The Augusta Masters Golf Club
In a nation like America, where everybody seems to be looking forward all the time, Augusta National is the rare place. It’s still intent on embracing it’s past and leaving pieces of history interwoven in modernity. For example, there’s no plaque, much less a commercial billboard, to signal the beginning of each flower named hole. The mega score scoreboard by the clubhouse is inscribed in faded block letters titled, ‘The Masters’ and the tournament’s golfing officials, the world’s most eminent agents, meet like old schoolmates under the 150 year old shade of the ‘Big Oak’, no cellphones are allowed.
Prancing about with barefoot glee on the Masters’ grass blades, actually got me stopped by an security guard. I was told in a firm voice to put my shoes on and quit the running.
Thus the more curious I grew about the Masters’ intriguing quaintness, the more I tried to soak up with a sponge-like determination. It was a realization of the dream Bobby Jones dreamt back in 1931, when he first chanced upon these barren plantation grounds. Legend has it that he stepped upon what’d be the practice green, gazed about and thought to himself, ‘And to think this ground has been waiting all these years, for someone to just come and lay a golf course on it.’
I decided to walk around exploring Jones’ dream world, nearly 50 years after his death. I was gifted a tour around the press building. It was magnificently adorned with historic quotes, journalist medallions, and enough high-tech trinkets to inspire even the most miserable of writers.
There’s also this massive TV studio house, with its back walls blown off like a paper house. You can see the suited-booted gentlemen sitting and chatting in plush chairs before the cameras, looking like dust specks down from the practice range. The cavern lighthouse like golf shop, where no shirts or caps are left bereft of the Masters emblem, is new. Mr. Doug, my great writer friend who was here for the 22nd time (that’s an year older than my brother, who is playing this Masters) told me that an old press building used to exist in it’s place. I imagined it — with journalists sniffling off ashy cigars, and hundreds of typewriters clacking away.
But in the end, the place I ended up getting wonderously teary eyed upon was the Concessions. I was treading down the sloping dip, in a crowd of most white & blonde people I’d ever been around, towards the food shelves. A humming scene spread out before me.
Lightweight college boys and cornrow braided girls were floating about in green aprons. Their smiles had stretched thin by the evening. They flicked buttons and served tall glasses of lemonade. Families swirled around neat arrays of Masters’ snacks everywhere. A cake of peach ice cream was grinning luridly at me from the freezer. As I kept looking and willed my eyes to go beyond reality, the world shifted. I tried to imagine the past.
The image now crinkled black and white, and the counters were dark. I saw red lipped girls with tight-coiled hair were bustling about. Ice water trays flew around with a flutter of woolen skirts and hair bows. A huge newspaper stack had appeared at the end. It slowly disappearing as the busboys handed them around. I looked at the mirage, because this was my 8th Grade history book come alive, imagining what 1934 must have looked like. A though came to me and humbled me. That my human existence right here in this moment too, was just a chapter in the the Masters’ magical storybook of time.
