After April

Good morning sounds a little different here. I’m from the land of mumbled hey and ‘sup and wary nods, or more commonly, eyes cast down at our feet, feigning blindness to passers-by. I fear that my way of not saying hello to strangers is becoming more common in more places as we grow more suspicious of one another, our preferences, our inclinations. But that’s certainly not happening here.

When you land in a car headed for Augusta, a Severance-style switch flips and zippety-do-dah is suddenly coursing through your veins. You wave someone into your lane of traffic. You smile and make eye contact at the gas station. And when you arrive, the good morning you get at security and from the police officer—even the one with the explosives-sniffing dog–drips with a lilt of sincerity that makes an unfamiliar place feel familiar, turns fantasy to fact, and you offer good morning in return with an exuberance your mornings have otherwise never known. 

The Masters is best experienced as or with a first-timer, and this week I’ve been fortunate to walk beside one. Two newcomer observations are reliable (most everything is reliable at the Masters): The hills are huge, and everyone is in a good mood. We’ve also been marveling at the operational efficiency of this event—it’s a case study in success and standards, where each year Augusta National competes against its own record of beating back joylessness and ineptitude. By my count, they’re undefeated. Granted, they have 51 weeks to prepare for one, but they don’t seem to waste a second of it, and in a world that can feel more confusing by the minute, how lovely to land in a place where confusion is given no quarter.

Consider the merchandise pavilion where live mapping via a chip in your patron badge alerts staff to crowded corners or slow lines; cruise through a seamless shipping operation that will see your bags of booty deposited on a truck before you reach the exit, your shirts and tumblers beating you home to your front porch; imagine the forethought that went into new beer cups that produce less foam this year, thus saving 20 seconds per transaction at the food stalls. Never mind finding a scrap of litter on the property; try and you’ll feel like Diogenes with his lamp. No work carts roaring past with provisions. No employees sneaking a smoke around the corner. Anything that might distract you from the golf is out of sight, underground, unseen. Of course that goes for our phones as well.

Every year I’m surprised by how many old friends I find along the ropes (I don’t have that many, so it is indeed surprising), but you can’t roam these grounds without discovering a familiar face because we are, for one week of our lives, looking up at people’s faces. What a wild scene for 2025: thousands of people, all with chins raised and eyes aimed forward. Not a single screen being studied. There must be some sort of world record going on here—thousands of Americans simultaneously off their devices for up to 12 hours at a time. And yet the world somehow manages without us. Astonishing stuff.

The newcomers are right—the Augusta hills are bigger than they appear on TV, but they’re not the Himalayas. They’re big because we’re actually looking at them, not trying to capture them in a snap or text someone about what we’re seeing. I’ve always contended that the phone ban is a gift, not a regulation, but when I reflect on Augusta’s other immediate revelation, the contagious kindness and joy, it goes beyond our empty hip pockets.

The Masters, as an experience, defies the check-the-box mode of modern life. It is package resistant. It’s the rare experience in sports that cannot be flipped into content, digested by a scroll, scanned in 10-second chunks before receding into the noise. We detach from the impulse to shout what we’re doing—document it or it didn’t happen—because the only way to document the Masters is to sit down, at home or in a folding chair beside a green, and be there. To watch and experience it, just yourself and your present company and the ground on which you’re standing. And what lovely ground it is.

The immediacy of bliss at Augusta National has plenty to do with the good fortune we’re all feeling. If you’re here—as a player, a patron, even media—you’ve been tapped on the shoulder in the most wonderful way, and that shared sense of luck—it swirls around the property on the cool Georgia breeze. It seeps into the lines for food and merchandise; it lingers along the ropes as strangers trade insights on how well somebody has been playing, or whether that’s a 5-iron or a 6. 

Fastened to that feeling of communal serendipity is a thin film of useful fear. We all want to be back here someday, so we find ourselves susceptible to best behaviors. Our personal defaults might have been trending toward cynicism and petulance, but this week is a chance to reset them and remember how to be kind, tolerant, enthusiastic people. It’s nice to know it’s still in there, and not buried all that deeply.

No phones, no running, no inane tee box exclamations—there are rules, both explicit and implied, but the guiding principle of everything Masters seems to be: Don’t be a jerk. I witnessed the rare Masters jerk last year. In the bleachers by No. 16, one patron asked another to sit down, which inspired a sharply directed “F*&^” that not only I overheard, but a security guard as well. Tears welled up in the eyes of the offender as his badge number was recorded, sobbing apologies as he realized he’d likely never be attending the Masters again, and had thoroughly screwed the owner of the badge he’d borrowed. I silently cheered this swift justice as memories of a more polite time washed over me. It warmed my soul to see that manners could and should still matter, that somewhere in this world being a jerk still comes at a price.

Outside these gates, rudeness is often rewarded; acrimony has become essential to our world’s zero-sum game of victory via volume. Returning to Augusta National is a yearly reminder as to why that doesn’t need to be the case. For one week, we get to visit the world in which we’d like to live. How did a golf tournament come to possess this sort of emotional power? Chalk it up to the Masters being so singular, so sacred, and such a privilege. But you know what else is? Every day of our lives. 

When we put on our Masters hat or eye the gnome that our spouse relegated to the basement, let’s recall how easy it was, at least for a little while, to say hello to a stranger. To wish someone a good day and mean it. To choose nice and find joy because both are there, just behind a curtain that’s easy to lift, even after April.