The 2025 Masters is the first great soporific sports event at the end of globalization. Northern Ireland's Rory McIlroy and Noah Kent of the U.S. on the 16th hole during a practice round on April 8.Mike Segar/Reuters
When times are good, people are full of ideas about why they’re nowhere near good enough, and how they could be better.
But when the times grow dark, everyone digs out their cultural security blanket. So here comes the Masters.
The unofficial beginning of spring kicks off Thursday in Georgia. The big story coming out of this year’s iteration is nothing. There is no big story.
Nobody’s proposing to do anything wild. Nobody cares that the Saudis have a golf league. Nobody wants to hear about Augusta National vis a vis elitism.
What people want is long tracking shots of magnolias, Jim Nantz saying “pine straw” a lot and that branded muzak CBS plays on the intros and outros. If I hear that music after a car accident, I will know I am dead.
The vanguard-of-the-revolution age of sports is over. The balm-in-trying-times era is beginning. The 2025 Masters is the first great soporific sports event at the end of globalization.
I’ve visited many modern temples, and none compares to Augusta National. It is to the 21st century what St. Peter’s was to the 16th or the Blue Mosque to the 17th – an example of what unlimited money and power can build.
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Once, I walked onto the close-cropped grass that borders the field of play with a colleague who was there for the first time. He stopped, hopped up and down a little, and said, “This is turf, right?”
The grass there is so perfect, so uniform, so springy and so brilliantly green that he could not accept it as real, though it is.
A little bit of money lets you fake it. An absolute ton of money makes it so you don’t have to bother.
This excess bothers some people, but right now, it’s comforting. We are in the midst of tearing down many beautiful things, not all of them tangible, so it’s nice to be reminded that some will still exist. How they got here is no longer top of mind.
Who’s going to win this year? Do you actually care? The Masters isn’t a sack race. It’s four days of pretending your problems don’t exist. It’s ASMR before it was cool. It’s the one Sunday of the year that even your mom couldn’t guilt you off the couch.
Tiger Woods won’t be there. He’s hurt again. Not to speak ill of the guy, but it’s kind of nice to have one of these without him. That way we won’t be forced to listen to the broadcasters wishing the ball into the hole every time he chips out of a bunker.
Woods is more than over-the-hill now. He’s a reminder of a very different time, back when our biggest problem was that maybe the clock on our computer might stop working as the new year ticked over. Plus, he’s gold-digging into the extended family that started the mess we’re in. Soon, he could be our enemy by marriage.
In terms of front runners, it’s the usuals. Scottie Scheffler, Rory McIlroy and Jon Rahm are the favourites.
Many neutrals will be pulling for McIlroy, because in tough times the underdog is even more appealing. If he can finally do it, maybe you can too. As long as the thing you want to do isn’t retire in the next year.
The most highly rated Canadian is Corey Conners, who comes in at 70-to-1 odds. Taylor Pendrith, Nick Taylor and Mike Weir are also in the field.
It would be perfect if one of us won at Donald Trump’s game right now. So perfect, you don’t want to risk thinking about it. You absolutely do not want to talk about it, at least until the sun is over the yard arm on Sunday and it’s still happening.
The Masters has always managed to seem as if it exists outside the marketplace. Every other event gets noisier, and it gets quieter.
Famously, the tournament has only a handful of sponsors. This is why you come out the other end brainwashed into believing you must drive a Mercedes and have a life managed by IBM.
The ads are almost subtle, which is not a word that leaps to mind whenever you’re being brained for the thousandth time about “responsible betting” during a hockey broadcast.
They don’t start broadcasting until noon most days, but you can follow online from 7:30 a.m. on Thursday.
This year, the tournament’s honorary starters are Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson. Between them, they’ve lived through nearly 20 crashes and recessions, and they look great. Hope for us all.
The honorary start sets the tone – dim light, unrushed, muted tones. Even the clapping is low key. The point isn’t getting to the end, like every other sporting event. It isn’t the money, or even the glory, since all of that accrues to only one person in the end.
The point is making these four days last as long as possible. Usually, that has something to do with summer. The Masters signals that it is imminent. Wimbledon tells you that it has arrived. The U.S. Open announces that it is ending. These three tournaments will always thrive because they are not only commercial. They are also circadian.
The Masters is the most lovely of them, because it comes at the beginning. It’s the Thursday night of sports tournaments – the night of the week that holds the greatest possibility, since it is followed by the longest possible recovery period.
It’s running into people you haven’t seen in a while on a day you have nothing else to do. It’s staring out the window on a lovely day while lying in bed.
The Masters is lolling about in sublime anticipation of nothing. It’s bliss.
Everybody needs a little of that every year. It’s been a while since it’s felt like we’ve needed it more.