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Attending the Masters on a Monday

Attending the Masters on a Monday

Sean Melia
April 05, 2024

April 5, 2024

An exciting announcement!

I’m teaming up with Fn3P to host a few events this summer. We’re calling it…

The Half Swing Series

We have two events locked in at some great public courses in Massachusetts.

May 30: Butter Brook GC

July 18: Crosswinds GC

The cliff notes:

$150 per person. 2-man aggregate net stroke play (find a partner or we can pair you up!)

Tee times start at 10 am.

The goal of these is to get 20 teams together to compete and have some fun and win some prizes.

Full details and sign-up here.

A Monday at The Masters

Sometimes you just have to know the right people. In 2018, a college buddy won The Masters lottery. It was the first year a group of us made a promise that if one of us wins the ticket lottery, then we all win the lottery.

Beginners luck, indeed.

At the time, I was a teacher with two personal days in my holster for the entire year, but I couldn’t use them consecutively. The Monday Masters ticket was of the days I could make it work. Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday would have left me in the lurch.

Over the months we giddily planned how we were going to take advantage of this rare opportunity.

We’d fly to Columbia, SC on Friday, play golf on Saturday and Sunday, and then head to Augusta on Monday.

Now, a Monday ticket might seem like the worst of the week. Few golfers arrive on Monday, so the course is pretty empty. That was fine with us. We wanted to see the course, the players were a bonus.

Our Friday arrival was staggered, as we were coming from a few different parts of the country. I was the final piece of the puzzle, and I directed my cabbie to take me directly to the bar where the other three guys gathered. It was the type of bar that, if I had inspected it further, might have had a mechanical bull in the back. It was loud with noise and neon; bartenders wandered around with vials of booze. A cold domestic beer was placed in my hand quickly.

The weekend had begun.

Needless to say, four “yanks” in their 30s at this establishment stuck out like a brown patch of grass on Augusta’s 12th tee box.

A young couple approached us and started scream-talking to us, not out of aggression but out of necessity. We never got the guy’s name, but we nicknamed him “Chad” or “Brad” or some fratty name that fit him like a glove.

We discovered that Chad was attending the Masters on Monday as well, and he encouraged us to meet him at a specific location at a specific time.

We did not take him up on the offer.

I was able to go straight to the bar because I had entrusted my clubs with Shipsticks. The convenient way to travel!

Not…

According to the shipping update, my clubs were chilling in North Carolina on Friday.

It didn’t seem like my clubs were going to make it. It was one of the few golf trips where it didn’t really matter.

There’s nothing quite like renting clubs from courses that are ill-equipped to rent clubs. A set of Strata clubs was produced from the back room at one course that we’d be playing twice that weekend. Regular shafts and a bent putter made a hard game even harder, but it didn’t really matter. The golf was a bonus compared to Monday’s date with Augusta National.

One golf trip tip: You’re going to want to play too much golf. Find a game that can limit the stress on your body. We played a great 2-man scramble and rotated teams every six holes. Each player tallied how many holes they won over the 18. It was a good time.

On Monday morning, we met in the hotel lobby ready for the day like kids at the top of the stairs on Christmas.

Arriving at Augusta National is an odd sensation. You park for free and follow a long road before reaching the ticket gate. Having watched so many Masters tournaments on TV, it feels like you’ve stepped into Universal Studios. It doesn’t feel real. The cleanliness and efficiency give off Disney World energy - smiling employees, short lines, and a sense of wonder.

The prices are unlike Disney World, though. Everything you can eat or drink is cheap, like “When I was your age, I could see a film for a nickel” cheap.

After ransacking the merchandise tent (NOT cheap…), we decided to walk the course backward. A bonus of going for a practice round is they allow patrons to bring cameras, no phones are allowed. Once Thursday starts, no phones or cameras are allowed. So I was able to take photos along the way.

As we walked, we began to run into players practicing on Amen Corner. Bubba Watson was out hitting chip shots on 11. We found Bay Stater Matt Parziale playing a practice round with Rory McIlroy. Parziale won the 2017 U.S. Mid-Amateur to earn his spot in the field, an incredible accomplishment. Matt, one of the guys with me on the trip, plays with him at Thory Lea, which made it even more memorable. Parziale made headlines as the firefighter from Brockton. Later in the week, he’d tee it up with Tiger Woods in another practice round.

We followed “Parz” for a bit and then made our way to 16, which has a cool tradition of guys skipping shots across the water on the par-3.

The entire time, the four of us kept having small “pinch me” moments. Whether it was biting into a pimento cheese sandwich for the first time, taking in the 12th hole, or thinking we’d seen Peyton Manning wandering around with some Green Jackets. It wasn’t him, but that’s the kind of headspace we were in. It seemed completely normal that Peyton Manning would be wandering around Augusta National. What else would he do?

As the day wore on, we began to check our watches because we all had flights that night. Work beckoned on Tuesday morning.

