by Sid Holt
Berckmans guests occasionally find themselves staying all day: oysters, Bloody Marys, air conditioning, golf on TV. Why bother going out to watch the disjointed, partial, live version? The clincher, for many, is the Putting Experience, along the northeast side of Berckmans—replicas of the seventh, fourteenth, and sixteenth greens, with Augusta National caddies on hand, in their coveralls, to help the civilians manage what, up close, look like preposterously hilly putts. After breakfast, there was a queue of people waiting their turn to test the greens. Condoleezza Rice, in green jacket and tan slacks, was there to greet them one by one. (The man on the courtesy phone: “A former secretary of state out there saying hi to everybody? Honey, it’s crazy!”)
Depending on your area of interest or expertise, you might recognize prominent citizens in golf-fan disguise. A patron who knew his hockey Hall of Famers, for example, could introduce himself to Chris Chelios and Lanny McDonald. One who knew his media magnates might note that Fred Ridley was having lunch with Brian Roberts, the chairman of Comcast and the head of the club’s digital-technology committee.
One Berckmans badge holder I didn’t recognize but whom a younger patron pointed out later, by the sixth green, was a thirty-one-year-old social-media personality named Bob Menery, who has made a name for himself by posting profane mock-narrations of sports highlights, in a dead-on sportscaster’s voice. Towering over him was his girlfriend, Katie Kearney, a swimsuit model and former Miss Missouri. Menery and Kearney had been invited to the Masters by a Lebanese businessman named Ahmed Tayeb. There were dinners (one hosted by a Saudi golf magnate, another with Ireland’s fifth-richest man); parties (at CAA’s, Menery had a rough go of it after mistakenly eating a housemate’s pot gummy); a round at Sage Valley (Menery shot his best-ever score, a seventy-five); and multiple late-night sessions at Hooters. As I chatted with Menery and Kearney, we were joined by their friend Jena Sims, an actress and former Miss Teenage Georgia, and the girlfriend of Brooks Koepka, the number-one golfer in the world, who had recently lost twenty pounds in advance of an appearance with her in the Body Issue of ESPN the Magazine. Menery and Koepka liked to kid around with each other about their attractive girlfriends. When Menery, outside the ropes, heckled Koepka about this during an early round at the Masters, Koepka laughed, but Menery got the Pinkerton glare. “You don’t fuck around here,” he told me. Last year, Menery posted a video on Instagram in which he crank-called the club pretending to be Bill Gates (who is a member), ludicrously demanding a tee time in the midst of the tournament. Now he was hoping that no one remembered this stunt; he was having too good a time, making too many connections, and, like nearly everyone at Augusta, sorely hoping to be invited back. On Sunday, he watched the final round on the flatscreens at Berckmans, leaving vacant the folding chairs that a runner had placed for him and his housemates by the eighteenth green early that morning.
* * *
Right outside Berckmans, you slip into the flow of regular patrons, a river of well-to-do white people in golf clothes. But what had previously appeared to be the most homogeneous crowd I’d ever seen suddenly seemed to contain some intriguing variety, relative to the clientele at Berckmans. The frat boys and young jocks, with stacks of empty beer cups (the cups are collector’s items); the slightly dotty elderly golf fanatics, with their binoculars and old Masters badges and long-standing viewing spots at the sixteenth hole; the sunburned Brits on boys’ trips, smoking 100s in the shade. Still, you see a lot of khaki shorts, ankle socks, and golf shirts. Sometimes you can tell people apart only by the corporate logos on their left breast: Hitachi Chemical, Mercy Care, Strategic Wealth Specialists, Newton Center Chiropractic, South Bay Construction, Arborguard, True Temper, Twisted Dune, the Citadel. Everyone had the look of someone who was used to telling other people what to do.
Here and there, I struck up amiable conversations with well-mannered men from all over the country. A carnival concessionaire from Austin. An art-frame conservator from New Haven. A white-water kayaker from the Smokies. I eavesdropped on greetings and farewells:
“What’s up, General?”
“Good to see you, Bud.”
“You guys be safe.”
