How's this for a morning? You breakfast on a massive waffle ($4), with the Masters section of The Augusta Chronicle (free in the clubhouse) lodged beside your coffee while watching Jose Maria Olazabal, Tommy Aaron and David Graham walk by (priceless).
On the opposite side of the clubhouse — in another wing, really — is the Trophy Room, where there's a buffet lunch that features, among other things, various Southern staples including fried chicken, black-eyed peas, biscuits, turnip greens and peach cobbler with vanilla ice cream.
Most of the waitstaff, in the Trophy Room and elsewhere, is African-American and remarkably courteous. (A sign in an employee area of the club reads: preserve the "mythical" member experience.) A little after three, at the end of lunch, you'll see waiters and waitresses and busboys lined up for the Trophy Room buffet. You'll see many of the same faces, year after year. But it's not a total time warp.
Taking a child's milk order, James Lawrence, a waiter who has logged decades at the club, wants to know this: whole, 2% or skim? There were fewer options in Cliff Roberts's day.
There's much else of interest in the clubhouse: the Crow's Nest (the hangout in the attic for amateurs), black-and-white photographs of the original nursery, various portraits and busts of Jones and Roberts and Eisenhower, aerial photos of the course, bookshelves crammed with golf books, many with a Masters link (Power Golf by Ben Hogan; Winner, about Billy Casper, the 1970 Masters champion; A Golfer's Life, the Arnold Palmer autobiography). The genius of the clubhouse design is that it brings you back to golf in general, and golf at Augusta National in particular.
In April that's especially welcome. You take a break from the world beyond Washington Road. Who doesn't want that? Maybe the best place to eat in the clubhouse — try to find someone to argue against this — is the second-floor porch, with its view of the course impeded pleasingly by the great oak. On any given day during Masters week you might see, sitting in a green wicker chair and having lunch, Mike Kern (golf writer for the Philadelphia Daily News) or Charles Coody (the '71 Masters winner) or Charlie Yates (Augusta National member, scion of an Atlanta golfing family).
On days with no wind you can smell the cigar smoke wafting up from the lawn below. You can hear the TV people snapping to attention when Phil Mickelson stops to take some questions. At your table are some rites of spring, National-style: a bottle of Aunt Nellie's Old-Style Sauce; the gooey remains of peach cobbler and ice cream; a waiter asking you how your winter was.
And the knowledge that beyond the railing of the porch, beyond the old oak and the industry bigwigs beneath it, beyond the green-and-white rope, lies a beguiling course, where somebody's standing in the 13th fairway thinking about the creek, the bunkers, the hole position, the wind and whether right then his swing will hold up.
Want to check it out? The walk from the clubhouse is all downhill.
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