The worst about an Augusta National Tee Time

There is, it turns out worst Share about winning the lottery.

The moment – that bad part – only takes a moment, but it cuts you deeply.

It arrives a long time before the payment. Before the stream of congratulation texts and phone calls. Before the first person asks for a favor. Before you even fully understood it yourself.

It arrived for me on the morning of April 12, 2024, fifteen seconds after Dad’s voice over the speaker appeared on my phone, and thirty seconds after I received the most unlikely news of my life.

“Yes?” Dad said, confused by my call in the middle of the Meesterweek.

“I have news,” I said.

‘Yes??” He said again, his eyes grow wide.

I reminded him of the Masters Media Lottery, a tradition that granted a small number of writers the chance to have Augusta National the morning after the Masters ends every year. I told him how I was introduced each of the last four years, including this one, but I had always been not successful. And then I threw the hay maker.

“Dad,” I said. “I won.”

“F— You,” he said in a moment of pure surprise.

And then he started to cry.

Only Than It affected me: the worst part of winning the lottery.

The wildest gift of my life would only be mine.

Like most lottery winnersMy trip to Magnolia Lane was a long shot.

For a family Long Island that is proud of its roots in the working class, the Masters was a dream in the literal sense: volatile, glorious and essential in an essential way. We did not have the means to watch the tournament via lens other than a CBS camera, and that was okay. The distance only strengthened our lust.

The see, but a non-touch way of thinking got a shock when I was accepted in a prestigious journalism program in the spring of 2015. It was the possibility of your life-a golden ticket in a career as a sportswriter, perhaps even with the possibility of covering a masters in the meat. But there was a problem: I couldn’t afford it. Tuition fees alone would give me tens of thousands of dollars.

Days before the deadline I received a phone call. My grandfather wanted to see me. Can I come by for dinner?

Joe Boyle – or ‘Poppy’, as I knew him – was one of my best friends, at the same time stupid and irreverent and brilliant and generous. His nickname came from the Garbagemen, he had given his car, and the proof of his inherent goodness included paying and installing a brand new roof on a house that he had sold days earlier. (Poppy, a contractor of New York City and carpenter of Handel, was dismissed from just one job: as a volunteer at the Habitat for humanityafter he had found their building practices and smelled.)

Golf was Poppy’s Last Love, a hobby in late life that turned into a complete obsession. By the time I drove out to see him, the cancer had ended his match days, but he still devoured every word written about the game in his favorite newspaper, The New York Post.

When I arrived, he immediately cut to the point.

“After you graduated from that program, you can really do this,” he said, spread a master story by the writer Mark Cannizzaro over the table. “I mean it.”

I shifted uncomfortably in my chair. I wasn’t sure if I took the offer, I said.

“What do you mean?”

“What if I’m still not good enough?”

He was silent for a moment and stared deep in my eyes. Then he delivered the line that changed my life.

“James, sometimes in life you have to take the gamble,” he said. “At the moment it is one of those times.”

That was the end of the conversation, and although we didn’t know it, it was the end of us conversation.

Poppy died a few weeks later, equipment poor but rich in all the ways that went. His funeral was an affair for all-cream alone.

When we arrived in church for the service, grandma approached me.

“Poppy wanted me to give you this,” she said with a grin. “Consider it your legacy.”

She reached in a plastic bag and picked up a small, circular object: an old, red-white poker chip of one of the casinos of the Atlantic city.

My voice caught in my throat.

I put the poker chip in my pack bag and held it firmly. A few minutes later I stood in front of a full house and delivered Poppy’s praise.

I completed the speech with a line that Poppy shared with me months earlier, seconds after the final round of his life. It was a quote from the famous golfer Ben Hogan.

“While you walk through the fairways of life, you have to smell the roses, because you only get one round.”

“It wasn’t Augusta,” I said. “But congratulations Poppy, played well on a round.”

It’s not WHAT You think about while you go through the pearly gates to Golf Heaven, but Who.

While you walk through the Magnolia Lane with your windows down and your foot of the accelerator pedal, you are hit by the overwhelming feeling that you are being viewed. Not (necessarily) by club-free snipers or high-tech cameras, but because of the same original force that chooses a Masters champion in April before he realizes it himself. The golf gods, maybe. Or maybe someone else.

