by Sid Holt
Nick Paumgarten
Unlike Any Other
New Yorker
FINALIST—FEATURE WRITING
For readers who did not grow up eating pimento-cheese sandwiches or playing a quick nine holes before dusk, the appeal of Augusta National Golf Club and the Masters tournament it hosts may seem beyond comprehension. But fear not. Nick Paumgarten is here to explain it to you. From the piped-in birdsong that plays alongside the course to the near-papal regard in which the chairman of the club is held, Paumgarten describes the dreamworld that is Augusta National in mesmerizing yet skeptical detail. Or as the National Magazine Award judges put it: “Paumgarten’s dead-on reporting about the club’s secrecy, elitism and idol worship exposes the allure of still-powerful myths about wealth and power.” The New Yorker, where Paumgarten has worked as a staff writer since 2005, has received twenty-five nominations in Feature Writing since the category was introduced in 1988 and won the award five times, most recently in 2019 for “A Theory of Relativity,” by Elif Batuman.
Beneath Augusta National, the world’s most exclusive golf club and most venerated domain of cultivated grass, there is a vast network of pipes and mechanical blowers, which help drain and ventilate the putting greens. The SubAir System was developed in the 1990s by the aptly named course superintendent Marsh Benson in an effort to mitigate the effects of nature on this precious facsimile of it. When the system’s fans blow one way, they provide air to the densely seeded bent grass of the putting surface. This promotes growth. When the fans are reversed, they create a suction effect and leach water from the greens. This promotes firmness. The professionals who arrive at Augusta every April to compete in the Masters Tournament, the event for which the club is known, expect to be tested by greens that are hard and fast. Amid all the other immodesties and peculiarities of Augusta, the greens, ultimately, are the thing. Herbert Warren Wind, who for decades covered the sport at this magazine and at Sports Illustrated, once asked a colleague, on arriving in Augusta, “Are they firm?” The antecedent was understood. In 1994, Gary McCord, a golf commentator for CBS, the network that has televised the tournament for sixty-three years, said on the air, “They don’t cut the greens here at Augusta, they use bikini wax.” He was banned from the broadcast.
It is by now hardly scandalous to note that Augusta National—called the National by its members and devotees and Augusta by everyone else—is an environment of extreme artifice, an elaborate television soundstage, a fantasia of the fifties, a Disneyclub in the Georgia pines. Some of the components of the illusion are a matter of speculation, as the club is notoriously stingy with information about itself. It has been accepted as fact that recalcitrant patches of grass are painted green and that the ponds used to be dyed blue. Because the azaleas seem always to bloom right on time, skeptics have propagated the myth that the club’s horticulturists freeze the blossoms, in advance of the tournament, or swap out early bloomers for more cooperative specimens. Pine straw is imported. Pinecones are deported. There is a curious absence of fauna. One hardly ever sees a squirrel or a bird. I’d been told that birdsong—a lot of it, at any rate—is piped in through speakers hidden in the greenery. (In 2000, CBS got caught doing some overdubbing of its own, after a birder noticed that the trills and chirps on a golf broadcast belonged to nonindigenous species.)
You hear about this kind of stuff before your first visit, just as you get the more commonplace spiel that everything is perfect, that the course is even more majestic in real life than it is on TV, and that, in spite of all the walking, you’ll put on five pounds. Pimento-cheese sandwiches, egg-salad sandwiches, peach-ice-cream sandwiches, MoonPies, underpriced beer. You are urged to adopt the terminology favored by the tournament hosts and embraced by CBS. Spectators are “patrons.” The rough—longer grass that lines the fairways—is the “second cut.” (And it is controversial, because its abundance contravenes the wishes of the patriarchs, who designed the course to have a dearth of rough. Gary McCord may have been onto something.) The traps are bunkers, and what appears to patrons and television viewers to be the whitest sand in golf is technically not sand but waste from feldspar mines in North Carolina.
