THE MASTERS: Where you can be ejected for sitting on the grass

Augusta National clubhouse (image from the Masters Tournament website).

FROM THE DAILY TELEGRAPH WEBSITE
By OLIVER BROWN
I wonder if I have heard the voice on the sat-nav system correctly.
“Continue on Interstate 20 for the next 132 miles.” Rumpled after 16 hours’ travelling to Atlanta, via Paris, I suspect it is more than I can take. But in those tenebrous forests of eastern Georgia, the name illuminated on each destination board proves sufficient to sustain me. Augusta.
The highway to Augusta is a desolate place, a laser-straight slab of asphalt boring remorselessly through the pines. The place that greets you is no Damascus, either. As I stop at a Drive-Thru Taco Bell for some horrifically overstuffed midnight burrito, I look down Washington Road at the hoardings for Krispy Kreme, Days Inn, Outback Steakhouse: all signposts to the grim geography of Main Street, USA.
Evidently, there is a sharp disjuncture between Augusta, hick Deep South town, and Augusta National, the mythologised golf course to which I am paying a first pilgrimage. But their narratives have become shared. On the home stretch, in search of the single-storey ranch house where I am staying for the week, I cross a series of evocative intersections: Glenwood Drive, Azalea Drive, Magnolia Drive. Now we are talking.
It is the classic question to put to any Masters debutant: How will you feel about your first journey up Magnolia Drive? Martin Laird, Scottish-born winner at Bay Hill last weekend, says simply: “I can’t wait to get there.”
Rickie Fowler, the 21 year-old who always looks as if he should be riding the Hawaii surf rather than seen anywhere near a fairway, talks of it being a childhood dream. Those words are uttered under the cover of a back-to-front pink baseball cap. The Green Jackets can hardly know what it is about to hit them.
For while the Masters next week shall surely serve up the grandest, most florally-framed scenes in golf, it is also an event trapped inside its draconian rulebook.
The whitewashed gates that separate the public parking lots from Augusta’s fabled greensward are, in every respect, portals to a different universe.
Patrons, as one must always refer to those blessed or rich enough to secure an admission badge, can be ejected merely for sitting on the grass. Woe betide anyone, too, who is spotted with a mobile phone. The punishment for it ringing out on Tiger Woods’s backswing scarcely bears thinking about. Georgia still has the death penalty, you know.
Twelve months ago, the city of Augusta remained riven by recession. It was difficult to move 100 yards without encountering notice of a clearance sale, or an advert for debt consolidation.
But the signature golf club did not, as you might expect of an institution counting Bill Gates among its members, buy into a culture of national parsimony. Needing another car park to replace the one they had just carpeted over with a practice ground, the governors bought up every house on a street and flattened them.
Billy Payne, chairman of Augusta National, rules his domain with no apologies for excess. When Woods chose the Masters as his comeback stage last year, Payne chose the eve of the tournament to launch a pompous peroration on how Woods had disappointed not merely his hosts, but a generation of children, by his philandering. Remember, though, that we are deep in Bible-belt territory. Sanctimony is never delivered in small doses.
Clues as to the setting are seldom less subtle than at Augusta Country Club, where the European Tour hosts its annual media dinner. In a scene straight from To Kill A Mockingbird, hors d’oeuvres are brought out on to the balcony while cicadas thrum in the thick evening air. We could not be an environment any more southern than if we were kicking back with a cloudy lemonade.
From such moments does a certain beauty spring. No occasion can match the Masters for the sheer richness of its ambience — not even a hushed Centre Court with Roger Federer on the bill. To stand by the sunlit first tee here is to enjoy a harbinger of the sporting summer to come.
To have a second bite next week at the toughest ticket in sport, where touts can command over £10,000 a throw is, I appreciate, a privilege. But many more drives up I-20 await if I am ever to match Art Spander, esteemed former golf correspondent of the San Francisco Chronicle, fast approaching his 47th Masters. He has, quite rightly, been given his own parking space.