Some make the ride down Magnolia Lane filled with visions of golf quantity, some with dreams of club excavation. But at least I bet I think some, like I did, about the people who gave everything for the moment and received nothing in return.

A Tee -time at Augusta National is the journey of your life. Sometimes it’s the journey of different lives. Your village cannot witness you in the flesh, but as far as I know, there are no rules against looking in Geest.

“We set up this morning in the dressing room of the Champions,” said the supervisor at the end of Magnolia Lane and interrupted my daydream. “If my memory serves me, I think we’ve given you a good one.”

A minute later I was brought up above the holiest dressing room in Golf, where I found the first proof of my visitor-in-spirit. In the rear corner of the room I saw a plaque with my name – James Colgan – Under a plaque with someone else’s.

Ben Hogan, 1951 – 1953.

After a few minutes of Ogling, I fixed my jaw again and traveled from Hogan’s Locker to the 1st Tee Box at Augusta National. While I was walking, I wondered how many people could say in wave history that they had done the same thing.

I couldn’t feel my grip when I hit my first tee ball, but I was relieved to see it flying high and straight, perfect on the right side of the Fairway on the right side of the Fairway. When I got off the tee box, I was just relieved to hear the voice of the man who participated in the meat for my round, one New York Post Writer I had met well. His name was Mark Cannizzaro.

When we approached the green, Mark watched while I reached my pocket and carefully got a ball mark.

“Nice poker chip,” he said, looking down at the red-white piece of clay that I had placed on the well surface.

“Thank you,” I said, unable to suppress a smile. “It was my legacy.”

Mark did not notice our gallery in the clouds that day in Augusta, but I knew our gallery noticed him. That was how it had always been: we two write and papaverle reading.

As usual, we provided a lot of entertainment. I put a few nervy swings away to merge an impressive first nine, although my well performance seemed to give my caddy an ulcer. I went to the back nine to challenge a score in the Lage 80s, which actually seemed a possibility until I reached the 13th hole.

I had allowed myself a moment of quiet party when I stared at a Birdie -Putt in the 13th: somehow I had succeeded in avoiding Rae’s Creek around Amen Corner. Then I hit my putt to the hidden Sunday flag just one her Too firm, looked while the ball dripped past the hole, from the green and in the water. I laughed so hard that I almost forgot to card the double bogey.

Fortunately, my non-ZO-Tidy 87 produced at least one highlight. It arrived on the right side of the 15th Fairway, while I stared over a frightening second shot over the water. I debated about laying the bottom of the hill, as I had seen countless players all week, but then something came over me. I grabbed my hybrid.

‘Take the gamble, “ I thought loud enough that I heard myself whispering.

And I did that, so hard and as well as every shot that I hit all year round. When I made the Birdie Putt a few minutes later, my first and only with Augusta National, I left an audible smile.

That was Poppy’s favorite gap.

I spent twelve months Trying to understand how my life led to Augusta National on the morning of April 15, 2024.

I debated the metaphysical, doubted the existence of a higher power and consulted the golf gods. Each gave a compelling matter for the unknowable, but nobody felt completely good. (Although I remain intrigued by the phenomenon of ‘quantum tunnel’, where particles go through great barriers, even though they missed the classic energy to do this.)

One day it struck me. The path from a children’s dream to the Fairways of Golf Hemel was not a solo trip. It had never been. The performance was not in a Tee time, a golf course or a heavenly place, but at all times that came before. It was my gift in the literal sense, but it was a group that was much bigger than me.

It was those people who deserved this moment – those who gave everything, asked for nothing and believed when they said I could do something. Their history is my history. My Tee -time was not about placing my stamp on Golf Heaven, it was about places theirs.

The path to Augusta National does not start at the gates to Magnolia Lane, with a ticket for the masters or in a classroom. It starts with a dream that becomes a promise: to take the big swing, push the chips to the center of the table and go all-in.

I didn’t know when I arrived at Augusta National, but I certainly do that now.

I won the lottery and Golf has nothing to do with it.

You can reach the author at james.colgan@golf.com.