Augusta National is sometimes likened to Oz. For one thing, it’s a Technicolor fantasyland embedded in an otherwise ordinary tract of American sprawl. Washington Road, the main approach to the club, is a forlorn strip of Waffle Houses, pool-supply stores, and cheap-except-during-the-Masters hotels. In the Hooters parking lot during tournament week, fans line up for selfies with John Daly, the dissolute pro and avatar of midround cigarettes and booze. But step through the club’s metal detectors and badge scanners, and you enter a lush, high-rent realm, where you are not allowed to run, talk loudly, or cheer a player’s mistakes. Order is maintained by security guards, who for decades were provided by the Pinkerton detective agency. (Though Pinkerton was acquired by a Swedish company called Securitas in 1999, many patrons still refer to the guards as Pinkertons.) In 2012, a fan who stole onto a fairway to take a cup of bunker sand was thrown in jail.
I showed up on a Monday afternoon before the tournament, just as a series of storms swept in and as the spectators, there to witness the first rounds of practice, were being herded off the grounds. Owing to the threat of lightning, play was suspended for the day, and the club was closed to visitors. The throngs poured out of the gates into the real world, just as I was leaving it. I took refuge in what the club calls the press building, a recently constructed Taj Mahal of media mollycoddling. This columned, ersatz-antebellum megamansion, in operation just ten days a year, has got to be the fanciest media center in sports. It has state-of-the-art working quarters, radio and television studios, locker rooms, a gratis restaurant with made-to-order omelets for breakfast, and a bountiful hot lunch, as well as a grab-and-go counter with craft beers, artisanal cheeses and jerkies, and a full array of Augusta’s famous sandwiches, each wrapped in green paper.
Such generosity and care for the journalists reflects the role that so many of them have played in burnishing the mythology of the Masters; it also suggests an effort to keep them away from the course and the clubhouse. The press is provided with every disincentive to venture out. The gang’s all there. Even the bathrooms are capacious and staffed with attendants. Each member of the media has a work station with a brass nameplate, a leather swivel chair, a pair of computer monitors, and a surfeit of real-time tournament footage and information—far more data than one would be able to gather out on the golf course, especially because, outside the press building, reporters are not allowed to carry cell phones. (The phone ban, strictly enforced and punishable by immediate removal from the grounds, applies to patrons and members, too. One morning during the tournament this year, a story went around that the club had done a spot inspection of staff headquarters and found that an employee had hidden a cell phone between two slices of bread.) The golfers and the tournament officials appear dutifully for press conferences; why bother heading out to the clubhouse to hound them for quotes? No phones are allowed at the press conferences, either. The club wants control over sounds and pictures—the content. The club can tell who’s who and who’s where by RFID chips affixed to each press badge.
The working area faced the practice range, which the players had abandoned once the rain began hammering down. As dusk approached, the rain briefly let up, and a battalion of men in baggy white coveralls—the official caddie costume at Augusta—fanned out across the range, to retrieve the hundreds of balls that the players had struck there earlier in the day. In the gloaming, these white jumpsuits, moving irregularly amid the deep green of the manicured grounds, brought to mind an avant-garde film about a lunatic asylum: the inmates, in their hospital gowns, out for a constitutional.
* * *
The course was still closed the next morning. I caught a ride to the clubhouse on a golf cart with a member, a so-called green jacket, named John Carr, an oil magnate from Ireland, who told me that he was on the media committee.
The m
embers in attendance during the tournament (and at dinner, whenever they visit) are required to wear their green blazers. The club’s founders decreed, in the earliest years of the tournament, that any members present had to make themselves available to patrons who might be in need of assistance. The jackets tell you who the members are. It is an oddity of the place that its members insist on secrecy—there are some three hundred, but there is no public list, and omertà is strictly enforced—and yet here, at the biggest golf tournament of the year, they parade about in uniform, wearing name tags: Roger Goodell, Sam Nunn, Rex Tillerson.
