As is our custom, last week my friend Ken Clark and I met to watch the Saturday round of the Masters. Saturday seems best. The first two rounds are wonderful—the entire week is wonderful—but they are a little early to command full attention: they make a better backdrop to the other marvels of early April. And Sunday—the stakes are too high, the smell of the end a little embarrassing and sad—Sunday is better absorbed in the privacy of one’s own lair.
We are a sports-obsessed nation, and honestly, in my ripe years I am losing interest in most of them. I’m not especially tribal, and I find it harder every year to prefer any team over the others. The provocation towards a preference begins to feel more and more like the interminable propaganda that is our daily air. Something to keep the masses divided and pacified.
I make an exception for the Masters. It is by far my favorite sporting event of the year. I can generate a little energy for college football, a little less for college basketball—even in their new, money-corrupted, semi-pro format—none for professional sports of any kind, with the one exception; and the thought of millions of people wagering billions of dollars on every possible aspect of every match feels like pesticide run-off. But the Masters just seems different from everything else. It’s partly the more compelling nature of individual competition, partly the meticulous obsession of Augusta National with legacy and detail, but mostly the rite of passage the tournament represents.
The return of spring every year moves me like nothing else, and redeems the miseries of January and February. You have to remember, a major part of our lived experience is the anticipation (or dread) of it, and the aftermath that’s ours forever. The experience itself is a blip on a timeline—what we mostly live with are the before and after. This is preeminently true of spring. All through late winter my antennae are attuned to every detail of the imminent revival. The real beginning of the year is the vernal equinox: the earth and its life are moving into a new phase—really an old phase, always new again—with the Masters two or three weeks later to reinforce it.
In other words, the arrival of spring is quite a short-lived phenomenon—for me, roughly parallel to Masters week—the fulfillment of the longer-lived and even more powerful anticipation of it, and the prelude to its long echoes.
And the beginning of the end of the arrival of spring comes on late Sunday afternoon.
You can evoke a complex of visceral and lifelong emotions in Ken or me with three words: The Butler Cabin. Those words more than any others embody the sadness and despair of all Sunday afternoons.
I’ve always hated Sunday afternoons because they have always represented for me a final reckoning. I have used up my poor little cache of procrastination, and the bills are due. I’ve been outside doing something with friends all afternoon, with adrenaline fueling the illusion that I had all kinds of time. I haven’t done my homework, I haven’t finished, probably haven’t even started, my lab report, or whatever project the stormtroopers of my school—later, work—world have inflicted on me, and the sun is going down. Monday morning is lurking behind the corner like a sadistic prison guard.
The Butler Cabin waits for no man.
There is no trace of this feeling during the Masters—it is genuinely a charmed island-week in the flow of time: not even as the final Sunday group heads into the back nine and the weary sun deepens the shadows over the course—well, maybe just a twinge—not even the reliably dramatic finish, the year’s final roar from the crowd, as time teeters on a knife’s edge: the joy of the week on one side, the Butler Cabin on the other.
Sunshine (usually), azaleas, pine needles all in place, festive crowds, roars, the vistas over the fairways, the big air, the superlative play itself—all of that, the entire experience suddenly shifts to a room that feels like a 1960s local TV set (“Sportsman’s Lodge”), or a funeral parlor—quiet, somber, watched over by the imperturbable Bobby Jones, civilized—well, actually, everything about the week has been civilized—and inexpressibly sad. There they sit: the chairman, the previous and current winners, the low amateur, and of course that epitome of civilized unflappability, Jim Nantz.
And it’s quiet. That’s just it—too quiet. Eerie.
It’s over.
Is this how the end of life will be? All the expense of energy, the hopes and fears, the struggling, the successes and failures, the long-haul anxiety and bursts of euphoria, the plans, the dreams, the anticipation—and it ends in a quiet room where it is soberly and genially assessed?
I don’t know, but down here there is nothing left after the Butler Cabin but the return of all your demons. Next stop, Monday morning.
Spring is not coming anymore—it’s here. The early blooms are gone, the late ones are fading or already lying in brown puddles of ruin. Now, stuck in the aftermath, you’re realizing for the thousandth time, it was all about the anticipation.
Oh well. Sometimes you’re just going to make a C. Maybe a C-minus. You get through it. You move on. You have to close doors before you can open new ones.
Life knows it can’t dwell on the ephemeral.
Which is everything. Including us.
See you next year at The Masters!