I should be working, but watching the Masters is pure decadence

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It is 11:36 a.m. on a Thursday and I am watching television. I understand this is depravity and decadence at its ripest. I should be at work, but the Masters – the first of the season’s major golf tournaments – starts today, and I am compelled as if hypnotized to watch mostly white men be paid extraordinary sums of money to pace through a botanical garden known as the Augusta National Golf Club, while they try to strike a small white ball into a hole hundreds of yards away in as few strokes as possible.

I understand non-golf-players might see this as a cosmically pointless and privileged pastime. At its most exciting, when someone drops a 50-foot putt, or holes out from 240 yards (or, even more fibrillating, doesn’t quite hole out from 240 yards), televised professional golf raises your pulse to that of a salamander basking in the sun.

Actually walking the hilly Masters course, designed in 1932, and first played in 1934? That would be exercise. But tickets this year ran anywhere from US$1,500, for a single-day ticket to a practice round, to as much as US$30,000 for a four-day pass. Even then you can’t see much. In this I am with John Updike, who once pointed out, having just attended an actual Masters, that “the best way to ingest a golf tournament is at the receiving end of a television signal.” At last year’s Masters, nearly six million TV viewers agreed with him.

By 11:36, of course, I have been watching the Masters for hours. Augusta is the American version of the Royal and Ancient Golf Course in Scotland, the cultural prostate of all golf, and so the preamble to the actual tournament is as endless as the coronation of Charles promises to be. Even the Rolex ads rise to Churchillian heights, touting “the pursuit of perfect movement … the humility in the face of success … after all, we’re on the same course.” The pomp and traditions (the par-three contest, the brimming flower gardens) are designed to make the event seem changeless and beyond the reach of time, which is almost true anyway.

Until two years ago, CBS’s weekend coverage of the Masters had been overseen by a total of two producers since 1959. The first, the father of TV golf, Frank Chirkinian – his nickname was The Ayatollah, but he looked like a depraved Roman emperor – was the genius who brought instant replay to golf. He also invented the over and under leaderboard, which makes the entire contest comprehensible at a glance, and came up with the idea of painting the inside of the hole white, to make it stand out on TV.

In the decades since, golf television has added roughly four new features, beyond better charts and graphics: drones, shot tracking, the apex gauge and the clubhead speed monitor. Why is that important to the TV-watching golf lout? Well – since you ask – the average professional golf shot has an apex of 100 feet; higher or lower than that, the golfer is trying to do something unusual. The latest gizmo is the bag cam, which lets you see the game from the perspective of a golf bag. Why anyone would want that perspective is a mystery, but the motto of sports television is, technology lets us do this, so why don’t we?

At the Masters, TV commentators wear ties and conduct stately half-hour interviews, an eon by the standards of contemporary sports media. On Thursday I heard Jack Nicklaus tell a gaggle of them that he thought his career was over at least three times over the course of three decades. I heard Tom Watson say modern players have consistently better swings than his generation of golfers, thanks to video training.

These guys have been watching the same people play golf at the same courses for decades; they’re historians. They talk about single shots made in 1988 as if they were remembering the birth of their first-born. Because golf is an individual sport where a single stroke (out of hundreds) can make or break a career, it’s a game of comparisons – not just between players and scores, but between players then and players now. Lloyd Mangrum shot a 64 in 1940; that score has been beaten only twice, by a single stroke, once by Greg Norman, the chief executive officer of LIV Golf, the new upstart competitor to the PGA Tour.

Unfortunately, Norman went on to lose that Masters by five strokes in 1996 – his third runner-up finish. He tied for second in 1986, a shot back of Nicklaus, and suffered more heartbreak in 1987 to Larry Mize, who chipped in from 140 feet on the 11th, in a playoff. Norman has never won the famous green jacket. Hmmm. If a LIV golfer wins this year’s Masters, the disruptive Norman – the Donald Trump of pro golf – wants the LIV golfers to converge en masse at the 18th green. According to the commentators, there will be heart attacks all round if it happens.

In any event I watched the pretourney jabber. I watched Jack Nicklaus (83) and Gary Player (87) and Tom Watson (73), the Old Masters, stab it off the tee – that is the tradition – and was pleased to see Fred Couples (63) play well enough in the formal match to tie for 17th with the likes of Dusty Johnson (38). People lust to see younger players pound the ball, but they also still hope some other older player might somehow win it again, to prove that time doesn’t always have to ruin everything.

