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The Masters

By Roy Waters | The News Herald

Published: April 7, 2009

Updated: 04/07/2009 08:37 pm

Two of sports most popular events share the limelight this week: The NCAA basketball finals and the Masters golf tournament.
The Final Four is always special to us Carolinians when one of our state teams is in it and the Masters is always special to us Morgantonians for very different reasons.
Local golfer Billy Joe Patton took the golf world by storm when he came within one stroke of winning the event in 1954 and years later took many of our golfers down to Augusta to play the course, a rarity for any small town.
The Masters is the only major sporting event in the country that's owned and operated by a local group. The World Series, the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals and the Stanley Cup are all staged by their respective leagues and associations. The same is true of tennis.
The other major golf tournaments are administered by nationwide organizations such as the U.S. Golf Association's U.S. Open and the Professional Golf Association's championship.
Not the Masters.
Members of the Augusta National Golf Club run it all by themselves. They set the date for the big event and select the field of players. They handle the tournament's finances and make their own deal with television, including the selection of television announcers.
The club pays a very healthy purse to the players, including more than a $1 million to the winner, but it has never made its bottom line public knowledge. It sets up the course for green speed, length of holes and fairway width all by itself.
In the beginning, it was an invitational affair for the friends of Bobby Jones but it exploded in the 1950s into an event that not even the great Jones expected.
Several factors brought this about, including Patton's great showing as an amateur and President Dwight Eisenhower's love for the golf course. The emergence of television in the 50s, combined with the flair and success of Arnold Palmer in the tournament, were the primary factors in the explosion.
The tournament soon became a sell out, with tickets available only to those who previously purchased them. There is no public sale of tickets even to the practice rounds.
Jones built the course on the site of a former nursery and the grounds are one of the most beautiful pieces of real estate you'll likely ever see except on television.
I was fortunate enough to attend the 1970 affair and the first thing I did was walk all 18 holes. Being a very serious golfer at the time, just seeing the course was one of my greatest sports thrills ever.
The course has two very unusual features. First, it's located on Washington Avenue, just a short distance from uptown Augusta and is surrounded by commercial sprawl with a tall green fence along the street that blocks all view of the course.
Second, you enter the course on top of a high hill with the 9th and 18th greens just below the clubhouse and the rest of the course below you down the hill.
Augusta National Golf Course and the Masters tournament are only part of the Bobby Jones legacy. As an amateur he won the grand slam of his day — the U.S. Amateur and Open and the British Amateur and Open — in the same year and retired from competitive golf at age 28.
The final nine holes of the tournament on Sunday have been called by many the two most dramatic hours in sports. The back nine contains several "high-risk, high-reward" holes and leaders rise and fall quickly.
Jack Nicklaus' great finish in 1986 was one of those events and it allowed him to win at age 46, making him the oldest major champion ever.
Tiger Woods erased all doubt of his greatness when he won his second Masters by 12 strokes, an incredible achievement.
The event is one of the most watched television programs of the year and it's very likely if you're reading this that you'll be looking to see if Tiger is all the way back or if Padraig Harrington can win his third major in a row.

Roy Waters is a sports columnist for The News Herald. Waters was baseball and basketball coach at Salem High School from 1955-1966, where his teams won 18 championships. In 2007, he was inducted into the Burke County Sports Hall of Fame.