AUGUSTA, Ga. — Is it me, or did the 2024 Masters Tournament concluded last month exude a subtle-but-fascinating Antipodean vibe? I’m not talking about the field itself (though I do think ESPN and CBS could have done with an Aussie Cam, to track the progress of Mssrs. Davis and Smith), but rather the course itself. I came away convinced that the 2024 presentation at Augusta National Golf Club has subtly moved closer to the Sand Belt stylings of Royal Melbourne, as opposed to the iconic American parkland for which ANGC has for many decades served as standard-bearer.
The Good Doctor, Alister MacKenzie, laid out all 18 holes at ANGC (with Robert Tyre Jones) and all 36 at RMGC (with Alex Russell) some 90 years ago. In Georgia, architect George Cobb subsequently authored several changes during the 1950s and ’60s. Yet most golf fans recognize that, between major championships, this golf course is routinely renovated and tweaked. Last week’s telecast revealed a few new cupping areas, enabled by reworked contours on and around the putting surfaces. A few loblolly pines have also gone missing, some by design, some due to old age, and some out of an abundance of caution, due to the massive tree limb that fell to earth during last year’s tournament.
Augusta National rarely comments on any of these adjustments, as we’ve come to expect. What’s more, its broadcaster partners scrupulously (some would say obsequiously) follow the club’s lead in this regard. As do the course design and construction professionals who carry out this annual off-season adjustment work.
Still, I noticed a few things that felt new, and all of them struck me as rather Australian.
First, the bunker edges at Augusta National are looking more and more like something we’d see at Royal Melbourne, Kingston Heath or Metropolitan. I’m not sure when this edging practice actually started, in Augusta, but this year I noticed for the first time just how much of the soil profile is visible at the top of the greenside bunkers especially. Either way, this is very much a stylistic flourish associated with the top courses in Australia, especially those in the famed Sand Belt region south of Melbourne.
The modifier design nerds like to deploy when describing this style of bunker edge is “sharp”. The definition of said edge is indeed very neat and clean, and balls don’t trickle down a collar or embankent into these bunkers: They drop in, directly. To be clear, I’m not about to claim that this style was instituted course-wide this past winter. More likely, it’s been introduced already, perhaps in a few spots, and expanded to include most every green complex, save 14, where no bunkers exist.
Aussie/Sand Belt bunkers and those at Augusta National have long shared two more qualities: steep faces and flat bottoms. This shared characteristic typically means a ball hits the face, doesn’t embed, and rolls back down to a fairly level bunker floor. This architectural choice has a competitive aspect (anything buried in the face would result in a terrifically difficult recovery shot) and an ease-of-maintenance aspect. It also looks smart.
We can agree Augusta National’s bunkers have presented and played this way for years. It seems to me the club has finally added this soil-forward edging presentation to fully complement the effect.
So my wife and I have a 12-year-old girl staying with us for a while and last Thursday evening she settled down beside me (armed with a big bag of magic markers and a sketch pad) as I watched a recording of The Masters first round. She wasn’t paying much attention. In that way she was a credible stand-in for the broader American public, which, let’s face it, doesn’t pay much attention to golf, even its majors. Indeed, when she did take notice, she playfully mocked the idea of watching golf altogether — that is, until she noticed Tiger Woods walking off a tee.
“Who’s that?” she asked.
That’s
Tiger Woods, I told her. I swear to god, I did not prep
her in any way; she picked him out of the crowd of players all on her own. The
next afternoon, during the live broadcast of Round 2, she wandered back into
the living room. Unbidden she asked, “How’s Tiger doing?”
He’s
doing quite well, actually. You like him?
“Yeah.”
Why?
“He’s handsome.”
What
else do you like about him?
“He’s cool. Look at the way he’s walking around. He’s very confident.”
What
about that mock turtleneck? Is that cool?
“Oh yeah. Those are in.”
Watching golf with a 12-year-old, distaff, golfing neophyte is a fascinating exercise in its own right. This one in particular had strong opinions: She thought Jon Rahm looked like a fat punk; she didn’t like him at all and rode him without mercy throughout (“He should just go home”). She quickly remarked on the unusually lanky stature of both Tony Finau and Matt Kucher. Brooks Koepka was notably swaggy — but nothing like Tiger, in her opinion. Surprisingly, Ricky Fowler’s youthful mien did nothing for her — something about his eyebrows being too dark (“And I don’t like his shirt”). Norwegian amateur Victor Hovland was pilloried for his prominent schnozz, which, in fairness, was fair comment.
But these were all bit players in the drama so far as she was
concerned. Tiger was the anointed one.
A lot has already been written about how Tiger’s victory on Sunday has introduced his phenomenon to an entirely new generation of golfers. I don’t anticipate this girl will suddenly want to play the game, or start wearing mock T’s. But it has been 11 years since Tiger won a major. This weekend’s performance reminded us of what we’ve all been missing.