Golf doesn’t have the physicality of football, the speed and violence of hockey, the suspense and meshing gears of baseball. That is its charm. Golf isn’t a team sport. The golfers compete against one another, but the most gripping game is the one they play against themselves. Golf is therefore intensely private, which makes it well-suited to television, a narrative device that excels at depicting action and physical details.

Admittedly, the inner turmoil of the athlete, which everyone wants to see – his nerves, his emotions, the agony of victory and the thrill of defeat – is harder to imagine without a physical concomitant like, say, being crushed and possibly maimed by a 300-pound nose guard.

But the pace of golf is so slow, you have plenty of time to watch and notice and speculate. The pauses in a game of golf are why, pound for pound, golf, along with baseball, cricket and fly fishing, has produced some of the world’s best sports writing. Golf writers have time to think. What you, the more or less knowledgable television golf fan, speculate about in those pauses is your business.

I watched Tiger sweat profusely, and wondered if his leg, shattered in a 2021 car accident, was troubling him. I watched Rory McIlroy, who has won everything except the Masters, hit what I think was his 8-iron 170 yards. I heard Scottie Scheffler, last year’s massively talented winner, claim that he kept his cool in the course of shooting 68, but his constant head-shaking and jaw-rubbing put the lie to it. Then I watched Victor Hovland, the Norwegian who was tied for the lead at seven-under par on Day 1, chip in close to the pin off an iffy sidehill lie, and thought, “I could do that,” which is what always happens when aspiring (that is, lousy) golfers watch golf on TV.

“We all have our dream shot,” my friend Paul Iggulden, a keen fan and player, once told me. “And it only takes one shot to make you come in at the end of the round and say, ‘What a great shot that was,’ even though you shot 109. There’s always hope.”

Duffer golf is based on what B.F. Skinner, the behaviourist, called intermittent reinforcement, a form of experimental torture in which a rat hits a bar and gets a pellet not every time, not every third time, but randomly, when he least expects it, and so becomes more and more addicted to hitting the bar despite the absence of reward. Ninety per cent of golfers never break 100.

It was late in the afternoon of Round 1, as I watched Rory McIlroy struggle with his speed on the greens on the back nine of the course, that John Mitchell called.

Mitchell is an old friend from Edmonton. When he isn’t skiing, he is golfing. Given the persistence of winter in Edmonton, Mitchell had just returned from playing a round of virtual simulator golf at The Golf Factory: he shot an 80, on a course in Hawaii. He was watching and taping the Masters on TV. Mitchell tapes every tournament, and then fast-forwards through it, condensing four hours to one. “I find it useful,” he once explained to me. “I watch it for technique, I watch it for the strategy that the players use. And I do think it helps me think my way to a better game.” He’s a fine golfer, with an index (a more sophisticated form of handicap) of 9.4.

Of course, he too has his moments of fantasy. “Brown,” Mitchell declared on the phone on Thursday afternoon, as Day 1 of the Masters drew to a close, “I have become Rory McIlroy, and Rory has become me.” TV golf fans do this: they pick favourites, the player they imagine they might have been, had fate gone another way (the credo of all golfers). Updike claimed there are two kinds of golfers, the inward one who never reveals his or her anguish, and the outward one (he cited Arnold Palmer) “who invites us into his game to share with him its heady turmoil, its call for constant courage.” McIlroy is an outward golfer, beseeching us to join him.

Rory had become Mitchell’s favourite golfer. There are some similarities. Rory is 5 foot 9; Mitchell is 5 foot 9. Rory is 160 pounds, which is just a little heavier than Mitchell. Rory’s club head speed is 125 miles per hour; Mitchell’s is 95, but so what? Mitchell’s wife even has a bit of a crush on Rory, which seems to encourage his association. “I’ll stick with Rory, unless Rory starts to do stupid things on the golf course at the Masters,” Mitchell told me. “In which case I may become Scottie Scheffler.”

This year, of course, the Masters falls on Easter weekend. I myself was watching Scheffler, last year’s winner, as he stood on the practice green long after the round late Thursday night, trying to figure out why his putter wasn’t working. I suddenly realized he was doing that at precisely the same time Christ Himself was headed to the Last Supper, and all that followed. I think this year I’ll stick with the Scheffler saga. After all, I know how the other storyline turns out.