Tim Jones, a senior project manager at a steel company in Louisville, told me, “Never been anywhere like this, where everything’s A1, from the hand towels in the bathrooms to the grass. I called my son. I told him, ‘This isn’t a golf tournament. It’s a cultural event where the Southern United States has its chest stuck out and is saying come down and visit.’ It’s been a hundred and fifty-five years since the Civil War, and yet we want to let people know we’re a strong people, a hardworking people, a proud people.”
A guy named Rick Foor, from Fort Mill, South Carolina, on hearing that I was from New York, asked, “Are you left of Trump?” He let me know that he was busting my chops. “So, but seriously, what’s the deal with AOC?”
I had another conversation about Ocasio-Cortez and the perils of single-payer health insurance with a large-bodied fund manager from New York. We met at a concession stand as we were both reaching greedily into a freezer for peach-ice-cream sandwiches, the last two in stock. (An old Augusta hand had given me some advice: “Follow the fattest fucker you see and he’ll lead you to the peach-ice-cream sandwiches.”) After a couple of bites, the trader threw his out. “It’s too mushy,” he said. “Yesterday I had one, and it was the best thing I ever had.” (Another pro tip: remove the cutlet from a chicken sandwich, put it in a pimento-cheese sandwich, then, before eating the new sandwich, carry it in your pocket for a few holes.)
At one point, a young man told me, “My uncle dropped dead last year on eleven. This is the one-year anniversary of his death.” Then the uncle introduced himself. Johnny Pruitt, age fifty-four, from Bluffton, South Carolina. He’d gone into cardiac arrest in the gallery and was out for twenty-five minutes before paramedics revived him. The family were gathered here to celebrate his resurrection. “I bow down at Amen Corner,” he said. “I had goosebumps coming through the gate this morning.”
* * *
Amen Corner, so named by Herbert Warren Wind, is the crux of the course, comprising, strictly speaking, the eleventh green, the twelfth hole, and the tee shot at thirteen. A stand of pines juts into the course here and provides a sociable vantage over hallowed ground and consequential golf. On Friday afternoon, fans watched balls arrive suddenly from the left and land on or near the eleventh green. Then came the players. The scoreboard—updated by men standing behind it using placards featuring each competitor’s name—would tell you whom to expect, if you didn’t have the grouping sheet. No matter where you were, Tiger Woods approached as if on a rising tide, behind the leading edge of the throng that was following his round. Agents from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation preceded him, and then, as shouts of “Tiger!” rippled out ahead, the man himself came striding along, with his familiar air of purpose and annoyance. He was in the second-to-last group and near the top of the leader board, and a buzz was starting to build that he might in fact be in the running.
To great fanfare, he birdied eleven and walked toward the grandstand, and the twelfth tee. Twelve is a famous, picturesque par three, Augusta’s Matterhorn. To land a ball on the green, you have to hit it over a creek and short of an embankment of azaleas. Great players have come to grief here. Woods, though, hit his tee shot to within a half-dozen feet of the flag. Pandemonium. And then, from seemingly everywhere, came the sound of a siren. There was lightning in the area, and everyone had to evacuate the course. The crowd groaned. Puttus interruptus. Woods rushed across the bridge to the green, marked his ball, and disappeared offstage, behind the azaleas, as the multitudes emptied out of the grandstand and the glades of Amen Corner and streamed back toward the exits—there was no place on the grounds for them to take shelter, in the event of a storm, unless they had passes to Berckmans. The sky darkened.
A few patrons lingered among the pines. “I’m staying here till they make me leave,” one man said. He smoked a cig
arette and admired the vivid slaty light. After half an hour, far off, a cheer went up, and suddenly the crowds were returning, some people at a run, to reclaim choice spots in the pines. The atmosphere had got rowdy, strangers striking up conversations like old friends.
A start horn rang out. Woods was waiting by the twelfth green, where he was soon joined by his partners. But after a long delay he missed his birdie putt. Soon a heavy rain arrived, and the SubAir system kicked in.
* * *
On Sunday, a threat of afternoon storms, possibly even of tornadoes, prompted the club to make the unprecedented and therefore surely agonizing decision to move the start times to early morning, and to send the groups out in threesomes, rather than the usual pairs. Woods lucked into the final group, a tactical advantage.
