A stunning location, challenging course, and the world’s best golfers playing for perhaps the globe’s only prestigious and fashionable green jacket.

 

It is an event that has produced countless wonderful stories, none of which is better than that of Ben Crenshaw’s second Masters victory in 1995.

 

Anyone who has read the “Little Red Book” will know of Harvey Penick’s contribution to golf teaching and how he has a genuine claim to be regarded as the greatest coach any sport has ever produced.

 

Penick had first placed a golf club in the hand of Crenshaw when he was just six. He was the only coach Crenshaw ever had and died in the week before the ’95 Masters.

 

Crenshaw was in the Augusta field that year but was in the midst of the worst slump of his career. He’d missed the cut in three of his previous four tournaments and not broken 70 for two months.

 

At 7.30 on the day before the Masters started, Crenshaw left Augusta and flew 950 miles to carry his coach’s coffin to his grave. Four days later, with tears welling in his eyes, Crenshaw holed out on the 18th green at Augusta to win by one shot.

 

“I believe in fate,” Crenshaw said. I don’t know how it happened. I don’t.”

 

It is a touching tale with few, if any, peers.

 

Despite all of the above, the Masters is an event which infuriates me as much as it inspires. There is the harmless stuff like the blue dye in the water and obsession with trivial tradition like the Augusta committee’s insistence on referring to “patrons” rather than fans or spectators.

 

More sinister is Augusta’s autocratic rule over its “guests”; a junta-like policing of the media which once saw a television commentator permanently excluded for referring to the patrons as “a mob” and another for having described the course’s notoriously fast greens as looking as if they’d been “bikini-waxed”.

 

Though things are a bit more relaxed now than they once were, words critical of Augusta will be hard to find this weekend.

 

The tone for what the Masters has become was set by a fellow called Clifford Roberts, Augusta National’s first chairman, whose own demons moved him in later life to take a moonlit walk on the vaunted course before putting a gun to his head, pulling the trigger, and falling dead into one of its famous water features.

 

To add to the authoritarianism and mystery that Roberts’ legacy brings, there is also an uncomfortable history that, until relatively recently, saw the club embrace the notion of racial segregation with something bordering on enthusiasm.

 

It is an enduring hypocrisy that at the same time as South Africa was excluded from international sport because of its apartheid policy, so the sporting world would focus its attention for one week every year on a golf club in America’s south where for the first 40 years of the tournament’s history the only black faces to be seen inside the ropes were caddies and outside them were litter-pickers and waiters.

 

The Augusta club had no black members and the tournament no black players. That, in spite of the fact, that at least two qualified by winning events on the PGA tour. It was only when Lee Elder teed up in 1975 that the Masters’ unofficial whites-only policy was ended. Until then, the committee had used the Masters’ status as an invitation-only event to exclude them.

 

Thankfully, Tiger Woods, who was born in the same year as Elder’s ground-breaking appearance, has done much to advance the cause of non-white golfers. He goes for a fifth Masters title this week when he will no doubt be watched from the old white clubhouse by one of the club’s handful of black members. They are a token minority but, bear in mind, 20 years ago there weren’t any at all.

 

The current club chairman is Billy Payne - he of Atlanta Olympics fame - and now, more than ever, pressure is on him to drag Augusta out of its parallel universe and into the one the rest of us occupy.

 

Some might say there’s more chance of that happening than a woman winning the Masters.

 

Pragmatists would no doubt settle for Payne inviting a female to take up membership at his club.

Augusta took more than half-a-century to allow its first Afro-Caribbean to cross the threshold. I wonder how much longer it will be before a lady is invited to take the same step?

Martin Gillingham represented Great Britain in the 1984 Olympic Games and 1987 World Championships at the 400 metres hurdles. Since retiring from the track he spent 12 years in South Africa where he was a radio talk show presenter and writer for a Sunday newspaper. He returned to the UK in 2003 and can now be heard commentating on athletics for Eurosport as well as rugby for Sky Sports, ITV and Setanta.

 

Comments


Martin fails to make what, I think, is an important point. Should
the Olympics really be thinking of adding a sport like golf to
the programme when it has such a poor record on things like race
relations and sexual equality? Surely this goes against
everything the Olympic Movement stands for? I, for one, will not
be watching golf in the 2016 Olympics if it is added in October.
By Concerned Olympic fan

13 April 2009 at 15:30pm