Few things or places in life are perfect? Heaven is supposed to be, so I guess Augusta National is the closest thing on Earth, we have to it. But part of it is just another illusion. Being on Earth, nothing stays perfect for long. Everything is moving, seasons change. But they do hold it together for a week or two, which is remarkable.
In a week or two, all the azaleas, dogwoods, wisteria, will lose their blooms. All the Rye grass will die in 3 weeks and the duller Bermuda will come out. Soon it will look, just like any other good course. The bent grass greens will not hold in the upcoming hot weather and the perfect greens will have brown spots and poa annau. In 2 months it will be in the 90’s, very humid and unbearable. All the members will stay home in their NE homes where it is cooler not to return until late fall when the temps return to the mid 70’s. The course will close during the heat. Perfect, fades very fast. Perfect has been lost. It only comes in early April every year in the spring, which is the magic of it all and its allure as its customers fly out of snow and cold.
When you walk in, you go through an airport screening device, if you have a cell phone in your pocket, they have it, and none are allowed. So once you are in, no ding dong is talking on some phone behind you trashing your day, or no phone is going off just as Tiger putts to win. No metal, no weapons are inside, so you are totally safe, surrounded by hundreds of Pinkerton guards, half of the Augusta police department and half of the Georgia highway patrol. If you are mugged by somebody, they would not get 100 yards. They could never get out the gate.
You have entered a zone of peace. Total safety. Players say, it might not be heaven, but it will do until I do get there.
The lesson is simple, we could achieve the same thing in this country, just get rid of the scum, and disarm the rest.
The weather is usually perfect during the actual tourney, thur-sun. Now and then you get rained on for a day, which is what umbrellas are for. No humidity, mid 70’s, perfect weather, sun shines down on you. You are in Golf heaven, golf Nirvana.
The best players on earth are hitting perfect shots all around you. You see eagles, holes in one, low 60’s, maybe a Tiger charge to win another green jacket and step into immortality.
Everyone goes into the gift shops and buys new clothes to wear at their country clubs that summer. Most will buy a couple of visors, 3 or 4 shirts, 3 sweaters, a nice jacket, bingo, 8 or 9 hundred is on your card. You paid 5 or 6K for the 2 tickets for the 4 days. You are paying 200 to 400 a night for a junk hotel room that normally rents for 40 to 50 a night out of the tourney week. You flew in; you are spending big bucks to attend here.
For years there was only 1 or 2 blacks playing and they never were stars. Then came Tiger, and that was to bring all the blacks into the game. But Tiger pushes he is Asian, marries a blond white lady, and when he won in 97, a lot of blacks came out to follow him.
They are now all gone. During the practice rounds anyone can win the lottery, buy a ticket cheap and come in. So if the Blacks were into the game, they would have won 25% of the practice round tickets. It was 98% white. I guess they want to play basketball free and golf is something out of their culture they just do not get or understand. During the actual tourney, its 99% white, because only white people from the 4 state region own the tickets which were closed for general sale in 1972, so any black or Asian you see on the course, bought his ticket from a white, who sold it on EBay, or to a ticket broker. Few Blacks apparently want to pay $750 to 1K a day, for 4 days, to walk around a golf tourney. Whites have no problem with this.
The patrons, those who hold the tickets, or those who buy them, are very upscale people, who can afford to blow 6 to 8K for the weekend. They are white, they average mid 50’s, good looking people, very short hair, you can count the long haired hippies on one hand out of 50K people, a few beards but short and neatly cropped. Their wives are pretty, blond and trim. They are corporate executives or people who own their own companies. The airport is filled with hundreds of corporate jets. All the Ceo’s of all the major companies are here with their key people, entertaining their top customers. It is the hardest ticket to get in sports. The Golf event. Time to get out there and impress an important person you want to do business with, which is what golf is really all about.
I sold $100,000,000 on a golf course and in bars. I know. That was where I closed all of my big deals.
Being now totally medically handicapped, means I no longer park a mile away, I now get to park right in front of the door. You used to pay $10 a day to park in people’s back yards and it was a mess, so the club buys hundreds of homes all around them, wipes the houses out, turns it all into a giant parking lot, and do they charge you $15 a day to park, they now park you for free, that is Augusta, unique in class. They spent millions to make it easier for you to get in. Who else ever did that for you?
I pay $200 for a series badge. It used to cost me $125. If this was the Olympics in Atlanta, they would say, they went for $125 in LA, the scalpers will sell them for $600, we will sell them for $636 which they did which screwed everyone including me who bought 25k in tickets I barely broke even on. The Olympics became the main scalper of tickets and total liar on what stock they had to sell. It was all a giant fraud.
The Masters could do the same thing, using the same mentality, and charge us not $200, but $2,000 a ticket and we would have to pay it. But they never did, they never let greed get in the way. That is to their immense credit. It shows what a great bunch of guys they are who runs this thing and how huge their devotion to the game goes.