The patrons in the galleries had a range of rooting interests. Some cheered for Rickie Fowler, who is widely acknowledged to be the American contingent’s leading young mensch, or for Phil Mickelson, whom many writers privately described as its reigning jerk. I stood next to an executive from Adidas and his fiancée, whose interests were best represented by the rising star—and Adidas athlete—Xander Schauffele. Go, Xander! A South African contingent went berserk for Louis Oosthuizen. But the contender who inspired the roars was Woods.
Early that morning, in the press building, I was flipping through a recent biography of Woods, by Armen Keteyian and Jeff Benedict. Skipping, as one will, to the dirty bits, I alighted on a section describing his serial infidelities of a decade ago and some text messages he’d sent to a porn star named Joslyn James, the first of which read, “Hold you down while i choke you and Fuck that ass that i own.” The rest were worse. This was the man whom everyone was roaring for. There was something Trumpean about it all—a suggestion not of redemption and forgiveness but of indulgence or abandon.
It can seem weird how enthusiastically the golf world roots for Woods, even though so many of its citizens, especially the ones closest to the tour, aren’t especially fond of him. People like to witness greatness, maybe, or to partake of excitement. He’s good for business, people said. One golf executive told me, “It’s easier for everybody when Tiger is winning.” This, too, seemed Trump-y: forbearance, in the name of lucre. It’s perhaps worth noting that Woods and Trump, who is closing in on two hundred rounds as president, have been both playing and business partners; Woods is designing a course for Trump’s property in Dubai.
In 1996, a year before the first of Woods’s Masters triumphs, his father, Earl Woods, told Sports Illustrated, “Tiger will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity,” including Mandela, Gandhi, and the Buddha. He referred to Woods as “the Chosen One.” It was soon clear that the son’s ambitions didn’t align with the father’s. One can argue, and many have, that no man is duty-bound to lead the struggle or that merely by dominating a mostly white field, often in places that have historically been closed to people of color, Woods is doing more than his share to advance the cause. It’s always been hard to parse the extent to which his popularity is a function of his being a pioneer, as a black man in a white world, or of his reticence about this.
Now, two months after the Masters, as Woods and most of the rest of the field have teed it up at the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, we know that the people got what they wanted. We may even remember what happened on Sunday. On the twelfth hole, the steady Italian Francesco Molinari, ahead of Woods by two strokes, hit his tee shot into the creek. The patrons, now more like a mob, avidly cheered his mistake, in violation of Bobby Jones’s rules of comportment. In the CBS control room, a producer exclaimed, “Game on!” And then Woods lofted his tee shot safely onto the fat part of the green, made par, and walked onto the next tee box in a tie for the lead. This time, there was no siren, no lightning. Overhead, the private jets were coming in low, presumably to fetch the premium-experience guests. As Woods made his way down the thirteenth fairway, Amen Corner emptied out for the last time, the crowds following him, shouting his name.
Almost two hours later, Woods sealed the victory with a bogey on eighteen, then made his way to Butler Cabin, to retrieve his green jacket. In a sitting room inside the clubhouse, his mother, his children, and his girlfriend had assembled to watch the ceremony on TV. Pinkertons guarded the door. In the grill room, a semicircle of members, still wearing their own green jackets, stood rapt before a flatscreen in the corner. They applauded when Woods slipped his arms into the jacket—the same one he’d won in 1997. He’d get to take it off the premises for another year.
In the parking lot, a group of reporters interviewed Woods’s caddie, Joe LaCava, who was leaning against the back of a courtesy Mercedes SUV. “I’m happy he won today,” he said. “It might’ve bought me a couple more months.” Fans and commentators spoke of Tiger’s miraculous comeback. Mostly, in their telling and certainly in his, what he’d come back from was debilitating back pain and other injuries, rather than the collapse of his marriage, his public image, or his emotional well-being. But it was all there, as subtext. Knowing what we do about America’s capacity for forgiveness or for willful forgetting, we can maybe allow, with some ruefulness, that the restoration of his body was more astonishing, after all. A few weeks later, at the White House, Trump draped the Presidential Medal of Freedom around Woods’s neck. The ribbon got twisted, and no one thought to straighten it out.
