As Dave McNeilly, caddie to Padraig Harrington, walked the Augusta National course this week he could hear, at every green, a humming sort of noise that, mysteriously, seemed to be coming from under the ground.
What he heard was the machines that have saved the 2003 Masters. Given that about 5cm of rain has fallen in the area in the past two days, the golf club would normally be saturated and closed. But this is Augusta National and the men who run the US Major have determined that mere rain is not going to stop the tournament.
So they have installed, under every green, machines called SubAir. These machines act like giant, reversible, underground vacuum cleaners, able to either suck water from a given area or blow warm air into it. They have, of course, been working overtime since last Monday’s deluge, which caused the club to close the gates on spectators for the first time in 20 years.
Some areas of the course have had to be roped off owing to mud churned up by spectators. The organisers have spread a drying agent over the offending area, being careful not to make last year’s mistake when they used cat litter to try to dry some areas; they had also been using some growth-promoting chemicals in those areas, and the two things reacted and an odour not unlike sewage spread everywhere.
The Bad Smell Masters is not something anyone wants to repeat. —Â