But that Dyke fag bitch Martha Burke tried to start some shit and get women as members and they told her to go fuck herself and to keep the sponsors out of hot water, they just financed the entire thing their selves. NONE OF US, minded paying $75 more, to shove it up that dykes poop chute and to show her, there is one place, you can’t shove around or bully. We all know I am a chauvinist pig, I am a product of that era, and I do not wish to change because you young punks all became poo says without a pair.
Fook U, and your politically correct bull shit, it makes me puke.
In the late 60’s my teacher Jug McSpadden built his dream course, Dub s Dread in Piper, Kansas, at the time, rated as the toughest on earth, 8101 yards long, the masters today is 7400, and I was a charter member there. We all had wives, but they could only enter the waiting room of the clubhouse, to wait to pick us up. They could not enter our bar, dining room, or play on the course. It was a men’s club, for men, to get away from the bitch for the day. Frankly, women had no interest in golf at the time anyway. There was no womens golf tour.
IMHO, any woman found on a golf course should be shot on sight. Let them nit and sew, cook and take care of the kids, but looping the heads off gofers and hitting 12 times to reach a green while I sit back there tearing my hair out is shit I do not need on my weekend. So the dyke lawyers sued all these clubs and crushed out our men’s independence and deballed all of us. That is all women seek, to de ball yo ass, trust me on this one. And once they deball and control you, dude, you are toast. They are off to their next conquest with half of what you worked for and earned for the last 10 to 15 years, you are now broke, and deballed. The only reason they hang around is you are the best fook they can get, or they can't find anyone to move in with who makes more money than you. If they find either of these two things, they are long gone.
The only one left, which was like Dubs Dread, was the Masters. But the bitch took on the zillionaires of the country, which would spend any amount of money to beat the bitch, and they did.
Hell they put in many minorities as members, they just do not want to be told what to do, by outsiders, and I think, that is their right. If women want to play golf, let them form exclusive women’s clubs and do not let men in. That I will have no problems with. When golf took off in the 60’s the Jews were not welcome to be members in Gentile clubs. Neither were blacks or Mexicans. The Jews simply funded and established very nice Jew country clubs where only Jews were members, problem solved. Blacks played basketball and Mexicans kicked a soccer ball around. Why can’t women figure this one out? If they want to open up a new club called cunt country club in my hood and exclude me from playing, no problem, you won’t see me at the front gate with a sign protesting them.
So when you walk through the gates to Augusta, you are dealing with very upscale people who have money. Most belong to their local top country club and play golf every weekend. They already have a strict dress code there they are taught to obey.
I walk in with a pair of $325 foot joy tour leather golf shoes, designer socks, $125 pair of slacks, $100 masters golf shirt, $400 masters alpaca sweater, $325 Bobby Jones silk jacket, geeze, a pool player shows up with old tennis shoes, trashed blue jeans and a T shirt, about $30 0n his body, at the Masters it’s a thou.
Am I bragging about what I wore, no, hell thousands were dressed just like me, and well beyond me? So I had 2 diamond rings and a Rolex, thousands did as well.
They dress to the nines to go in there. So do the women. It part of putting on your Sundays best go to church. Something spectators used to do at pool tourneys which seemed to end, when Ike died, when civilization as I knew it died with him, and definitely when they wacked Kennedy.
It all then, turned ugly and slowly went downhill every year, since then.
It’s partly showing off your wealth or position, or its respect for the tourney, the event, the tradition. You go in there looking like a pool bum, 50, 000 people will be looking down their noses at you all day long dude. So if you can’t afford to dress the part, don’t bother to come. This is now Woodstock, this is the Masters. Hippies and freaky weirdo’s are not welcome. I did not see a single ring in a nose or lip.
Everyone is polite, everyone helps everyone, and nobody bumps into each other, even when 50,000 people are crowded into a few tight places. It shows, it proves, what people can do, can be, can become. If they are tightly controlled. Let them run loose, they become animals.
Once the event begins a lot can change with the weather. When it’s dry you can wear tennis shoes, but if it rains and gets soggy turf underfoot and the constant drizzle from above you have to wear spike golf shoes or you will be sliding down the sides of the greens on your butt. Augusta National may have acquired a measure of notoriety because of the controversy over its men-only membership, but an enduring following still marched to its fairways today and filled its retail merchandising facility with long lines of customers buying expensive clothing and gear bearing the distinctive Masters logo.
Outside, a few vendors sold wares that acknowledged the membership dispute. Far more noticeable was an extraordinary traffic jam, an endless procession of cars jamming the access roads to every club entrance. Washington road outside the club is a constant traffic jam.
The scene will probably be no different Thursday, when tournament play begins. While the focus for months may have been on the unvarying men-only makeup of Augusta National, the galleries attending the Masters tournament hold fast to tradition, too. The badges used for admission have been passed down from generation to generation, and the waiting list to obtain one has not been expanded since 1972 and then in 1978.
