152 Steps

For the pros, it’s roughly the distance of a stock 56-degree wedge. About 117 yards. But it’s not a yardage any caddie would ever give to their player. To do so would be presumptuous, even outrageous. This number doesn’t represent a specific golf shot. But it is a hallowed distance, and no one can be champion without traversing it. The best golfers know it well, and perhaps in private moments they let themselves imagine what it might be like to make it under the golden-hour light of an early April Georgia sky. They might not admit it, but they’ve seen it in their dreams. To walk off the 18th green at Augusta National and head northward, into the collective roar. To watch the sea of pastel polos and wide-brimmed sun hats part before them. And to take that first step—somewhere between walking and floating—toward the sprawling oak tree in the distance.

I am, of course, speaking of the champion’s walk. The one winners take after they hole the final putt at the Masters tournament, hug their loved ones and head off to claim the green jacket. Not to get too metaphysical here, but the trip from the fringe of Augusta National’s 18th green to the scoring building up the hill seems to bend both space and time. For the select few who get to take it, it is both the longest and shortest walk in golf—a lifetime that passes in an instant. Depending on adrenaline levels and the number of interlopers waiting with open arms, it generally takes a player anywhere between 80 and 180 seconds to ascend to the clubhouse. Some saunter, stunned; others strut with purpose. But there is one constant: By the end of those 117 yards, the traveler’s life will have changed forever.

Perhaps I’m laying it on a little thick. But I have grown rather obsessed with what happens on Sunday at the Masters after the last putt drops. From a purely logistical perspective, ending at the top of the leaderboard at Augusta sets into motion a heady chain of events: You win a few million bucks, cement yourself as a major champion in front of a TV audience of more than 10 million, etch your name into the lore of a historic, secretive institution, earn the invitation to come back the next year (and every year after that), and force every other past champion to eat a meal of your choosing. But before any of that happens—before any of it can sink in—there is the champion’s walk, which, through both happenstance and the magic of high-definition hand-held cameras, has evolved over the last decade into arguably the best televised moment in all of sports. What happens on the way to the scoring hut, captured by hustling Steadicam operators, is a multi-act play that captures the thrill of winning, its evolution into shock and, finally, the exhalation of relief.

The champion’s walk is, by Masters traditions, quite new. When Charl Schwartzel outgunned Rory McIlroy and a crowded leaderboard to win the green jacket in 2011, he ducked right into a scoring tent perched on the edge of 18 green, not 20 steps from the hole. Bubba Watson and Adam Scott won the next two Masters, respectively, in playoffs that ended on 10 green. It wasn’t until Watson won a second time, in 2014, that Augusta moved its scoring facility up toward the clubhouse, leaving about 351 feet for the winner to negotiate in order to sign his card and then head off to Butler Cabin to make things official. Watson’s inaugural stroll is a good one: He’s met by his toddler, Caleb, on the green. Watson cries, hugs his wife, Angie, and picks up his son, and they march off. It takes them precisely 134 steps. (Yes, I counted.) Near the end of the walk, now away from the crowds, Watson, eyes still glassy, looks at Caleb and asks him, “Did you watch Daddy play golf?”

As the self-proclaimed preeminent champion’s-walk historian, I’ve pored over every available pixel, to the point of absurdity. To figure out the rough distance, I used Scottie Scheffler’s walk (136 steps) and cross-referenced the average stride length of a 6-foot-3 male (31 inches) to get the unauthorized Augusta National yardage from 18 green to scoring (136 × 31 = 4,216 inches, or 117.111 yards). Is this journalism or a brain disorder? Who can say? But I’ve spent hours on YouTube counting every step. It took Jordan Spieth 131 steps in year two of the walk. In 2016, Danny Willett won as the leader in the clubhouse, so we only got a short 75 steps of his anticipatory walk before CBS cut away. Sergio García bounced 119 exuberant times to get into scoring as fans broke into the “Olé!” chant around him. Yet despite this tradition building, CBS still hadn’t quite grabbed onto it. When Patrick Reed won in 2018, producers cut away from his walk to replay the final putt.

As with so many things he touches, it took Tiger Woods to make the walk iconic. When he stunned the world and won in 2019, Woods came off the green and embraced his son—a near-reenactment of the moment 22 years earlier when Tiger had won his first Masters and hugged his father, Earl. This time, cameras stayed with Woods for all 152 of his steps. Instantly, the champion’s walk was no longer just part of the broadcast but a crucial element all to itself. Two years later, CBS upgraded the shot, using Atlas Cam, a rig with a shallow depth of field, for the final walk, giving the entire moment a movie-like veneer.

“It really brings out the subject you’re shooting, so the eye focuses on what the operator intended to shoot,” CBS director of golf Steve Milton told Sports Video Group back in 2021, when CBS debuted the technology.

“It evolved organically,” Jim Nantz, CBS’s voice of the Masters, told me recently over the phone, giving the credit to Milton and the broadcast team. “[The winners] walk off the 18th green and we’re going to follow them. It’s live television. It all just kind of happens. And sometimes you get lucky and a specific shot stands on its own so well that I don’t even have to add anything to it. When that happens, the broadcast evolves from television and becomes a bit more like cinema.”