The jackets themselves never leave the grounds; they hang in the members’ lockers. Each winner of the Masters gets a green jacket, too, which is presented immediately after the victory by the club’s chairman and the previous year’s winner, in an awkward ceremony staged for television in the basement of a house called the Butler Cabin, near the eighteenth hole. The solemnity surrounding this perennial observance suggests the initiation ritual of a really square fraternity. Jim Nantz, the longtime host of the CBS broadcast and of the Butler Cabin sacrament, has perfected an air of unctuous self-satisfaction that signals even to the casual viewer that there is something batty about the whole enterprise. The way that Nantz repeats the tag line—“A tradition unlike any other”—assumes a sinister, cultish edge. Everyone associated with the club seems to take all this very seriously. On the official Masters podcast, the host, Marty Smith, said to the celebrity chef David Chang, as though reciting a prayer, “The respect for the grounds and the reverence for the event permeate us as human beings and we thereby disseminate that same respect to our peers.”
“It’s a beautiful thing,” Chang replied. “It almost restores my faith in humanity.” As one long-standing media-badge holder told me after he’d spent ten minutes singing the club’s praises on the record, “These guys are out of their fucking minds. They think it’s supernatural.”
A friend who used to play at Augusta every year during nontournament weeks (his father was a member) told me that, at dinner in the clubhouse, you could see the power of the green jacket in the body language of the guests, as they fawned over their host. Yet there was also a certain gelding effect: “Dad was not a humble man, but he was always nervous at Augusta. He didn’t want to break a rule. The club turned these high-powered men into boys.”
Carr seemed free from such concerns. He led me straight to the clubhouse, into the grill room, where other green jackets were milling about. The clubhouse dates back to the 1850s, though it has been renovated and expanded through the years; its dimensions are modest, its décor restrained. It sits atop one of the finest wine cellars in North America. Soon Carr was greeting others, and then he was gone. I did not feel welcome, so I kept going, through the first door I saw, which opened onto a patio that looks out toward the first tee. The patrons massed and flowed on the other side of a rope line, some thirty yards from the porch; in the space between stood an immense oak, its trunk some twenty feet in circumference, its branches cabled up and sprawling into a canopy that created a swath of shade. So this was the famous Tree, the default meeting place and schmoozing ground. The area, though closed to the public, bustled with members, managers, agents, journalists, players past and present, caddies, and a range of VIPs. “This is the gathering of golf,” Jerry Tarde, the editor of Golf Digest, here for his fortieth consecutive year, told me. “Under the Tree, all of golf passes you by.”
Beyond the Tree, out in the sun, the air was thick with moisture baking out of the ground. The course was evidently playable, but the spectators’ paths through it and along the fairways were slick and shiny with mud. Amid the squelch, you could hear the low roar of the SubAir system. Here and there, vents in the ground emitted a rush of warm exhaust. A patron stood astride one, a little obscenely, drying his pant legs. Where there was pitch, patrons in less sensible shoes wiped out in ways that made my ligaments wince. Descending the right side of the tenth fairway, while following the practice round of a Mexican amateur named Álvaro Ortiz, a large older man went heels up and splashed down in the mud. Nearby, another man—a lawyer, apparently—said to his wife, “I’d file in a heartbeat. Take about twelve minutes to get a settlement.” The mud, or maybe the drying agent, gave off a reek of sewage. Years of watching the Masters on television had not prepared me for the smell of shit.
* * *
By the following morning, the air had dried out, and the grounds sprang into a kind of sharp autumnal relief—a pretense of perfection. At the driving range (which, like the press center, is new, sprawling, and used pretty much only during the tournament; the members warm up elsewhere), the pros, many with a coach or a manager present, hit balls. Behind them was a wide grandstand, at the rear of which patrons made half-whispered comments, knowing or otherwise, about the array of swings and flight paths. To look from face to face was to regard a study in contentment or even, thanks to the pervasive cigar smoke, self-satisfaction. Everyone there, it seemed, knew that this was the place to be; the aura was all the more intense because of the unquenchable desire to take and post look-where-I-am cell-phone photos.