Forget the 15 majors, the renewed Nicklaus chase. We’ve missed this
man’s naked charisma most of all. No golfer in history has half the presence
Tiger exhibits just walking down a fairway. Charisma is a hard thing to
quantify, but it’s also one of the few things that readily spills over from a niche
sport like golf into the larger culture. And that’s another thing golf has been
missing these past 11 years.
I watched Sunday morning’s finale at Tomaso’s, a fashionably down-market, diner-sized canteen in Portland, Maine. At 10:30 a.m., when I showed up, there weren’t but 3 or 4 us there. An hour later, the brunch crowd had attracted a full house of young, bearded, IPA-swilling hipsters. This was no sports bar, much less a golf bar (does such a thing even exist north of Pinehurst?). Even so, when Tiger birdied 15, the place went crazy. The barman quickly turned off the music (a pleasant alt-country playlist featuring the likes of Ryan Adams, Old Crow Medicine Show and Jason Isbell) and turned up the CBS television feed. Tiger had this unlikely place in the palm of his hand. When his tee shot on 16 came to rest 2 feet from the hole, the patrons inside Tomaso’s erupted.
About this time, I noticed a text had arrived. A friend of mine was
down in Boston at the TD Garden watching the Celtics-Pacers playoff game, an
inelegant affair he referred to as a “game/rock fight.” He reported there were
“tons of people clustering around TVs on the concourse watching golf. It’s
amazing how much love there is for Tiger.”
There’s really is something about this guy — something non-golfers
can appreciate. Yes, he has battled back from considerable personal/physical adversity,
but this obscures the larger point: He was stupidly charismatic when he
appeared on the Mike Douglas Show at the age of 2, when he won three straight
U.S. Amateurs, when he debuted as Nike’s cross-over pitch man, when he claimed
those 14 majors… Apparently, after a decade away, he remains stupidly
charismatic, not just to core golfers but to casual fans and mere onlookers
around the world.
Sunday night, my daughter
sent me a text: “Is Tiger Woods good again?”
She’s 20 years old, a junior in college, and couldn’t care less about golf. But somehow word of his resurrection had reached her via the broader cultural news drip. I asked exactly how she had learned of his Masters victory.
“I saw him on the TV at this
bar! Some people were watching.”
Do you find him charismatic?
“Not really. He’s cheated on a
lot of women.”
My daughter is clearly not so forgiving of Tiger, in part because she’s a woke young woman, but also because she’s yet to make the mistakes that Tiger and the rest of us 40, 50 and 60somethings have made. But her admonition is well taken: Recognizing and appreciating anew Tiger’s ungodly magnetism doesn’t mean we should get all crazy (again) about what that charisma really means.
It doesn’t mean, for example, that we should start believing Tiger’s
mere presence will bring millions of kids (or Millennials, or Baby Boomers)
into the game. That never held in 2003; it doesn’t hold now. Nor does it mean
we should start building new golf courses willy nilly to accommodate this chimerical
wave of converts. It doesn’t mean Tiger has, on account of his victory,
instantly become a particularly good man or father. It made no sense to ascribe
him these qualities in 2007 frankly; knowing what we know, it makes even less
sense now. Why we blithely attach these sterling personal traits to men (or
women) who exhibit extraordinary sporting skill is beyond me. One hopes we’ve
learned our lesson here.
But it does seem clear that Tiger and the professional game in which he competes have changed more than a little in the 11 years since he limped to his last major win. Today’s Tiger is 43 years old, his hairline in full retreat. He’s been through a world of shit, both physical and personal. The process of dealing and coming back from all that would change anyone. His swing and his outlook on life are forever altered.
And here we confront what might be the most interesting
manifestation of all this change: Sunday’s victory was the first time Tiger has
ever come from behind in the final
round to win a major tournament. The greatest front-runner in history has
learned how to come back.
Tiger won from the front so frequently because, from 1997 through 2008, his outsized aura truly cowed most all of his would-be competitors. Remember how they’d wilt when paired with him? Francesco Molinari and Tony Finau did not play well beside Tiger on Sunday but here, too, the game has changed a great deal in 11 years. Today’s PGA Tour is stocked to the gills with young, dynamic, swaggering talent. It will be fascinating to watch this generation of professionals compete with the man many of them grew up idolizing.
Because one thing has not changed: You can’t take your eyes off this Tiger Woods fellow. This was true over the weekend; it was true through 2008. If we’re honest with ourselves, it was true afterward, too, through his many trials. We rather shamelessly rubbernecked the wounded, struggling Tiger like we ogle an accident on the side of the road. More than a decade has passed and we still can’t take our eyes off him. Why? Because he still has more charisma than anyone who has ever played this game, more perhaps than all the major winners in history, combined. Even a 12-year-old, non-golfing girl can see that.
