A seasonal dysfunction

The weirdness waylays you sometimes, like a blackjack to the cerebellum. One second you're walking down a well-lit street and everything looks normal and safe and utterly everyday; the next, you're down and there's a blackness coming over your vision, and 2020 is making off with your wallet.

And so here I am two weeks before Thanksgiving, looking at this photo.

In it, a bunch of white-clad caddies are lugging golf clubs up a green fairway with a bunch of golfers in khakis and logo shirts walking beside them. And yet something is not ... right. 

The quality of the sunlight looks wrong, casting shadows from an angle that reminds you we're a scant six weeks from the northern hemisphere's shortest day. In the foreground, the leaves of a tree have gone all gold and bronze. And in the background, up there in front of the golfers ...

It is all a somber green, when there should be a riot of color. The bushes behind the famous green are just, well, bushes. The azaleas that make them a celebration of spring have long gone into hiding, and, whap, here comes that blackjack to the cerebellum.

It's time for the Masters, the photo says.

With winter coming, and not summer.

Today it begins, and there's talk of Tiger and Jack and Bryson and Brooks, and a symmetry that does not extend to the calendar. The symmetry is all about Tiger and Jack: If he successfully repeats his stunning feat of 19 months ago, Brandel Chamblee tells us, Tiger, who's ranked 33rd in the world now, will have his sixth Masters title. And it will come 23 years after his first.

When Jack won his sixth Masters in 1986, it also came 23 years after his first. And he was also ranked 33rd in the world at the time.

So there's that: A potential roundness to a weekend that will be anything but in all other ways.

The season is wrong. The landscape is wrong. Even the atmosphere is wrong, because without spectators, there will be none of those fabled roars going up through the pines when Tiger or Rory or DJ or some other favorite son Mapquests a putt on 16 or kicks Amen Corner in the grapes with birdie-par-birdie.

So, yes, more weirdness here in 2020. Thank you for that, Bastard Plague, the Bastard that keeps in Bastard-ing.

One thing, though.

At the end of all that uncharacteristic green this weekend, someone will don a green jacket.

And that bit of green will look absolutely right. Absolutely.