Augusta National had one last treat for us. There was a buzz that Tiger Woods was on the property and might make it out on the course.

Tiger is famous for playing practice rounds outrageously early. If Bridgestone could make a reliable glow-in-the-dark ball, he might get his reps in at 3 am. So to see Tiger Woods sauntering down the second fairway as we made our way across the course and back to our car was that last bit of Augusta magic because he had not played in the Masters since 2015, missing the ‘16 and ‘17 editions with back problems.

Little did we know, 52 weeks later, Woods would win The Masters.

As we stuffed our luggage with oodles of goodies from the merchandise tent, which is not a tent at all, we tried to process the last three days. From loud bars, to 63 holes of golf, to drinking too much, to meeting Chad, to waking up before the sun on Monday like children on Christmas, we had reached the “time to clean up the wrapping paper” segment of the experience.

There’s an email I typed up on the plane that night that captured as much as I could from the weekend, and it resurfaces each year around this time.

That’s what a Monday at The Masters can conjure up. I have no idea if I’ll ever return, but I know as long as I’m able to, I’ll put my name in the ticket lottery and hope the ghost of Bobby Jones is on my side.

Brian, Pat, Matt, and me at Augusta National

Double Click(s)

I’m going to use this section to “Double Click” on something I discovered or thought about this week.

12.3 million people watched Iowa and LSU play basketball on Saturday night. I was one of them; it was riveting, and excellent, basketball. The Celtics were playing the Hornets at the same time, and I had no interest in watching that game. The Caitlin Clark effect is incredible. As a friend texted on Saturday night, “Caitlin Clark is outrageous.”
Women’s college hoops is having a moment; that much is clear. As a golf fan, I am seeing some of what occurred with Tiger Woods play out with Caitlin Clark. Sometimes, a player can transcend the sport and help it grow quickly. I am curious to see what happens next season when Clark and Angel Reese leave for the WNBA. Who knows what redshirt junior UConn’s Paige Bueckers will do. We know first year JuJu Watson at USC is awesome. Clark is a comet (or Solar Eclipse?) that has attracted millions of people to look up at the sky. Some will follow her to the WNBA, but I wonder how many people will now pay attention to women’s college hoops on a regular basis and how the NIL might impact what players believe they are worth.
Golf Digest dives into the history of the 11th hole. It’s a great example of how distance has impacted a course with endless money. And they’ve run out of space, and they’re adding trees.

Speaking of distance, Bryson Dechambeau, the pro golfer and amateur scientist, does a rather unscientific experiment that became an advertisement for the golf ball rollback. It’s worth watching. I couldn’t help but be transfixed on the video because the content was awesome. Nine holes with a top 20 golfer in the world talking through shots? Yes, fucking, please. Why can’t the PGA Tour ask one player every week to film something like this on the back nine of that week’s tournament. Maybe let them skip the pro-am on Wednesday. Produce the content for two uses. First, post a 45 min. video on Youtube. Second, use it on the broadcast in small bits. Is the 15th tee shot hard? Let’s listen to Adam Scott talk through how he might play it AND hit a shot. Kudos to Bryson for the idea. Would love to see 5, 10, and 20 handicaps go through the same experiment with a rolled back ball. I’d love to see players play 9 holes with a rolled back ball and 9 holes with a modern ball. But they don’t know which ball is which.

Rory McIlroy is everywhere… He joined Morgan Hoffmann and Jeg Coughlin III for 100 minutes to talk about life, golf, mushrooms, and more on the I Can Fly Fly Podcast.

When I’m not golfing…

I’m reading…

MLB uniforms are a total mess. Mismatched colors, sweat stains, unhappy players. Good times!
How 19,000 Jaromir Jagr bobbleheads were stolen and returned to Pittsburgh: ‘It’s like an Onion article’ The Athletic goes deep on this hilarious heist. Worth the read.

I’m listening to…

Days are Gone by Haim is always a good listen.
Vampire Weekend’s new album, Only God was Above Us, came out on Friday.

I’m drinking…

It’s been very quiet on the booze front. However, I have found myself enjoying a root beer if I’m out. It’s kind of nice to order something at a bar or restaurant and still say the word beer but get a sugar high instead of a buzz.

I’m eating…

Tiff made strawberry ice cream this weekend for Easter. It made it feel like summer... and then it rained and sleeted all week…
Went to AB Kitchen across from TDGarden this week before the Cs v. Thunder game. Had a delightful burger and sweet potato fries.

I’m watching…

Really enjoyed watching the first two rounds of the Augusta National Women’s Amateur. I’d encourage you to watch the final round on Saturday. Golf Channel will have it starting at noon.
With every passing episode, I love The Gentlemen more and more. We’re moving through it slowly because every episode feels like a round with Mike Tyson. Heavy punches and high intensity.
This quad-box video of every shot Jon Rahm hit in the 2023 Masters is awesome.