Say your family interrupted yet another game you were watching on ESPN 3 or 4 and said, “Admit it. You’re a sports addict.” Say you agreed to save your family life by watching only one sports event per year. Which would it be?
The Super Bowl? Rose Bowl? NBA Finals? Final Four? World Series? Wimbledon? Kentucky Derby? Cubs opener? Bears convention?
For me the choice would be as decisive as Tiger Woods’ 12-shot victory here last year. Hold a starter’s gun to my head and I take the Masters. Of course, I would need a straitjacket the rest of the year, but give me the four-day quest for the Green Jacket. Give me the event that year after year provides the most unpredictable drama, the greatest star power and the most amazing stories in sports.
Give me Augusta National on Sunday and I’ll say Amen, as in Corner. Give me the world’s most seductive and mysterious golf course–a “mystical cathedral,” Ben Crenshaw calls Augusta and its directionless winds and paranormal undulations. Give me the most excruciating pressure in sports. Give me the Masters and I’ll survive.
You don’t have to like golf or golfers to love the Masters. They could play basketball, football or baseball at Augusta National and it probably still would out-memory Churchill Downs and the All-England Club and “the Granddaddy of ’em all.”
What has been the biggest criticism of America’s most hyped event, the Super Bowl? Too many blowouts. Too often, Super Sunday hasn’t lived up to its buildup. So what happened in last year’s Masters? It exceeded its buildup with a blowout. Would Tiger be a babe in Augusta’s woods? No, his Sherman-like march through Georgia and its plantation traditions will go down as one of the most memorable Masters.
Every Masters Sunday I wonder who is writing these scripts. Dearly departed Masters founder Bobby Jones? Dan Jenkins? Kevin Costner? Spielberg? Serling? O Henry? Who knows? Maybe they all convene every April Fool’s Day in the Butler Cabin to brainstorm.
You can almost hear them over the whispering pines: “It’s Phil Mickelson’s turn so we can get his wife more air time on CBS. Mickelson overtakes Tiger when Tiger hits his tee shot on 15 (a par 5) into the water. . . . No, Fuzzy beats Tiger in a playoff when Fuzzy refers to the “collar of the green” and Tiger hears “collard greens.” . . . No, no, just when nobody expects him to, Greg Norman finally exorcises the ghosts of his ’96 collapse (when he blew a six-shot lead) and his ’87 playoff loss (when Larry Mize holed out from 150 feet) by beating Mize and Faldo in a playoff.”
The great thing about the Masters is that it always is won by, well, masters. By the greatest players, from Hogan to Nicklaus to Woods, doing great things. Ed Sneed can lead by five shots beginning 1979’s final round, but he won’t win. Scott Hoch can find himself in a playoff, but he will choke. The only way an unknown, undecorated, uninteresting Larry Mize can win is if he’s from Augusta, he’s playing in his first Masters and he does a “Braveheart” on Norman the Conqueror.
Usually, a Mize has a much better chance of winning a U.S. Open. If you think golf is boring, you would find the Open interminable. The Masters is to the Open what the old Ditka was to the current Wannstedt.
The Masters is high-risk, high-reward; the Open is play-it-safe. The roughless Masters never is won by anyone deploying what the caddies call the “Tom Kite Method”: laying up on the par 5s. The Open almost always is won by a Kite or a Curtis Strange or a Hale Irwin or an Andy North who is patient enough to avoid the jungle rough by poking it down the middle, playing safely to the middle of the green and two-putting. The Open is about making pars, the Masters about making eagles. The Open is a war of attrition, the Masters a gentlemanly war.
When you least expected it, Jack Nicklaus won in 1986 . . . at age 46 . . . by going 4-under on the final four holes. When you least expected it, Ben Crenshaw won in 1995 . . . exploding out of a long slump . . . after returning without sleep from carrying the casket of his mentor, Harvey Penick. Who’s writing this stuff?
Take nothing away from Woods, who didn’t three-putt once in four rounds. But the past champions are curious to see how he’ll handle the adversity that strikes when least expected on greens that can putt like icy mountain roads.
Tom Watson noted Wednesday that during last year’s final round, on No. 14, Woods made a putt that hit the back of the cup.
“I know that putt,” Watson, a Woods fan, said, “and if it hadn’t hit the back of the hole, it probably would have rolled down the hill and left him with a 50-footer. Once that happens to you out there, you start thinking about it.”
Watson knows he doesn’t know Augusta’s winds: “The wind conditions here are the most difficult to judge of any course I play for a living. You can be on the practice tee and it’s blowing left to right, and then you get out there on 17, and it’s blowing completely the opposite direction. How does that happen? No one knows.”
All I know for sure is that Sunday night, I’ll be at this keyboard writing about an outcome I couldn’t have made up. Give me the Masters, thank you.
