The Masters is a weird event.
It might not be up there with wife carrying, bog snorkelling and cheese rolling, but it’s a strange event, the equivalent of golf’s little brother with ADHD.
The fact that it is a a major golf tournament, played over four days, does not make it strange, but all the quirky, idiosyncratic foo-fah surrounding it does.
For starters, it is the only one of golf’s for majors that is played on the same course every year, which puts it on a par with the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race, which has never been held on the river Severn or Mersey (although it was held on the Great Ouse in Cambridgeshire in 2021) as a locked-in venue.
All the other majors are a movable feast and staged at different venues especially The Open which is always played on the UK’s variety of links courses.
These are all seaside, sand dune courses, where the wind can strip the handle from a putter, the rain rattles in horizontally and the rough is long enough to hide a pride of lions. Arguably, they provide a tougher test for a golfer than a course which is as neat, tidy and precise as your nan’s front parlour.
Augusta National was founded in 1932 on the site of an antebellum Georgia plantation; the sort of place which needed slaves to pick its cotton, or fruit in this case.
The course was designed by golf champion Bobby Jones and Alister Mackenzie who despite his surname, was a Yorkshireman who served as a doctor in the Great War and based his course designs on the way the Boers used landscaping to camouflage themselves and blend into the landscape in a previous spat.
It was intended as a members-only winter course and from the get-go, was always intended as a money-making enterprise, in contrast to most other members-only clubs which are non-profit organisations.
Augusta National does not disclose its income, ticket sales for the Masters or its membership list and this, depending on your viewpoint, only adds to the air of mystique which surrounds and adds to the charm of Augusta, or proves that it’s as secretive as Opus Dei or the Knights Templar.
Golf clubs have always had an air of exclusivity about them, and the UK has its share of elitist clubs, notably Queenwood, where you will need to fork out £200,000 to join and £8,000-a-year membership fee.
For a sport that has its roots on the medieval Scottish coastlines golf developed its own brand of snobbery as the upper classes seized it and made it their own but in what is supposed to be a country which abandoned the British class system, Augusta National has taken it to a different level.
Not only does the course close between May and October, even when it is open, only members get to play on it. It is not like your local muni where you can book a slot or even turn up on the day with your bag of clubs.
Although the membership list is secret, there are around 300 members, known as Green Jackets. Membership is by invitation only, there is no application process.
If you are not invited, you don’t get to play.
In 1953 Augusta National built a fence around the course, ostensibly to protect President Eisenhower who had taken a shine to the club (playing there 29 times during his presidency), but really to keep the riff-raff out.
It would be no major shock to the system to learn Augusta National was a bedrock of the sort of Southern values that kicked off a civil war. Co-founder Clifford Roberts, who became the club’s chairman, said early on ‘As long as o am alive, all the golfers will be white and all the caddies will be black,’ and this was the case until television executive Ron Townsend was admitted in 1990.
Women fared even worse and it wasn’t until August 2012 that former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was one of two women admitted as members.
The mythology and mystique surrounding the Green Jacket is another ritual that perpetuates Augusta’s ‘tradition’ but it really is a pile of piffle.
Every member of Augusta National is required to buy a Green Jacket, which is kept in a fingerprint-secured and climate-controlled vault. Members must wear them during the Masters but like the Holy Grail in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, they must never be taken off the course,
Two went missing in 2012 and the club launched an investigation, such was the panic.
Since Sam Snead’s win in 1949 the Masters champion is presented with a Green Jacket, but it does not come with a membership. Rory McIlroy will be allowed to take his jacket off the course for a year, after which it must be returned.
One of Augusta’s quirkiest sights is the caddies. Clad in their white boiler suits – not just for the Masters – you would be forgiven for thinking they had come to do a spot of painting and decorating. Thanks to Clifford Roberts, until 1982 caddies were African-American.
Of course, Americans lap all this stuff up like mother’s milk, labelling it as tradition and history, a bit cheeky for a club founded in 1932 when real tradition and history is St Andrews Old Course, which was founded in 1552.
