I’m not sure I was as excited about my first Masters as Charles Howell III was about his. He grew up three miles down the road, after all. And he was playing. I’m just scribbling, as pleasant a task as that is.
Charles III (what is it about American golfers that their parents can’t think of a different first name for them?) said he was in awe of the Augusta National Club and the event before being invited to play here for the first time in 2001: ”Even if they made us hit wooden drivers and gutta-percha balls, I’d show up and be happy just to be there.”
It was the kid’s entry in the pass-the-bucket all-comers’ championship for baloney. Golf and Americans love that stuff: the wonder of the game and the history and the honour and how they’d like to be buried at Amen Corner, if only the guys in the clubhouse would let them, and ”please, please, Hootie, let the sun shine on all my hopes and dreams” — and, if you haven’t already, God bless America.
The writers write it down because it looks great in print.
Cynical? Me? A bit. There is romance and history at Augusta and it must be a thrill for any young player to be on that stage. And a heart-arresting experience to win it. But there is no shortage of horse shit in the azaleas, either. This year’s programme fairly dribbled with testimonials from players about the orgasmic experience of being allowed in to golf’s earthly paradise.
Maybe they are fit to bursting. But golfers, like all professional athletes, are in sport for one reason: the result. As a rival boxing trainer once observed of the all-dancing Sheffield fighter Herol Graham (who had been described as poetry in motion): ”Nobody ever got knocked out by a poem.”
Yet golf, more than any other sport, drowns in its own schmaltz. Which is odd. Because, for all their love of a sound-bite, golfers are pragmatists who work their backsides off honing their game by the millimetre to get just the slightest edge on their opponents (and the course). No amount of sentiment is going to distract them from their work when they step up to the tee.
And where they leave the past behind is in the laboratories of the multinational equipment manufacturers. People there, who might otherwise be finding a cure for cancer or shoes that talk, are paid a lot of money to make clubs that look and sound as if they could fly you to the moon.
That’s where the pretence stops. It’s not Hootie Johnson, Augusta’s chairperson, who is golf’s overlord. The real oligarchs of the game are the guys who run Nike and all the other fat companies.
Of course Charlie didn’t bring his niblick; he arrived again this year with his full array of whizz-bang clubs, beautifully polished and paid for by his grateful sponsors — like all the other 89 invitees. As ever, it was Tiger Woods’s bag that attracted most attention.
USA Today’s cover story last Thursday was devoted to the great man’s arsenal, particularly the rediscovered five-wood, the magic club (pioneered by Ray Floyd when he won this event 30 years ago) that every hacker knows gives the ball more air-time. Woods used it first last year and its appearance at Augusta set the nerds and nostalgics into a bit of a tizz. Ever the scientist, Woods recognised the metal-headed fairway ”senior club” would help him to plop the ball more easily on to the greasily fast greens. It did. He’s a genius, but even he needs help.
What’s revealing is not just the overblown language but the newspapers’ compliance in the process of marketing Nike’s product for them as if this were a genuine news story. In a way it is; because this is what makes news in golf, a sport that long ago ceased to be the simple pastime of Charlie Howell’s imagining.
As Andrew Marr points out in his wonderful memoir My Trade, much of modern journalism is, more wittingly than not, devoted to promoting consumerism. It is hardly a secret that golf as we know it (that is, a worldwide entertainment industry) would all but collapse but for the sales of clubs, balls, bags and bad shirts.
And it’s not just me who’s cynical. Golf is. It markets itself as a sport rich in tradition and great deeds, a sport married to old, long-lost values of honesty and fair play, of the Corinthian spirit — then it gets you through the gate and persuades you to buy all manner of overpriced merchandise in pursuit of that image.
Of all the world’s premier golf tournaments, the Masters at Augusta poses the most obvious contradictions. It is physically stunning, the golf is invariably dramatic and Bobby Jones will look down on it with great pride. But there ought to be no forgetting the ugly side of its history.
It is a delicious coincidence that soul star James Brown, who lives in Augusta and has a street named after him, was born in this town about the same time Jones was inventing the Masters, a tournament that for decades excluded blacks.
I don’t mean to sound an ungrateful guest. Those who run the event couldn’t be nicer. It makes a lot of people very rich (which is no crime) and the crowds clamouring to get in are testimony to its popularity.
However, if Charles Howell is a proper student of the game and of his home town, he will know that, when the Godfather of Soul was growing up in what was a racist backwater of the South, golf was more than a game. It was an instrument of separation. Woods has gone some way to fixing that. But Augusta National still struggles with its conscience. It has a way to go before it soothes the pain it has caused. And it will never shed its dependence on the almighty buck.
Charlie missed the cut by 16 shots. — Â