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What the Masters does is preserve the code. The PGA Tour money folk, left to their own devices, would chase every last dollar until the Tour fell into the NASCAR/NBA/NFL/WWE abyss. (Exhibit A: the 44 corporate logos in the Tour media guide.) The Masters reminds us of the importance of gracious losers, replaced divots, hushed spectators-the actual game. That's why the chairman of Augusta National Golf Club (along with the game's dominant player at any given time and very few other people) is one of golf's most influential figures. Every April trees bud, the clubs come out, we turn on CBS and fall for the whole thing again, the grace and beauty and athleticism. We actually like the knot in our stomach that makes us want to heave our lunch, even if it's all vicarious. Your grandmother doesn't watch the Honda Classic, but she watches the Masters, right?
And now the Masters has a new chairman, William Porter Payne, last seen in public running the Atlanta Olympics in the muggy summer of 1996. He is only the sixth boss man at the club. First there was Clifford Roberts (1934-76), protector of the Bobby Jones legacy, a taciturn purist who put the Masters on CBS chiefly to bring a great game to more people-and to bring more glory to the club and its members. Roberts was succeeded by Bill Lane, a Texas gent who died after overseeing just two tournaments. Then came Hord Hardin (1980-91), an autocrat with a tin ear. He was followed by the affable Jackson Stephens (1991-98). And then came the chairman whose name you most likely know, William (Hootie) Johnson (1998-2006), the only radical ever to hold the position, who changed the course, the tournament and the world's perception of the club. He handpicked his successor, Billy Payne, a 59-year-old Georgian who is as courtly as Johnson was (at times) bombastic. Google Martha Burk and Hootie, if you can stand to revisit that whole thing.
Even though it's part-time, seasonal work for no pay, Payne, a lawyer by training, has landed himself a huge job. (By day he's a managing director of Gleacher Partners, a financial advisory company owned by Eric Gleacher, who for years was a prominent USGA committeeman.) Payne has to reclaim Augusta's past-as an oasis of civility, something lost, some would say, in the Hootie years. He has to prepare for a future in which television coverage aimed at the guy in his lounger, which made the Masters the Masters, goes the way of the wooden driver. And he has to keep the high purpose alive.
You may want to know: Is he of golf? Payne didn't grow up with the game. But then came the decade and change he spent first trying to bring the Olympics to Atlanta, then running the Games. "During that time golf became my therapy," Payne said, using a modern word early in a recent interview while wearing a contemporary cut of the club's famous green sport coat (shoulders lightly padded, darted chest). He was sitting in the Augusta National office he inherited from Johnson, Bobby Jones staring at him by way of a portrait painted by Dwight Eisenhower and beloved by Cliff Roberts. Payne is the first chairman who didn't know Roberts or Jones.
