One of the many joys attached to attending the Masters is watching the local television coverage. The biggest joy of all is the now established tradition that, starting on Monday at 6.30am, some poor sod masquerading as a traffic reporter has to set up a pitch at the side of the four-lane highway that runs menacingly in front of the Augusta National Golf Club.
Here he, or she, is pitched live into the morning show to tell Augustans how the traffic is moving. Each year it is the same: ”Washington Road is getting real busy right now. If you don’t have to be here, stay away. There’s a lot of vee-hicles.” Really? It’s Masters week, you’re outside the bloody club and there are … cars?
The point is that Augusta is desperate to be seen as a throbbing metropolis, but it is a half-arsed effort because this is a city of just 190 000 souls. Souls is the operative word here because Augusta was the birthplace of the Southern Baptists and there are so many churches per acre that Rome appears secular by comparison. More than half the population is black; to a depressing extent there appears to be the usual voluntary segregation, although how happily voluntary is hard to gauge.
Naturally, as Masters fever hits town, the big story in the Augusta Chronicle in the past week has been a religious one, something to do with support for the pastor who left town two years ago to move to Chicago to replace the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who in turn is the guy who dropped Barack Obama in it with his ”America’s chickens coming home to roost” sermon. Last time I looked there were 168, mostly angry, comments posted on the paper’s website. Race still matters in this place, as it does in much of the South.
Whether Tiger Woods casts an eye over any of this stuff from his retreat in Florida is doubtful. Woods, publicly at least, avoids any real comment on the real world. I suppose that when you are living a fantasy, corporate life, this is the way to play it.
A couple of months ago an uppity British reporter, desperate for a fresh angle, asked Woods if he supported Obama. Tiger almost choked before rather angrily rebutting the query. Woods and politics, Woods and real life, what a cheek, eh? Better stick to those ”how great you are” questions, son. And quick, because Tiger never seems to forget a perceived slight, no matter how unintended or trivial.
This, of course, is part of what makes him great. Like Roy Keane did on a football pitch or John McEnroe on a tennis court, he stores these up, feeds his ego with them and then uses them as fuel to make it to the desired destination. Next for him, of course, is the Masters and a fifth green jacket, his 14th Major as he hunts down Jack Nicklaus’s old record. Will he do it? Does Obama go into the woods and dream of being president?
What we’re discussing here is not who will win this Masters, it is who will come second. Forget last year and Zach Johnson’s win. It was cold, it was windy, it was wearily dreary, it wasn’t really the Masters at all. Johnson played well, putted sensationally and won with a one-over-par score. Zach used all his life’s luck in one big go. Tiger was lacklustre, weirdly uninspired and, by the way, finished second.
Early in January I wrote that I believed he would pull off the Grand Slam this year. I have never suggested this before, never felt it before, but in January, before the guy had struck a ball, I began to have faith in its inevitability.
At the time, if you hunted around, you could get 30-1 against him pulling off wins in the Masters, the US Open, the Open and the US PGA. Now the odds are vibrating at about 6-1. It seemed ever so slightly daring to suggest that a Grand Slam appeared more likely than not at the time, but then a couple of weeks ago people were seriously discussing whether Woods could go through an entire season undefeated.
We now know he fell at the eighth hurdle and you could see how annoyed he was as he exited Doral’s Blue Monster. By his standards he putted poorly a fortnight ago, but it is an error he will not repeat at Augusta.
”I love this place,” he says, and he is not alone. Tiger loves it because it was where he won his first Major title in 1997, because it suits his game hugely and because Augusta National has a special place in the American people’s affections. And, for some of them, their hatred.
For years Augusta National, with its rich white men, its old-time standards, its self-absorption and its arrogance, represented a side of America that was ugly to those born either on the wrong side of the tracks or with a different colour skin or both. It tries hard to be different now.
The latest chairperson, Billy Payne, is an investment banker who turned out good enough at marketing to secure the Olympics for his home town of Atlanta, Georgia’s state capital. Payne offers a more smiley and 21st-century Augusta National, a man determined to maintain the right standards and to shred the outdated ones.
Last time I looked Augusta National had two black members. Not great, but not bad either. Anyway, two more than many of Britain’s leading clubs can offer. Actually make that three because Tiger automatically joined the club when he won 11 swift years ago although, naturally, it doesn’t cost him.
I could go on about his rivals this coming weekend, highlight the claims of his only serious challenger, Phil Mickelson, splutter about Retief Goosen or Angel Cabrera or wonder if Ernie Els is over the jitters, but, honestly, why bother? Tiger Woods, surely, is the winner. — Â