Nostalgia can overpower memory. Should it also condone hypocrisy?
No sporting event in the world evokes memory more than the Masters. Even for viewers who don’t watch golf regularly, the Masters is a measuring stick by which we mark our lifetimes: the first time you watched with your father, or where you were when Ben Crenshaw sank 1995’s final putt and dropped his face into his hands, or the first time you pointed out the man in a red shirt and told your child, “That’s Tiger Woods.” Ironically, most fans of the Masters never actually lay eyes on Augusta National; on the rare occasions they do, every sight brings back a lifetime of memories — oh remember, here’s where so-and-so hit such-and-such in whenever-it-was.
For better or worse, the Masters also is a measuring stick for the growth of our country, and for the resistance to that growth. At its first playing in 1934, and for nearly its first half-century, every caddie at the Masters was Black. “As long as I’m alive,” vowed Clifford Roberts, one of Augusta National’s co-founders, “all the golfers will be white and all the caddies will be [B]lack.” Roberts’ promise held true until 1975, when Lee Elder became the Masters’ first Black player — even though, by that point, Pete Brown and Charlie Sifford both were two-time PGA Tour winners. (Two years later, on the bank of Ike’s Pond at Augusta National’s par-3 course, Roberts shot himself in the head.) Neither Brown nor Sifford ever played in the Masters. Another decade and a half passed before Augusta National allowed a Black member.
Women, too, have been famously excluded at Augusta National. For 80 years, no woman was allowed to join the club until 2012, when it extended memberships to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and businesswoman Darla Moore.
None of this is a secret — not even an open secret. Discrimination is as much a part of Augusta National’s legacy as azaleas and magnolias. Fans acknowledge it, even though the club won’t. But we compartmentalize that history; like a slice of some godawful, canned cranberry sauce at an otherwise lovely Thanksgiving, we push it as far to the edge of our plate as we can get it, so that we can focus on the rest of a pleasant dinner. We don’t ignore that it’s there, because we can’t — but we don’t have any plans to cut into it, either.
Our memories of the Masters are pure; our memories of the people we’ve watched it with are pure; our daydreams of walking those too-perfect fairways and putting those remarkable greens are pure. And that purity is important to us. So we keep Augusta National at arm’s length — because we’re afraid that, if we allow ourselves to acknowledge its ugliness, we might disturb the purity of our memories.
And to be clear, “our” memories are white people’s memories. There’s a reason that most patrons in an average Masters gallery are white; there’s a reason that, even outside Augusta National’s walls, the Masters’ most fervent supporters are white. Black people have no trouble naming Augusta National’s ugliness, because to them, it’s not a simple embarrassment — it’s raw pain. “Till Lee Elder came, the only Blacks here were caddies and waiters,” said Calvin Peete in 1983, three years after he became the Masters’ second Black player. “To ask a Black man how he feels about the traditions of the Masters is like asking him how he feels about his forefathers, who were slaves.”
In the club’s defense, the current chairman, Fred Ridley, is no Clifford Roberts. Ridley seems genuinely committed to steering Augusta National in a direction that better reflects where America is in 2021, and where golf should be. The Augusta National Women’s Amateur, which finished its second playing this month, has been well received (despite serious flaws, including its conflict with the LPGA’s schedule) and is a welcome gesture of inclusion toward women’s golf; likewise, naming Elder an honorary starter, and funding the creation of a women’s golf team at nearby Paine College — a historically Black institution — symbolize that Augusta National’s current caretakers understand the burden to atone for decades of discrimination.
But ultimately, these mostly symbolic gestures are just that: mostly symbolic. Through the Masters, Augusta National claimed the mantle of the ideal golf course and club — an irrefutable fact that reverberates in every corner of the game, from architecture to agronomy to club culture. Is there any doubt that golf remains exclusive, expensive, and exclusionary in part because of the example Augusta National spent decades setting? If Augusta National had opened its doors to Black members a generation earlier — if it had publicly shunned discrimination, rather than defending it decades after the Civil Rights Movement’s height — is there any doubt that Shoal Creek would have done the same long before the embarrassment of the 1990 PGA Championship? Or that other clubs who, explicitly or implicitly, have shunned Black participation would have charted different courses?
Apologies usually are purely symbolic, too. But in Augusta National’s case, an explicit apology — the last thing it’s likely to do, of course — would carry the practical, real-world effect of demonstrating that the ideal toward which other courses should strive is an inclusive home for young Black women and old white men alike. It would create a clean break with the club’s shameful past, in lieu of slow-walking into the Twenty-First Century with the hope that everyone will forget about Augusta National’s first 80 years. And it would relieve its fans from compartmentalizing the purity of the tournament they love from the reprehensible history of the club that made the tournament possible.
Short of that, fans are left trying to separate the Masters from Augusta National — a fine distinction at best, and a hypocrisy at worst.
But nostalgia is a powerful feeling — powerful enough to overwhelm reason, and to wall off memory from scrutiny. Repairing the imperfections of those memories, though, first requiring acknowledging them.
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