Augusta National reveals no information about its Masters patrons, as the club steadfastly calls them, but it is generally conceded that the average age of an attendee is well past 55. It costs just $200 for all four rounds of the tournament, but in most years a single badge can be resold for as much as 3 to $4,000. Still, most fans do not consider bartering their badges.
Steve Hale, who lives in Aiken, S.C., about 20 miles from Augusta, has attended every Masters tournament for the last 40 years.
''My parents started buying tickets in the 1950's when they were $5 a day,'' said Hale, 52. ''Because of that, my mother, Phyllis, now controls a group of tickets. You've heard of St. Francis of Assisi? They call my 80-year-old mom St. Phyllis of the Tickets.''
Eighty-year-old Beanie Morris, a lifelong resident of Augusta, has been going to the Masters since 1942.
''I remember when all the ladies came so dressed up it looked like they were wearing their Easter outfits,'' Morris said. ''Some of them, I guess, still do.''
Morris is proud of the well-heeled, orderly Masters Tournament crowds, but this year Morris expects change. ''I wouldn't be surprised if somebody jumped a rope and did something to make a scene,'' Morris said. ''I was talking to a local police officer and he said they just about expect that.''
Hale found that thought almost unfathomable. ''I wouldn't want to be that person,'' he said. ''Whoever gave them that badge would never get in again and that is a terrifying thought. I've loaned a badge to friends and the most horrible image I have is that they might do something and I lose my badge. All it takes is a cell phone going off at any time and you're terminated for life.
One of the problems with recent golf is pubic golfers, non country club members buying tickets and thinking they are at a Nasser race where they get drunk, loud and rowdy. The par 3 contest began to have that problem because they were not the regular patrons, but people from all over who win lotteries and are from all sections of society, and not all from country club backgrounds. When the beer drinking got out of control and people began to get too loud and drunk, they solved the problem by making you walk a mile to get a beer. You see it’s not about the money there, which is so unique, it’s about the tradition and insuring it never changes, from the days when Bobby Jones walked the grounds.
''Then I would be 65 years old, watching the Masters on television, saying, 'I used to go there.'''
Fast Larry has attended every year since 1969, having a half century run there. He says I grew up following around Hogan and Sneed, watched AP and Fat jack emerge, the game get on TV and become a mega sport, and I was there through all of its half century of history. What an experience it was. My Masters badge collection is now 1958 complete through 2009, it’s all framed and one of the treasures of my life. It has a value of $14,000 and it now hangs in a secure location outside of my home.
The price of Masters badges on the resale market is down considerably this year because of the economic meltdown, but that means a four-day admission is still about $1500 to $2,000 for a single badge, which is half what they sold for last year, making this year a bargain to attend.
Because the Masters is the only major golf event played on the same course every year, fans have come to expect familiar sights and sounds from Augusta National. And when those fans are inside the gates, they tend to treat the event with reverence. There are no corporate tents on the course and no commercial signs. The grounds are manicured with maniacal precision; the exact time it takes to mow each fairway is timed by stopwatch to the second. If a pine cone drops, somebody runs to pick it up.
It is common for people to call Augusta National a shrine or a golf cathedral, which may sound overly pious. Do not tell it to those who sit in the viewing stands around the greens -- the club refuses to call them bleachers -- with all the reserve and patience of churchgoers waiting in pews. Many have old Masters badges stapled to hats and sweaters, some dating from the 1960's.
''That is the way Bobby Jones set it up in the 1930's,'' Morris said. ''The etiquette is very important. It is a very sensitive crowd.'' The most polite and knowledgeable crowd in any sport, anywhere, and nobody wants to see that change or pass.
The back of every Masters badge is imprinted with words written in the 1960's by Jones, the legendary champion from Atlanta and a co-founder of Augusta National. Among them are these: ''It is appropriate for spectators to applaud successful strokes in proportion to difficulty, but excess demonstrations by a player or partisans are not proper because of the possible effect upon other competitors.''
Running is a no no and will get you kicked out. Get too happy drinking beer and you are gone as well. Some call them Nazi’s. I don’t. To have perfect, to have peace and harmony, you must have rules, those rules must be fully understood, and obeyed, and enforced. It’s like the entire event is ran by Sheriff Joe out in Arizona. Screw up, and dude, you are gone. Obey the rules and you have a wonderful time. No punk will be allowed to screw up your day.
This year, as the Augusta National traditions and customs have been challenged like never before, the Masters tournament galleries may once again be a part of the story.
''Things have been changing,'' Morris said. ''But maybe they always have. You know, when I first started going, you couldn't give away Masters Tickets. Nobody wanted them. If you did go, there weren't ropes between the fans and players and you could walk right down Magnolia Lane to get there.
''You could say all that has changed.'' It is now a walled fortress. The most exclusive private men’s club in the country. The top 125 billionaires and major owners are members. Trying to play the course is almost impossible, unless you know one of them, and they invite you to play.
Help
Add Reply
Posted 06 April 2009 - 10:51 AM
MultiQuote
