Sunday is normally the fourth round of the tournament, and not meant to be televised until sometime in the afternoon. Today it's been on since 8:30 A.M. with the restart of the third round. The weather has been rainy, cold, (in the 40s) and windy. There have been more Ping umbrellas up than ever before.
It's an odd image in golf when a course marshal appears on the course blowing an air horn warning that play will be suspended because of electrical storms in the area. The air horn sounds like a Southern Pacific locomotive has left the tracks and is headed for the putting green.
I never heard of pine straw until I watched the Masters. The "straw" are the brown pine needles that carpet he ground under all the pine tress ringing the course. If your shot is not too deep in the woods on the pine straw you're probably going to recover. At least these golfers do. But if you're too far into the woods, oh-oh.
And those pine trees usually stay upright, providing beauty, shade and acting as obstacles. But this year, several of them toppled over, their roots losing their grip in the soil. These trees were BIG. It was a slow motion timber and no spectators were hurt, having scurried away in time before they hit the ground.
When the weather hit 40° during the third round, golfers could be seen with stocking caps pulled over their endorsement headgear. They looked like Keebler elves scurrying around with a putter.
And as for Tiger Woods, he wasn't burning bright. His third round was suspended, forcing the prospect of his having to play 29 holes on Sunday. Tiger withdrew from the tournament rather than subject himself to that task. His leg was bothering him.
Tiger, Tiger is not burning bright these days, but you can't be on top forever. The younger players are whacking that ball off the tee more than 300 yards, so far they really can't see where it lands. Someone I know was told the trouble with their game was that they were standing too close to the ball after they hit it. Not this bunch.
Lately I'm reading an anthology of sport columns by Dave Anderson, the Pulitzer-award winning sportswriter for the NYT. Dave passed away in 2018, but the columns, mostly from the '70s, still ring great. I met Dave at a talk he gave at Brooks Brothers at the Madison Avenue flagship store (now no longer here) of all places, quite a few years ago. Until then I had never met him face-to-face, but he did on Christmas Day in 1994 publish a letter I wrote him about the hockey and baseball strikes. Dave made use of quite a bit of the letter in his column, including my name, 'It's Not Going to Be A Baseball Christmas.' I was famous for a day. Maybe two.
There weren't a lot of people at the Brooks Brothers talk, and why would there be? Despite this, I introduced myself and listened to Dave make his comments on the sports he loved to write about: hockey, baseball, boxing and golf. Especially golf. Dave himself was an avid golfer, and rarely missed an opportunity to write about it, particularly when the majors rolled around.
The talk was in April, (I do not remember the year.) and Dave commented that for a sports fan this was a GREAT time of the year. Baseball has started, hockey and basketball are entering the playoff rounds, and golf was getting ready to present the Masters Tournament from Augusta, Georgia.
Dave talked about his trips to the Masters, and the pre-tournaments events and practice rounds he witnessed. He described one practice drill where the golfers would hit golf balls at their caddies many yards away who were holding baseball mitts. The drill was to hit the golf ball to the caddie and have him catch it without having to move a step in any direction. Shagging balls in the outfield without moving. I had never heard of that.
Dave did add that whenever he visited the Masters he couldn't shake the "plantation feel" of the place. He never really felt comfortable, despite the beautiful surroundings.
And why would he fell comfortable? Dave was born in Brooklyn and started his sports writing career writing for the now long defunct Brooklyn Eagle.
There is some irony there. His colleague Red Smith, another Pulitzer-award winning sports writer for The Times, would comment that as he started in the Midwest—born in Wisconsin—and was trying to make his way to New York City writing assignments he was eventually offered a job to write for the Brooklyn Eagle. Red demurred, and took the offer to write for a Philadelphia paper, reasoning that Philadelphia was closer to New York City than Brooklyn, despite Brooklyn being only across the river from Manhattan, considered to be within the borders of New York City, and having a major league baseball team, the Brooklyn Dodgers. Dave had no such problem with starting out in Brooklyn. After all, he was born there.
I've probably paid more attention to this golf tournament than any other. Maybe because of the time of year, or maybe because of the landscaping. This year I watched it with my son-in-law, an avid golfer, as we were having Easter dinner over my daughter's house. Covid restrictions are over. At least for now.
I told him I will forever remember the 1986 Masters when Jack Nicklaus made his charge and won his 6th Masters. We lived in Flushing at the time, and my friend and I had just gotten back from visiting my father who was in St. Francis hospital in Roslyn, recovering from a mitral valve replacement.
When we got there the entrance was blocked by a phalanx of doctors and nurses standing by the door as someone was coming out. I couldn't see who it was, but my friend was taller than me and told me it was Jerry Lewis. Lewis was known to have heart troubles, and might have been there for a procedure.
I told my friend as much as I felt inconvenienced by the temporarily blocked doorway, I thought perhaps Donald Manes had been taken there after his suicide attempt, Manes being the Queens Borough president who would later successfully commit suicide rather than face the Parking Violations scandal that was unfolding. He failed at his first suicide attempt.
But learning that Jerry Lewis used the place for his medical needs, I figured the hospital must be good if a Jew goes to St. Francis rather than Mt. Sinai.
The weather broke nicely for Sunday's renewal of the suspended third round, and of course the start of the fourth round, with Spain's 28-year-old Jon Rahm winning his first Masters fairly easily with a 12-stroke under par 276, a 4-stroke lead over Phil Mickelson and Bruce Koepka who tied for second.
The telecast finished a little after 7 o'clock. I suspect CBS got 60 Minutes in in its entirety. Dinner and dessert had been great, and the golf was fun to watch. We went home, full and happy.
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