A Tradition Unlike... errr where'd it go?!

I want my Masters back…

Let me be astoundingly clear about something: I love the Masters. To be sure, I also love golf, but there are few things that you’ll find golfers to be as passionate about that doesn’t directly concern their game as those four glorious days that give us a window to Augusta… it’s literally the green-flag to spring and for many, the signal of the beginning of golf season.

I must interject a brief aside, if you’ll indulge me. There may be several of you out there who say “Golf?!” and come up with a decidedly not-witty comment that has been used mere thousands of times before. If you don’t like golf, that’s fine, but I’ve found most people who don’t enjoy the game fall into two categories:

1. They’ve never actually attempted to play
2. They’ve played, learned that it was actually difficult, and decided not to like it because, brah, I don’t suck at anything… (other than life of course)

Those of you who don’t like the game or don’t pay attention to it need not read on.

There, now that that’s settled, allow me to climb up on my golfer’s soap-box for a moment here. Let’s get one thing painfully out in the clear: The Masters sucked this year. There, I said it. Flat out sucked. Trevor Immelman deserved to win, and I don’t want to take a thing away from him. Champ’s not one of those front-runners who has to see a “name”win to enjoy the tournament, those guys can go pull it out their ass for all Champ cares (coincidentally, many were likely intently watching the Red Sox Yankees “rivalry” this weekend as well…). What I wanted to see was good golf and some competition. We got neither. The one brief bit of relief I had was the fact that Tiger wasn’t gift wrapped another major due to some dude choking on applesauce all day long while The Striped One played nothing better than par golf. Tiger Woods demands respect, but I HATE watching him win that way. On a day where the winds blew, the eventual winner tied a dubious record… highest final round score shot by the eventual champion: 75.

That doesn’t cover the scope of the suckitude of this tournament however, in a four day stretch where the low score was 67 and the final 20 players on Sunday couldn’t break par, there was a detached and very distant feel to this tournament. There were no roars on Sunday, there were no back nine charges, there were no low scores from a few groups ahead of the leaders to add intrigue and excitement to this competition… this from a tournament that was world renowned for: “The Masters doesn’t start ‘till the back nine on Sunday”. Ack. Some will blame the wind… but that’s a scape goat here. It’s not as though the place was on fire for the first three rounds, and there were fantastic conditions to be had out there. What did we get? A bloodbath… which isn’t what the Masters used to be about. Suddenly the Masters and the folks in those green jackets have caught a case of USGAitis… and it reeks. I do not enjoy the U.S. Open, it’s not entertaining for me to sit there and watch train wreck after train wreck on a tricked up and artificially toughened forgettable track in the summer sun. Leave that garbage to the USGA.

The Masters is above that, its tradition is so interwoven with the holes and the players who have made them memorable that to trifle with them to the extent that the people down there have has robbed the tournament of much of its magic. NOBODY CARES that Augusta yielded under par scores because it was still a course that demanded and rewarded solid golf and shockingly: yielded exciting golf. The people at Augusta have gone too far with their changes. The course is too long and they have combined this length by making the greens no more receptive, adding cuts of rough where none previously existed, and essentially turning the track into the U.S. Open dressed in green sheep’s clothing. Which is vomit inducing.

When you remember the Masters what do you remember? You remember Nicklaus shooting a back nine 30 for the ages in 1986, you remember Ernie and Phil dueling with eagles and birdies in ’04, you remember David Duval throwing it away down the stretch, you remember Mark O’Meara making birdies on the last two to win, Arnold Palmer and Gary Player doing likewise, the greats playing great golf. Seve, Woosnam, Ben Crenshaw, the list goes on and on and on. I’ll tell you what you don’t think of: a bunch of guys trying to put band-aids on rounds and just get into the clubhouse… that’s U.S. Open type garbage right there.

Don't plan on seeing these reactions on Sunday anytime soon...

There’s a ridiculous and nasty venereal disease going around the sport of golf right now concerning the word “par”. “We must protect par!” has long been the cry of nobodies and dweebs at the USGA, and now with the artificial and unnecessary tricking up of Augusta National, we’re starting to see the effects of this kind of hysteria. Par is just a goddamn number, that’s all it is, a number, and an arbitrary one at that. What I want to see is exciting golf, I want to see players dueling down the stretch, and I have not a single care in the world whether that duel takes place at 15 under or 1 under or even 3 over. We got none of those things Sunday, because we’ve got courses now that don’t allow players any opportunity to do anything other than get lucky, and they are covered up with stupid words like “demanding”, “exacting”, and “a challenge”. They are none of these things, they’re contrived and stupid. Anyone can make a golf course hard by growing the rough for a couple of weeks, saying par 5’s are par 4’s and making the fairways as wide as your hallway. Augusta has started to show the early symptoms of this ridiculousness and the tournament has suffered the consequences for the past two years.

Augusta was different, it was a great course that provided great moments… but in its current configuration it’s in grave danger of losing that, and that’s a shame. When sporting events forget what they are about and begin to focus myopically on insipid details, they run the danger of alienating those that have made the event what it was in the first place…

Champ… out.