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An excerpt from Fanatic: 10 Things All Sports Fans Should Do Before They Die by Jim Gorant, published by Houghton Mifflin June 2007. Copyright Jim Gorant. For more information go to jimgorant.blogspot.com
I'm walking through a grotto of trees, filled with the smell of newly fallen pine needles, past a cluster of low green buildings that include a massive gift shop with an impressive switchbacking walkway that seems like something out of Disney World. Ahead, the darkness created by the overhanging branches is broken by an opening in the treeline where the sun bursts through, sending long shafts of yellow spreading across the ground. This light brings forth a rush of anticipation, because I know that the sun-drenched clearing is the golf course. I find myself walking up on my toes a bit and lifting my chin to get a glimpse. Finally, I clear the forest and I'm here. I'm on the golf course at Augusta National.
The thing that hits me from this spot along the first fairway are the greens. Not the things the players putt on, but the array of green shades. It's green on green. The dark shadowy green of a still pond, the depth of a Coke bottle, the brightness of a watermelon. Green on green on green.
Once I drink in this sea of greens, I notice that the course is more open than I imagined. From here, I can see across six or seven fairways. Sure, there are trees, the famous Georgia pines, but the groves are not as thick, and more strategically spread out than I pictured. Next come the hills. The two-dimensional space of TV flattens out the slopes that the holes climb up and around. It's steeper than I imagined.
It's an odd feeling to be here, staring out at everything I expected combined with so much I never could have dreamed of. I walk out to the rope along the fairway. The grass is incredibly short and cut so that it leans toward the hole. It's yet another shade of green, Granny Smith green, and shiny, so that it looks waxed. Forget about how fast the putting surfaces are, it's hard to fathom how fast these fairways must be. Or as one guy standing nearby says to his wife and buddy, "These are fairways? Look at these fairways! Murph, she doesn't know, would you explain to her what a fairway looks like?"
I head out across the course. I'm sensitive to the things one never sees on TV. The marshals, who open and close the ropes along the fairway so that no one crosses when they're not supposed to, wear white jump suits and yellow hardhats with green numbers that correspond to the fairway they guard. On the one hand it's a practical and reasonable outfit-safe, cool, organized-but there's something about it that's also so self-serious as to be laughable. I mean, they're glorified hall monitors, crossing guards protecting pedestrians not from oncoming cars but from golf balls.
