Barry's Blog

Most of us who have played golf would agree that there are many days when Mark Twain's famous quip is all too true: "Golf is a good walk spoiled." But as we prepare for the 2006 Masters at Augusta National, where the azaleas are in bloom and the weather is warming up, many are wondering who will be the favorite, especially when six holes have been altered in the past year to lengthen the course to a whopping 7,445 yards (155 yards longer than last year, 520 yards longer than in 1997). Even Nickaus and Palmer, longtime members of Augusta National, have captured pre-tournament headlines by complaining that the course is no longer the course they have known over the decades. Nicklaus, in an interview with Golf Digest that stunned everyone, including, it seems, the club, offered: "They've ruined it from a tournament standpoint."

Needless to say, Tiger seems to be the favorite, and by lengthening the course, and with his short game, most handicappers believe Augusta National has finally succeeded, not in Tiger-proofing the Masters, but in Tiger-sealing it, as only Tiger and a handful of long hitters are capable of winning. We'll see...BTW, you can watch every player play "Amen Corner Live" by webcast at the Tournament's official website, www.masters.org

But enough about the ongoing brouhaha surrounding this year's Masters Tournament. Here are a few interesting "Did You Knows?" about Alister MacKenzie, the golf course architect who designed Augusta National, taken from Geoff Shackelford's excellent article in the current Master's Preview issue (April 4th) of Sports Illustrated. The exquisite MacKenzie was born in 1870 in Yorkshire England, yet always considered himself a Scot. He was trained and first practiced medicine as a surgeon, but turned to being a full-time golf architect by 1920.  MacKenzie built Augusta National during the Depression, and was paid only $5,000, because his original fee of $10,000 was halved by Clifford Roberts to get the struggling project started. While MacKenzie claimed to have designed as many as 400 courses (the number is more like 150!), his legacy lives on at such courses as the swank Jockey Club in Argentina; Pasatiempo, a semipublic course in Santa Cruz, California (where his ashes were scattered after his death); and the #2 ranked course in Golf's World Top Ten, Cypress Point, down the beach from Pebble. But it is Augusta National, designed with his friend Bobby Jones in 1931, that defined his legacy, whose inspiration had been the understated, wide-open Old Course at St. Andrews. Unfortunately,  MacKenzie died of a heart attack on January 6th, 1934, less than four months before the first Masters was played.

While the history surrounding golf and the Masters is legendary, it goes without saying that the parallels between  golf and our human condition have been well documented, it seems, from time immemorial. The mutual joys and frustrations of the game are difficult, if not impossible, to answer. In many ways, golf is the least precise game in the world, as golfers are rarely able to determine with any precision exactly WHY they are playing well or poorly. In his best-selling book, A Good Walk Spoiled: Days and Nights on the PGA Tour, John Feinstein observes: "No one has the answers...Hard work can make you better but it won't always make you better. Sometimes, it will make you worse. Golf has no guarantees. And what makes it even more difficult, there are no excuses...No one ever gets a bad call in golf. No one strikes you out or tackles you or blocks your shot or hits a forehand so hard you can't get to it. The ball doesn't move and neither does the hole. You either get the ball into the hole quickly or not quickly enough. Period...There is no sport as solitary as golf. No sport humanizes you like golf."

And as few other sports, golf keeps track of every mistake. PGA tour player Billy Andrade, a friend to many MLB players, likes to tell them, "You can strike out your first three times up and still be a hero by hitting a homer your fourth time up. In golf, you make three errors and you're dead!" Or, as the legendary Sam Snead once chided Hall of Famer Ted Williams, "In golf, you have to play your foul balls."

In many ways, golf might even be considered a "spiritual" exercise. (You guys should get a lot of mileage out of this statement with your wives!) Why? Because it deflates our ego, and shows us how far we have to go. And while in many venues of life we may fool ourselves into thinking that we are really doing well, golf is not nearly as forgiving. In fact, golf may give us a glimpse of what we are really like, deep down in our souls:

"Most of us don't really know how well we're doing, in real life, and imagine we're doing not so bad. The world conspires to flatter us; only golf trusts us with a cruelly honest report on our performance. Only on the golf course is the feedback instantaneous and unrelenting...In the sound of the hit and the flight of the ball it tells us unflinchingly how we are doing, and we are rarely doing well."                                                                                                                                                                       - John Updike, "Moral Exercise," from Golf Dreams: Writings on Golf 

For FinishingWell,

Barry Morrow