Hello, Friends: The Soothing Power of Rewatching the Masters
I have been thinking about Jim Nantz’s hair. Longtime CBS broadcaster, calming voice of the Masters, the now indefinitely postponed golf tournament that would otherwise have been played next week. The hair, last I checked, is still reasonably robust, but Nantz is 60: Even television immortals can’t hold on to every follicle forever. But go back in time, as I have lately, and something remarkable happens: The hair—your standard golf-dad, left-forward-to-right-rear swoop, not unlike the one atop my head right now, and thinning at about the same speed—grows more lustrous and tangible. Pelt-like, even. Unmoved by time or fear. It had a glow of its own back then. I like to think we all did.
I am a latecomer to the Masters, and to golf in general. The first time I watched either was three years ago. I had recently moved to a new city and didn’t quite know how to live in it yet. One April Sunday, I found myself watching the final round of that year’s tournament—Sergio Garcia, striding down 15, about to win his first major in 74 tries—in a kind of stunned, contented boredom. Emerald green grass, ostentatiously pink azaleas, aggressively chirping birds, Nantz whispering away in what might as well have been a foreign language. It was like being gently clubbed into tranquility. It was like being suffocated just enough to kill off the louder and more unruly brain cells. It was like nothing at all.
The Masters is a notoriously difficult ticket; Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia, where it is played, has a brutally exclusive and fraught history that nobody mentions during the telecasts. What you learn about the tournament by watching it on TV is only that great men have strode on these hallowed fairways since time immemorial; that the azaleas always bloom, the sun always shines in perfect, beam-like form, and that the concession stand makes a good pimento-cheese sandwich with a price—$1.50—that is frozen in time, like everything else there. It’s a frictionless, closed-loop system; the same guiltless day, over and over again, for four days each year. Except this year, of course.
Through some weird quirk of corporate generosity, the final-round broadcasts of the tournament, going back all the way to the 1960s, are on YouTube, for free, and lately I’ve been watching them compulsively. Originally my intention was to simply rewatch Tiger Woods’s win at last year’s tournament. It would take up five and half hours of my life (right now, by all means! Take six!), and I knew it had a happy ending, or at least a cinematic one: 43-year-old Tiger Woods, with a back made of prayer beads and surgical steel, coming from behind to win his fifth Masters and 15th major, in a round that featured four different world-class players melting down in the exact same way, in the exact same spot, while Woods simply…did not. Woods is easily the greatest athlete golf has ever seen, but this particular win—the result of some extremely canny strategy, a good deal of luck, and an inward focus so intense his eyes sometimes seem to be turned all the way around in his head—is not an athlete’s performance. It is a monk’s. Watching it is like meditation.
"It’s a frictionless, closed-loop system; the same guiltless day, over and over again, for four days each year. Except this year, of course."
Then I realized you could just keep going. I watched 2015, a 21-year-old Jordan Spieth’s first win at the tournament, and an even more boring broadcast than usual: He leads wire to wire, and wins by four. Today, Spieth is ranked 56th in the world, and looks like he’s trying to remember the password to his swing every time he hits a golf shot. What does he think when he watches this footage now? It’s a version of himself he cannot access. At the margins of the frame, other players I know only in their modern incarnations stride by: Dustin Johnson, looking like a major-league pitcher in search of a game; Garcia, rehearsing for a triumph that he doesn’t yet know is his. Mostly I just treasure the comforting sameness of it all, the dull rituals: the shots that don’t matter from the golfers who won’t win, the long waits, the sedate hour before the leaders even tee off. Mellow-voiced announcer Verne Lundquist, growing ever sleepier at 16. The past: Let’s go back there.
In 2016, Spieth—leading again—self-immolates in the same spot, 12, where Tiger will later effectively win in 2019. Total human misery on Jordan’s face. Not even an attempt to mask it. An unheralded Englishman named Danny Willett cruises right by him and wins. Random vectors colliding, mistakes resounding, compounding, history being shuffled capriciously—inevitably—into place. Try as we might, none of us can go back there.
The comfort in watching old golf tournaments is the comfort of revisiting a reality we’ve lost now. Even when life resumes, we know it will be different in ways we can’t possibly understand yet. Escapism is a luxury, of course, like having a job or enough to eat or a home with enough square footage to not drive my wife insane as I watch men with names like Smylie Kaufman and Webb Simpson go at balls with sticks. And boredom—not tortured, constant idleness; boredom—is the greatest luxury of all. Right now, for me at least, it can only be found in dispatches from a world we’re not getting back.
I started playing golf myself after that first Masters I watched, at the instigation of two of my best friends. I found it worked against the free-floating anxiety I’m prone to feeling, even during the best of times. At night, instead of thinking about demons, I think about golf shots, and it calms me. I miss seeing my friends. I miss going outside and playing a game. Now, at night, when I picture hitting golf shots, what I’m picturing is something I can’t do. I’m picturing the person I was but can’t quite be anymore. As I write this, I see a young tour pro, Xander Schauffele, has announced that he has “lost a sense of purpose” now that professional golf isn’t being played. He says he’s trying to remain “mentally sane” while “feeling unemployed.” He’s wealthy, secure. But he’s also 26 and great at a thing he can’t do right now. I get it. At last year’s Masters, he was tied for the lead after 16 holes, before fate and Tiger Woods slammed the door on him. He is losing time now that he’ll never recover. Like the rest of us, he is in possession of so much that is currently going to waste.
One Masters I haven’t seen yet is 2005, the Tiger win before the most recent Tiger win. I gather there was a playoff that year. I believe there was a notable shot on 16. My golf friends and I have been talking about watching it all together, on text, maybe Zoom. But right now we’re saving it. Who knows how long this will last? Who knows what other dumb artifacts we’ll need from the past when the future finally comes?
Koepka is collecting majors at a record clip while upending the tour's social norms, wearing Off-White on the course—and making clear he wouldn't mind changing the game forever.
Originally Appeared on GQ