But what makes the Masters special and the main attraction for most spectators is the impeccable course and it takes a lot to make it a Disneyland of golf. Those pine needles under the trees are imported and that bird song of old Mr Mockingbird and Whippoorwill? Played out through hidden speakers.
The likes of Alan Titchmarsh and Monty Don marvel at how the azaleas and dogwoods are in peak chocolate-box lid flower for the four days of the Masters but the Augusta committee refuse to comment as to whether they are frozen to maintain their bloom.
And those greens, cut to a length to make them fast and so short snooker could be played on them. Groundskeepers get down on hands and knees and crawl over every square inch with scissors to trim any blade of grass that has the nerve to poke itself up above the others.
But in the same weekend McIlroy was plotting his second Masters title, a cycle race was taking place in conditions as far removed from the manicured perfection of the Augusta National as the 4,000 miles from Georgia to Northern France.
On this course there are no groundskeepers with scissors, but goats, who are considered an essential maintenance tool.
Welcome to the Paris-Roubaix race, one of the classics of cycle racing and known as L’Enfer du Nord – the Hell of the North.
Unlike Le Tour doe France or Giro d’Italia, the Paris-Roubaix is a one-day race, over 162 miles. It has no Mont Ventout or other mountains to climb, being staged over the flat Flanders landscape where the Great War was slugged out.
What earns the race its doom-laden monicker are the 30 sectors of pave, fearsome stretches of cobbled road.
These are not the twee, pebble-sized cobbles you might find in the streets of Rye and would bring a knowing, cross-eyed smile to a maiden aunt tripping over them on her old boneshaker.
We are talking blocks of granite the size of a baboon’s head, laid roughly along ancient roads laid down by the Romans. Such huge lumps are tricky to navigate at the best of times. When it rains, they become as slippery and treacherous as a curling rink.
The original design brief for the Citroen 2CV was to allow a farmer to drive to market over a ploughed field with a basket of eggs on the front passenger seat and for none of them to break.
The eggs would have been ready for scrambling had they been driven over some sections of the Paris-Roubaix race, roads rougher than a bear’s arse and riding them is like sitting on a bike while operating a pneumatic drill.
One problem for the race is finding stretches of pave road. The course underwent an image problem as communes which had lengths of cobbles, raced to tarmac them over for fear they would be seen as backwaters populated by bike-riding Monsieur Hulots.
But thanks to Les Amis de Paris-Roubaix, enough stretches are continually being unearthed to maintain a course (even if the route slightly varies some years) along with their partners in crime Les Forcats du Pave – the Convicts of the Cobbles – who patch up stretches that need it.
And this is where the goats comes in. They are the best method discovered for chewing out the vegetation which grows up between the cobbles, especially in the toughest pave section, the Trouee d’Arenberg, a 2,500m stretch through a forest on cobbles laid down by Napoleon.
If the asphalt roads of Le Tour equate to Augusta National for smoothness and ease of passage, the Paris-Roubaix is a windswept links course. Riders have a love-hate relationship with it, describing it as the worst race to take part in, but the best race to win. Tadej Pogacar has won Le Tour four times but he can’t beat the cobbles of northern France, yet he will continue to try as long as he can put his tushy on a bike saddle,
The discomfort doesn’t end when riders cross the finish line.
While the Masters champion is ceremoniously robed with his green jacket in the homely splendour of Butler’s Cabin, the showers at the Roubaix velodrome finish are straight out of the 1930s. Tradition dictates that riders soap off in open, three-sided, low-walled concrete stalls, each with a bronze plaque with the name if a previous winner.
In contrast to the elitism of the Masters, the Paris-Roubaix is very much a people’s event, run over an area trashed by two world wars, and a region which has become impoverished since the closure of its mines and steel industry. There is no elitism here, apart from the riders who are the cream of cycling, trying to win a race which blows a huge raspberry at their skills and endeavours.
But like the Masters champion, the Paris-Roubaix winner receives a special prize.
Not a tailored green jacket, but a pave block, an 18-inch cube of granite which would cause his trophy cabinet to collapse if he thought to put it in. And unlike the champion’s green jacket, he doesn’t have to give it back after a year, it’s his for keepsies.
Perhaps the Masters isn’t so weird after all.
