Masters Blog 2005

On Sunday morning the air was crisp and cool and smelled of azaleas. The flags were asleep on the flag poles. The sun was smiling.

We stood outside the merchandise shop that morning and watched the traditional running of the fans. When the gates open and crowds enter, the marshals police the throng with shouts of, no running! So this becomes an Olympic stiff walking race to place the fold out chairs in positions at the greens of Augusta. This was the 1970’s cartoon “Keep on Trucking” character with his legs well in front of his body, trying to outpace everyone else in the parade. The merchandise director had warned us before we watched to stifle our laughter, but that was too difficult.
Despite third round play, we were busy as ever. There was a constant drift of the crowd past our counter and I was lost in the work. Then Chris nudged my elbow and told me I needed to come with him for a break.

He led me out of the shop and down the hill to the bleachers of the sixteenth tee telling me, every step of the way, what Tiger Woods was doing. Tiger was about to set a course record. Chris told me that Tiger had birdied seven holes in a row. The previous leader, Chris DiMarco had faded and Tiger had taken the lead.

We arrived at my same favorite greens at the sixteenth tee. From there the crowd can witness both the green of fifteen and the tee shot and putt at sixteen. Suddenly the large leader board posted Tiger’s result at fourteen. He had broken the string and made a bogey. We watched him bogey again on fifteen and miss his birdie and settle for a par on sixteen. Maybe he was human after all.

By the time the final round began we had moved all the remaining merchandise on to the long serving counter top at our station. When a customer drifted by we could point him to the stack of his size. It had become self service. If he were a medium there were only two shirts and if he were a double extra large there were none. We asked one of the girls to baby sit the piles and we went to the course to watch golf.

On thirteen we watched Mickelson and Singh who were ironically matched for the last round. Singh had asked the officials to check Mickelson’s cleats during play on Saturday, complaining that the shoes were tearing up the greens. Mickelson had confronted Singh in the locker room and there had been words. I wondered if there might be a secret wager between them today. Neither struck the other in the neck with an eight iron, however.

Then we decided to climb the hill and perch behind the green at number five, where the hill is above the turn at fifteen and sixteen. On arrival we discovered that the view was too obstructed by the trees, and we wanted a clear look at the man in red and black, so we followed the trail down from the tee box on number six. Half way down that trail, we found our spot. We were like those strangers no one saw in the grassy knoll, with clear vision to the green below. Behind the pink, white, and red azalea bushes we stood with the green of sixteen below us like a pool table top. With a turn of the head we could watch the putting on fifteen. The crowd below was tight to the ropes on all sides and up here there were no shoulders to peek over.
We had been prepared to watch Tiger pass by on his way to the coronation. But to our surprise DiMarco had struggled back into contention and now, as they approached fifteen, Tiger held only a two stroke advantage.

I looked at the white word Ping on DiMarco’s black cap and asked Chris, “Shouldn’t that be Polo on DiMarco?”

There was a distraction for both leaders before their putt on fifteen. The South African, Trevor Immelman soared his ball to the sixteenth green and it struck above the hole and came rolling back. That can go! Chris husked, and like a jolt of electricity the crowd erupted in one voice as the ball rolled neatly back and into the cup for a hole in one. This was the same hole where back to back hole in ones had greeted Mickelson’s arrival to fifteen just the year before. Now I stood on the same hollowed ground with the same sudden rush of adrenaline and was astounded once more. DiMarco sunk his birdie and suddenly his was a one stroke game.
When DiMarco’s ball came down to the right of the cup, Chris and I knew it was a make able birdie lie. But when Tiger’s ball struck left and rolled into the low slump in the fringe, we knew it was a wicked lie. Chris whispered, “I’ve been there before on this hole. That’s a tough place to be.” Yes, he gets to play Augusta once a year.

And that is when time started moving in freeze frames. How important is this shot? I thought. It’s just for a few hundred thousand dollars, a fourth green jacket in nine tries, the silencing of a media who questioned his elite ability, and remarkable golf history.

When he struck the ball and it ran some ten feet up the incline of the green and made a lazy Indy 500 turn, every pupil was focused on the ball. And now the ball started down the slant, and the crowd drew a collective breath and it trickled down, not so much rolling as drifting, being drawn like a magnet toward a special moment. This scene was directed by Alfred Hitchcock. This was a scene of a child playing with a revolver. This was watching the last card placed delicately atop a hundred decks in a castle of cards. The ball rolled to the lip of the cup and stopped. Or so it seemed in that freeze frame of time. For one millisecond it was the Twilight Zone episode where all the people are frozen in place while the astronauts walk around in lone animation. And then the collective energy of every soul there and every soul watching on television willed the black Nike swoop on that ball another rotation and it plopped into the hole. The crowd voice was an earthquake and Chris and I found ourselves bounding into free space in a glory leap. Chris’s eyebrows neared his hair line, his open mouth moved into a grin, and our hands slapped in high fives. We began to assess what we had just seen.... How many times will we see that shot again in our lives? How many times will that highlight be shown in the broadcasts to come? And these two orbs in these two sockets were witness.

“The difference,” said DiMarco after his sudden death playoff loss,” was that his chip went in and mine didn’t.” DiMarco’s chip on eighteen hit the flagstick and deflected, or Tiger’s remarkable twenty foot break would have lost some glamour. But that could not happen. Not this day.
This had been the passing of the guard. Jack Nicklaus had sat before the cameras and said that this was most likely his last Masters. His time had come to face the reality of his physical decline from the pinnacle he had crafted. It would have been fitting if he, rather than Mickelson, could have placed that green jacket on Tiger’s shoulders. This was the new era and the crowning of a new king.

Flashback

Today it is raining and I am inside, and I’m dry, and I’m cozy.

Acute memory though, of my twenty-one year old ass fitting into an upside down steel pot helmet that held me out of the rice patty water. I’m on night guard and my poncho drapes around me and into the water at my boot ankles and my M-16 is between my knees like a tent pole. It is such a drenching downpour that I have zero fear of Viet Cong intruders. They are wet and cold too. I have the poncho drawn to a fine pinhole over one pupil and I am marinating my body inside in the smoke from my cigarette. The poncho is thick enough that it hides the glow of each smoky draw, and this wee hour smoke, out here in the bush, is an unusual treat. So I peer through the pinhole into nothingness but rain lines that are popping the rice patty surface, and I sit in the arc of my squad perimeter that circle in a protective pattern. No trip flares are out, the rice patty too soggy for a firmly staked grip. So the rain drops drill the outside poncho against my light helmet liner and I conger up visions of the United States, women who are not Asian, freedom to just go for a drive, dry clothes, fresh fruit and sliced tomatoes. These thoughts are in the slice of custard in my cranium where I go for refuge, for down time, for escape.

Then I am here again in my cozy home looking out at the splashing rain. I go back to the kitchen for another cup of coffee and ponder whether I should go outside and get cold and soaked, just because of my freedom to come back inside and be dry and cozy.