Tiger Woods was at the far-right end of the line, in a mint-green shirt and gray pants. He had his driver out—the club that hits the ball the farthest, the one you use off the tee. He has had intermittent trouble with it through the years. Errant drives make life difficult. Still, Woods had been playing better and better since last year’s Masters, after a decade in the weeds with injuries (most notably his back, on which he’d had four surgeries), painkiller addiction, the collapse of his marriage, and the subsequent sordid revelations of all the philandering that had occasioned it. Some golf writers talked about his career in terms of pre- and posthydrant, a reference to the night in 2009 when his now ex-wife, going through his phone, found out about one of his affairs and chased him out of the house. He fled in his SUV but, zonked on sleeping pills, immediately crashed into a fire hydrant, whereupon she smashed the back window of the car with a golf club. From there, his life went off the rails.
Some commentators thought or wanted to believe that Woods could contend at the Masters this year—he’d won four times already—and even a casual know-little like me couldn’t help noticing that, on the day before the first round, he was roping his drives, one after another, each soaring toward the water tower on Washington Road on a clean, almost identical trajectory—a slight draw, right to left, which suits the doglegs of Augusta. Occasionally, after a drive, he wandered ten yards or so out onto the range to fetch his tee. With the others hitting nearby, this looked heedless, like a movie colonel not flinching amid a mortar barrage. Utterances of “Tiger” popped up out of the murmur of the crowd—hundreds of white people just standing there staring at him.
After a while, he went to work on his wedges. The crowd moved with him, while some broke off to line the path he’d be taking from the range to the clubhouse and the course. Momentarily averse to such gawkery, I hung back and watched a couple of golfers I’d never heard of; I recognized, not for the first time, that the mechanics and variables of the golf swing are a mystery to me.
Still, it was a soothing place to hang out. I’d been told that the recorded birdsong played on a loop, and so for a few minutes I listened intently, but I didn’t have the ear for it. Earlier, I’d been told by a guard that there was a bird speaker in a nearby magnolia tree. Now I followed one chirping sound to a holly bush. I eased my head carefully into a gap in the prickly leaves and, to my surprise, scared up an actual bird. Pulling my head out, I saw that I was being watched closely by a couple of Pinkertons. “A real bird!” I said to them. The Pinkertons remained expressionless.
The Masters is the only one of the four major tournaments that is staged at the same place every year. The other three—the U.S. Open, the PGA Championship, and the Open Championship (known as the British Open)—are organized by various governing bodies and rotate among an evolving roster of courses, some of which are open to the public. The Old Course at St. A
ndrews, in Scotland, the so-called home of golf and an inspiration for the layout at Augusta, is a public course. So is Bethpage Black, on Long Island, the site of two recent U.S. Opens as well as last month’s PGA Championship. The 2019 U.S. Open, which took place last week, was at Pebble Beach in California, also a public course.
Augusta is obstinately private. Its leadership, embodied by its chairman, who serves for an indefinite term as a kind of sovereign and is the only person authorized to speak about the Masters, invariably deflects questions about club matters by saying that they are club matters. The club operates as a for-profit corporation. No one knows how much money it makes or has—except that it’s a lot, judging by the investments the club continually makes in the tournament, the course, the physical plant, and the expansion of its real-estate holdings. No one, anyway, is pocketing cash. Still, the high profile of the Masters, as an athletic competition and a cultural event, has often made Augusta National’s desire to be otherwise left alone seem risible, especially in light of the prominence—in business, in politics, in public life—of so many of its members. It’s a remarkable if dodgy achievement that the club has managed to maintain the private-public charade for as long as it has.