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In our high-tech, high-def age, certain fan experiences don’t seem worth the trouble or expense:
• Sitting in the upper deck at a basketball game taking place in a football stadium. This is roughly akin to squinting at the bottom line of an eye chart, except sometimes the letters move. NICE DUNK, H!
• Bobsled. During the 2010 Games I spent four hours near the finish line and witnessed 2.78 seconds of blur.
• Sitting in the upper deck at a football game in a football stadium. Watching Super Bowl XLVI from the farthest reaches of Lucas Oil Stadium, I was informed that the game had ended by text alert.
But golf is the worst of them all. The TV viewing experience is so thorough and intimate—plus there’s Jim Nantz going on about snapshots of memories woven into the fabric of legacies or whatever. Whereas here are the things I found myself saying over and over at the 2013 Masters:
• “Who is that?”
• “Whose ball is that?”
• “What just happened?”
• “Gah, this pimento cheese sandwich tastes awful. WHY DO I KEEP BUYING THESE THINGS?”
It makes zero sense to attend a golf tournament if one of your goals is to know what happened at that golf tournament. From some viewing positions on a course, you can see a golfer drive the ball but can’t see where it lands. From other positions, you can see the ball land but can’t know for certain who shot it. Keeping up with events at the Masters is particularly difficult because Augusta National does not allow patrons to carry phones. Or shout. Or use any form of communication other than semaphore, the silent language of flags.
The way I figure it, I missed 98 percent of what transpired during the first three rounds. During the other two percent, I often had my view blocked by heads, hats, ugly hats, trees, umbrellas and, one time, my own fingers (it seemed preferable to watching Mike Weir putt). But by Sunday, in front of the TV at home, even as the rain poured down on the course, I missed being there.
Take it from me: There’s nothing like the pleasure of watching Sergio Garcia melt down in person and in real time. That I was seeing it happen a split second before millions of viewers made all the difference.
There’s nothing like the people-watching opportunities. We saw Wayne Gretzky following Dustin Johnson’s group. We saw new Augusta member Condi Rice rocking a green jacket over a floral-print dress. And we saw many of my favourite kind of Masters fan: the grown men who show up in full golf attire, right down to the spikes. You know, just in case Augusta chairman Billy Payne taps them on the shoulder and says, “Care to tee it up, boys?”
There’s nothing like the old-school charm of Augusta National, which has resisted pretty much every trend in modern sports. Sandwiches cost $1.50. There is no corporate signage. At any other U.S. course, the site of Bubba’s impossible hook shot from the trees at 10—which set up his playoff win last year—would be commemorated with a theme park offering rides on the Bubbacoaster. At Augusta? Nothing—at least not until a spectator took a stick and affixed to the ground a yellowed newspaper clipping featuring a photo of the shot.
And there’s nothing like witnessing a Moment first hand. We were in the stands at 15 during the second round when Tiger’s approach smacked the flagstick dead on and bounced back into the creek. The noise from the crowd was as though someone had cued a sound-effects CD to “Audible Gasp.” It’s there now in memory: the ricochet, the reaction, Tiger’s stunned body language.
In person, we can’t see it all. But if we’re lucky, what we see we’ll never forget.
Scott Feschuk is a Sportsnet magazine columnist