| TALES FROM THE BOX
The Joys of
Spring
This month ushers in a return to major championship golf with arguably the greatest of them all – the Masters Tournament. European Tour commentator Julian Tutt recounts his visits to the hallowed turf of Augusta National.
Daniel Wong (Tutt); AFP (Augusta)
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The lawn in front of Augusta’s famous old colonial-style clubhouse (this page); Tiger Woods plays his second shot to the par-5 13th, the final hole of Amen Corner (opposite) 34
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ommuniqués from the Old Country suggest that the wettest winter since Noah’s carpentry and animal-management skills were sorely tested is showing signs of relenting. My local market town in rural Wiltshire is about to reclaim its original nomenclature of Bradford on Avon, having spent most of the past three months known within the community as ‘Bradford under Avon’. Throughout the Northern Hemisphere, the brilliant whites and yellows of spring are bursting forth in defiance. Even in Hong Kong, where the grey pall lingers longer than normal, the beautiful bright blossom of regeneration brings cheer to doleful souls. Although the modern golf season never ends, and big tournaments have already filled the airwaves, there’s something about early April that brings an air of expectation to the heart of every golf fan and indeed many non-golf fans. It’s all about the dogwoods and azaleas, the camellias and yellow jasmine. The annual trip down Magnolia Lane, when the greenjacketed brethren open their portals for one brief week to allow the hoi polloi to roam freely around Bobby Jones’ old playground, has the advantage of familiarity. Not that the modern version of Augusta National bears much resemblance to the
masterpiece that he and Dr Alister MacKenzie created eighty years ago. Rather like the wonderful old Hong Kong Golf Club courses at Fanling, Augusta was “nude” in the early days, a course that was designed to be played in a links style, predominantly along the ground. Now the coniferous cathedral spires of spruces and pines that line the fairways merely add to the sensation that you have entered hallowed ground. It is the Masters Tournament. Augusta is, for the most part, a town that you would happily take a detour to avoid. I remember well my first visit in the early 1990s when I was working for BBC Radio. Our HKGOLFER.COM
accommodation was one of those typical cheap American motels abutting a noisy highway. The rooms were enormous, as were the beds, with their frayed covers and smelly mattresses. An air of decay permeated, with cigarette burns on the furniture and worse on the tatty carpet. The plastic bathroom inspired a hasty ablution. The morning journey along the Washington Road was a chance to play “which tacky diner with even tackier neon sign will we patronise tonight?” The choice was endless … and depressing. However, turn right off the Washington Road through the Pearly Gates of Magnolia Lane and you entered a world so contrasting that it almost defies description. It’s one of those experiences that you just need to experience! Outside, a churning, screeching mass of rundown humanity with hawkers and ticket touts pushing to take your money. Inside, there is an instant sense of calm and sanctity, like passing through the great west door of Westminster Abbey into a place where reverence is demanded. In fact it’s only the players and those closely related to the Almighty who actually get to drive down Magnolia Lane. The rest of us turn off into one of the many car parks – great areas of gravel and tarmac that stand empty for fifty-one weeks of the year – that amazingly accommodate the forty or fifty thousand “patrons”. It’s when you pass through the heavily fortified pedestrian entrances that the full magnificence of Augusta National starts to strike home. My first impression was the grass. In those days there was no rough, or “second cut”. It was just one enormous, perfect carpet of dark green, totally uniform turf, stretching as far as the eye could see; not a weed, not a blade out of place. Then it was the swathes of enormous conifers with their base of pine straw. Everything in its place, and a place for everything. Next, the empty fairways. Wide enough to land a jumbo jet, they were deserted, save for the odd player and his white boilersuited caddie. It’s the only tournament in the world where that happens, and the players love it. No scorers, no hangers-on, no officials nor even “on-course commentators”. Particularly no on-course commentators! Television viewers remember the banks of colour, so carefully nurtured to be in full bloom at just the right time. But my overwhelming impression was of “green and white”. Green in its many shades interrupted by the white of the beautiful old colonial-style clubhouse and the timber cabins where members can stay and, of course, the Butler Cabin where the new champion takes delivery of his green jacket. On arrival, we made dignified haste for the clubhouse. (Running is not allowed at Augusta HKGOLFER.COM
The annual trip down Magnolia Lane, when the green-jacketed brethren open their portals for one brief week to allow the hoi polloi to roam freely around Bobby Jones’ old playground, has the advantage of familiarity. National. Miscreants are liable to have their accreditation removed!) Every year the same staff were on hand in the wonderfully modest, yet stylish and classy structure that serves as the 19th hole. It was an enormous privilege that we were allowed to roam free, to guzzle our eggs Benedict on the verandah looking out over the first tee and to exchange the odd quip with greats of the game sharing our space: Bob Goalby, Billy Capser, Byron Nelson, Sam Snead – they’d all come wondering by. Rookies like me would stand gawking at the top of the stairs watching and waiting for the door of the Champions Locker Room to open and for Jack Nicklaus to appear, or Arnold Palmer or Tom Watson or Ray Floyd. That was one room we couldn’t enter. You need a green jacket to get in there, and not just one belonging to