Jacob Baynham
Jerry’s Dirt
Georgia Review
WINNER—PROFILE WRITING
“Jerry’s intentional art of living was a centrifugal force we couldn’t escape,” writes Jacob Baynham as he recalls the life and death of his father-in-law, Jerry McGahan, in his cabin in western Montana. “He lived a life that was true to himself, packing twice as much living into every minute and filling his days with the things that he loved. His was a rare and alluring existence, even if it made few accommodations for anyone else—including the people who loved him the most.” The National Magazine Award judges described this story as “a timely meditation on living fully and a moving portrait of dying well.” Baynham is a freelance journalist in Missoula, Montana, who writes “about people: the things that unite us and divide us, the places we live, and the food we eat.” Founded in 1947, the Georgia Review has received twenty National Magazine Award nominations and previously won the awards for Fiction, in 1986, and Essays, in 2007.
I. The Cabin
Jerry McGahan was not well when he stepped out of his Montana cabin on a gusty mid-September afternoon in 2016. His hair was wiry and white. Steroids had swollen his face, rounding the usual angles of his jaw. He elbowed open the front door and slowly crossed the porch. His feet had memorized the distance.
The cabin was older than he was, but solid. In 1973 he found it for sale at the foot of the Mission Mountains just north of here. He paid three hundred dollars for it and gathered some friends to help take it apart. Jerry numbered the logs, loaded them onto a truck, and reassembled them here along the Jocko River with his first wife, Libby. Using skills he learned from carpentry books and an eighth-grade shop class, he framed the windows, wired the outlets, plumbed the pipes, and built the cabinets. By the end of the summer, it became a home in this sylvan oasis. His closest neighbors were the swaying ponderosas, junipers, and cottonwoods of the river-bottom forest.
The cabin looks at home in these woods. Like a nest, it is built of the materials that surround it. The cabin’s roof is shingled with hand-split cedar shakes, which are dusted with pine needles. The gutters are trimmed with gray, lichened wood. The doors have no locks.
The cabin has a way of arresting people. Whoever comes down here, whether a deliveryman or—once—the poet Allen Ginsberg, knows they are seeing something rare and beautiful, the fruits of an autonomous life. When a hospice doctor visited, he stepped out of his car, swept his gaze over the house, the mossy rock gardens, and the corkscrew hazel out front, and said: “It looks like a hobbit lives here.”
Jerry lived here for two-thirds of his li
fe. At seventy-three years old, he was neither tall nor short, and his body was sinewy from a lifetime of walking and work. He wore glasses and a bristly white moustache. His nose protruded from his face like a beak. It was large enough, the story goes, that a kid once ran over it with a bicycle when Jerry was lying on his side on the school playground, inspecting a bug.
As he walked across the porch, Jerry didn’t stoop or wince. He smiled. Laughed, even. The only clue that something was amiss was the tiny aberration in his daily uniform—his collared shirt wasn’t tucked into his Levis.
If he was in pain, his face didn’t betray it. Comfort rarely guided his decisions, anyway. He did his work by hand, preferring the manual to the automatic. He cut his own wood, fixed his own cars, brewed his own beer, and butchered his own game. If his life was aesthetically beautiful, woodsy, and romantic, it was seldom comfortable. So whenever he had a headache or a wound, he endeavored to overcome his pain mentally. “I try not to attend to it,” he’d say.
But this current sickness was greedy for his attention. By now the cancer was accumulating. I imagined it welling up inside his body like a bruise-colored summer thunderhead, the kind of storm that smells of dust long before it ever smells of rain.
* * *
There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, figuratively or literally, when I first met Jerry, one spring morning in 2007, shortly after I had fallen in love with his daughter in Missoula. Hilly first described her father to me as a writer and beekeeper who never ate fruit out of season, refused to own a cell phone, bought almost nothing, and knew a lot about birds. In person, I found him to be self-possessed and encyclopedic, but simultaneously humble. He listened more than he spoke, and he was always learning. Our interests in writing, travel, and mountains overlapped. I admired him immediately; in time, I loved him.