So I'm watching the run-up coverage to the Masters yesterday, and in the background I can see those impeccably radiant flowerbeds cupping the 13th green in the palm of their hand, and it looks like an English garden upon which no human foot ever should trod. And it reminds me again why the Masters is about the only golf I ever watch on TV.
It's because no other major or minor or Greater Potted Meat Product Open combines its sheer beauty with its occasionally indescribable horror.
There are the azaleas and Rae's Creek and the Cathedral of Pines and the slant of the late-afternoon sun bathing everything in gold. and there is Greg Norman. Or Rory McIlroy. Or Jordan Spieth or Francesco Molinari or any number of others for whom a Sunday afternoon in the spring of the year became the setting for a Stephen King novel.
The Masters gives you all of it all at the same time, and it is wondrous and soulful and awful and cringe-worthy. It is spring announcing that winter is finally, fully over, and Norman losing a six-stroke lead on Sunday like the drip of water torture, a hooked drive followed by a butchered approach followed by a missed 10-footer, and then a three-foot gimme sliding past the cup on the comebacker.
It is McIlroy yanking a drive into the wilderness with the green jacket there for the taking. It is Spieth unraveling on the back nine like a plucked stitch. It is Molinari, with the ghost of Young Tiger coming hard after him, swallowing hard and going swimming on both 12 and 15.
Against that Monet backdrop, it is a horribly fascinating thing to watch, like slowing down to rubberneck a car crash. And then you blink and there's Jack Nicklaus striding up the 18th fairway on his ancient unconquerable legs, the fabled Augusta roar going up to through the pines around him, and it is all beauty again.
It began again this morning, and, no, I have no idea who's going to win. But it's going to be a hell of a thing to discover, in that lovely, beastly garden, who it is that loses it least.
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