples and six better than the slimmed-down Scot Colin Montgomerie. Price was also eight shots better than Ernie Els, who squeaked through the cut, promptly shot a 66 and then followed that with a final round 77.
The prodigious length Els can generate off the tee allied to his deft touch round the greens and seemingly nerveless putting have marked him worldwide as a potential wearer of the green jacket. Few would argue against this conjecture. Els has everything to take Augusta National apart just the way Nicklaus tended to do. The same equipment.
This year? Perhaps not the consistency to string together four winning rounds. Els has been making adjustments to his swing — one wonders why, but this is a technical realm beyond the ken of the average hacker — and it has told in his game.
But then Price was engaged in just such tinkering when he came through to win the US PGA and first of his three majors in 1992.
There is, though, still the matter of 72 holes of highly charged competitive golf ahead before any player can taste the emotion of treading in the footsteps of Jones and Nicklaus.