a member. The social epicentre of Augusta National is “The Big Oak Tree” just outside the clubhouse. Planted in the 1850s it now needs wires to support its heavy, sprawling tentacles. This is the place where business is done and rumours exchanged, where old friends meet for their annual reunion, where new friends are made and where the media hang out eager for every grain of gossip, hoping to intercept the players en route to the first tee or more likely returning from the 18th. The players are either happy to chat after a brilliant 65, or striding with the purposeful look of a man whose next stop is the practice ground, and any hack foolish enough to attempt an interception can expect a curt response. It was here that I spent many a long hour. Interviews are a fairly crucial part of radio sports coverage. The golden nuggets then had to be hastened, discreetly, back to the media centre two hundred yards away. Everyone on the staff at Augusta oozes that drawling Southern charm that makes you feel so welcome, but you soon realise there’s a subcutaneous band of steel that quickly comes to the surface if you breech their very strict code of conduct. A few years ago BBC Radio’s golf correspondent, Iain Carter, offended by running (or was it using his mobile phone, or perhaps talking too loudly, I forget) and had his accreditation removed and was banned from the premises for the rest of the day. One of my happiest memories was interviewing Arnold Palmer after he’d received yet another honour. Everyone wanted a slice of him, but he gave of his time willingly and freely in the most charming and courteous manner possible. A true gentleman and one of the unambiguous sporting greats. Cast around now for today’s equivalent … HK GOLFER・APR 2014
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One of my happiest memories was interviewing Arnold Palmer after he’d received yet another honour. Everyone wanted a slice of him, but he gave of his time willingly and freely in the most charming and courteous manner possible.
AFP
Chairman Billy Payne shares a joke with Arnold Palmer, Gary Player and Jack Nicklaus at last year’s edition 36
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Another interview that sticks in my mind was that given by Greg Norman after his meltdown against Nick Faldo in 1996, eighty-four years to the day after the Titanic had hit an iceberg. He’d lead by six shots going into the final round, but after a soggy double bogey at the 12th, he was behind. Faldo, now the hunted rather than the hunter, was unsure about his second shot to the par-5 13th. Was it a 5-wood or a 2-iron? The discussion between him and caddie Fanny Sunesson took all of five minutes, and we saw and heard all of it. It was a masterstroke by the TV director, who would normally have rushed off to watch Joe Soap’s two-foot tap-in for bogey at the 17th, but this was the pivotal moment in the round. It was a two-horse race by then, and this was all that mattered. Norman shot 78 to Faldo’s 67, and afterwards he covered himself in glory with his honesty, dignity and sportsmanship. He didn’t know what had happened, but he knew that he would come back and win “this thing” one day. If ever there was a sporting injustice, it is that Greg Norman does not own a green jacket. Every year there is a media draw for a lucky handful of scribes who will play the course on the Monday afterwards, set up exactly as the combatants had experienced the day before.
Many Augusta regulars had been going for years and their names had never come up. Amazingly I hit the jackpot first time out. I then had to scurry around finding balls and gloves and a decent set of clubs, and beg David Graham (a two-time major champion and Augusta employee) for an early tee time so that I’d make my flight. We set off from the first with daylight still considering its options. The raucousness of the thronging patrons the night before had been replaced by an eerie silence, broken only by the hysterical giggling of Helen Alfredsson, (who I was later to share a mic with at the 1995 Ryder Cup) who was also about to get her first taste of Augusta National. We made fairly serene progress to the ninth, then ran up against the backlog created by the 10th tee starters, many of whom were Japanese. They knew this was going to be their only chance to walk inside the ropes and nothing was going to hurry them. Group photographs at every landmark were de rigueur, and it was out with the long lens around Amen Corner for those award-winning snaps. Anxious glances at the timepiece slightly took the gilt off the gingerbread as my departure time got ever nearer. I am very lucky though. I got a second bite at the cherry a few years later, the first time I went there for BBC TV. That day I got around without a single three putt. There were plenty of chips and two-putts though! Somehow t he Ma sters a lways seem s to produce drama, romance and intrigue. Remember Tiger’s “rules infraction” last year, and Australia finally getting a green jacket? This year the tournament ends on the 13th of April. Hopefully there’ll be no “Titanic”, but maybe another anniversary will be significant? On 13th April 1612 Miyamoto Musashi defeated Sasaki Kojiro at Funajima Island. So, a first Japanese winner perhaps? In 1742, Handel’s Messiah was given its world premiere in Dublin. Rory McIlroy to take the title home to the Emerald Isle? In 1796, the first elephant ever seen in America arrived from India. There are no Indians in the field as of this moment so look for, err, an “elephant”? More recently, in 1964 Sidney Poitier became the first AfricanAmerican male to win the Best Actor Oscar for his role in “Lilies of the Field”, while on 13th April 1997 Tiger Woods became the youngest golfer, and first African-American, to win the Masters. So Woods crashes through the field (of lilies?) on Sunday like a bull elephant, to defeat Hideki Matsuyama in a play-off, whereupon the patrons burst into a spontaneous rendering of the “Hallelujah Chorus”, as the academy/committee award Tiger his fifteenth Oscar. It’s all utterly predictable. HKGOLFER.COM