Like any good film, a well-composed shot is its own contained universe. I’ve watched and rewatched every champion’s walk a dozen times over, and each one seems to accomplish the same feat, revealing something elemental about the winner. When Spieth won at 21 years old, there was a moment, just before he bounded off to scoring, when his father urged the shellshocked young champ to acknowledge the crowd. Spieth smiled, nodded and headed back to the green to tip his cap to thunderous applause. It’s a small moment that manages to convey so much—not just about Spieth’s own character, but also a father-son relationship rooted in discipline and respect. During Scheffler’s 2022 walk, his wife, Meredith, never left his side. Gobsmacked, the pair held on to each other tight—a portrait of a young, loving family. In 2021, the first year of the cinematic cameras, Hideki Matsuyama took a stoic walk alone, bathed in the day’s last rays of golden light, trying mightily to hold back tears of joy and disbelief.

For Kyle Porter, a golf writer and obsessive chronicler of the human side of golf’s biggest stages, Matsuyama’s walk is an indelible moment. “It was his eyes that did it,”  he told me on a recent call. “Dancing and darting, telling a thousand stories. Not totally sure of what he’d just done but, at the same time, looking completely assured of his place in the golf pantheon. Where else do you get that?” 

For Porter, the walk is a rare look at an athlete coming to grips with a return on their investment: a lifetime of grind and ambition rewarded. “It’s the compression of not just years of work but that entire week of pressure,” he says. “You can see practice sessions and plane rides to ridiculous places written on the faces of champions in that space, but you can also see the release in that moment of what surely felt like the most difficult four-day war of their careers. It makes for this strange clashing of emotions that nobody really knows what to do with.”

The champion’s walk is, among so many other things, a glad-handing clinic—a spectacle of big hugs, of bros dapping each other up. Watch enough of them and you’ll notice a very specific hierarchy emerge. Family comes first—a wife or girlfriend, most likely, and, if present, an infant or toddler. Then come the kids (and, usually, the tears). After that, it’s siblings and parents. Next, coaches, agents, aunts and uncles, and finally, college friends. Think of each as one in a series of concentric circles of people who’ve helped the champion along the way—a blitz version of This Is Your Life, playing out on perfectly manicured grass.

“Golf is a sport where, ultimately, you’ve got to do it alone,” Nantz said. “But to get there, you have so many people that you have to feed off of their energy, their love, their support. To get there—I don’t care who you are, I don’t care how superhuman you are—we all have had people who gave of themselves to help [us]. That’s not to be underestimated. And it’s a beautiful moment to see this on display after an emotional week.”

All sports have their iconic moments of victory—Michael Jordan sobbing on the locker-room floor after winning the title in 1996; Brandi Chastain clinching the World Cup in Pasadena in 1999 and tearing off her shirt; the confetti-strewn pomp, hugs and Gatorade baths at the 50-yard line after winning the Super Bowl—but Woods’ 2019 Augusta champion’s walk may stand above them all. It captures a moment so incomprehensible, so powerful, that Nantz went silent for two minutes and 44 seconds as Tiger walked toward the clubhouse, slowly realizing the enormity of what he’d accomplished. “I knew right away that I needed to lay off it for a long time and let history speak for itself,” Nantz told me.

Woods’ journey, a three-minute exultation, isn’t a victory lap. It’s somehow a trenchant examination of the man himself. There’s the hug with his son, Charlie, and the echo of history. There’s the embrace of family and the stunned hangers-on. And yes, there’s the deafening chants of the crowd. There’s the moment when Tiger seems to lose himself, looking more like a wide-eyed 21-year-old than when he first won.

But the truly revealing sequence comes near the end of the walk, not long after he crosses the first fairway. Having made the first part with Charlie by his side, Woods, riding on a weapons-grade level of endorphins few humans have probably ever experienced, picks up his pace. Charlie fades to the background, and suddenly Woods is by himself, marching with a smile as wide as Augusta’s roomiest fairway. To watch Woods in this moment is to understand his singularity, his awesome otherness. Here he is, surrounded on all sides by people positively losing their minds, and yet Woods may as well be on Mars. He has done the unthinkable, defied all the odds and made more history. The world is watching, but no one, not even those closest to him, can keep up. Tiger Woods is the center of the universe. He is also, ultimately, alone.

I’ve repeatedly inspected Woods’ walk on YouTube, studying his face, looking for something each time. Once in a while, when I’m feeling bored or listless or in need of the virtual equivalent of comfort food, I’ll watch the final hole of a Masters broadcast and scrutinize those last moments. And yet I wasn’t sure why, exactly, I’d developed this online tic. It wasn’t until I talked to Porter that it all made sense. There is something entrancing about seeing the precise point at which a life changes. Because what we’re witnessing is the confines of possibility expanding ever so slightly. That, as Porter told me, is what makes that moment so intoxicating. “Thinking deeply about other people’s dreams,” he said, “often reminds us of our own.” •