Once a pleasure, Masters becoming just another major job

A mystery unfolding | Old guard fading out | Fit to be Thai | Lehman's car shot | Notes

The Masters sells soft drinks in cups without commercial logos. The Masters sells us on the idea golf is not a long walk spoiled but a trek through the azalea bushes and dogwood trees and acres of nostalgia. The Masters then is not what it seems to be.

Tiger Woods isn't thrilled with all the changes to Augusta National. (AP)

You've heard it before, that perception is reality, and so it must be with the yearly event at Augusta National, a golf tournament so ingrained in the minds of the public and the lore of sport that scalpers can get $250 a ticket -- for a practice round.

The Masters is a place where if your name isn't Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Vijay Singh or Chris DiMarco, you don't have much of a chance. And maybe since DiMarco has led going into the final round twice and never won, you could argue neither does he have much of a chance.

In another era, it wasn't much different, only the names then were Arnie, Jack and Gary and later Tom, as in Watson. Now and then an outsider slipped through, but mainly it belonged to the stars, particularly the stars who could hit a ball a mile and putt on greens as slick as a con man's come-on, as well as huge and rolling.

The idea in any sporting championship is to test the best. The question from the people at Augusta, mainly the guy in charge of practically everything except the thunderstorms, Hootie Johnson, was whether that indeed was taking place. His virtual answer is that it wasn't.

Hootie decided major alterations were required for the first of the year's major golf tournaments. Either the golf balls played too long or Augusta National wasn't long enough. And because the ball and the club technology that send the ball great distances are beyond Hootie's domain, he has chosen to extend the course. Practically beyond recognition.

If Peyton Manning throws four touchdown passes, is there a hue and cry to make him play on a field that covers 200 yards? If Albert Pujols has a three-home run game, do we raise the height of the fences 40 feet?

Golf, for better or worse, has this hangup on what is called purity. When Bobby Jones and Alistair Mackenzie built Augusta National back there in the early 1930s, there weren't a lot of people -- actually there were no people -- using titanium drivers or working out in the weight room. Holes were designed for the clubs and balls of the day. It wasn't planned obsolesce, but apparently it has become that.

For this year's Masters, 15 yards have been added to the par-4 11th hole, the one that ends with a green alongside a pond, the one that is considered the start of the triangle of holes known by the charming label "Amen Corner."

Fifteen yards and a row trees planted to the right of the fairway so nobody is allowed play the safe shot. That's after 35 yards were added in 2002. And what for years was a hole around 455 yards has been turned into a monster of 505 yards.

What for the "average golfer" would be a par-5.

"The hole was intended to be played with, according to Bobby Jones, a 3-iron or stronger club," Hootie informed us. "I'm sure you remember, I think it was in the '98 tournament .. Phil Mickelson hit a big driver and a pitching wedge to the green.

"I believe (Ben) Hogan was quoted, 'If you ever see me on that green (in two), you'll know I missed my shot. Well, if Hogan was hitting a damn pitching wedge, he wouldn't have been to the right of the green, he'd been within three feet of the cup."

Hootie, a one-time fullback at South Carolina, was the voice of rigidity in 2003 when that vixen of a feminist Martha Burk insisted Augusta National accept a female member. You know how that debate finished. With Martha fading into oblivion.

Which may be what happens with any happiness once derived from playing in the Masters.

A long while ago, a pro named Tony Lema, who won a British Open and then perished in a light plane crash, said something like, "The Masters is fun. The U.S. Open is work."

With the revisions of Augusta, there must be a revision to the observation.

"Holes that start with a 5 and say par-4," mused Colin Montgomerie, the Scot, "are generally the problem."

As are holes that start with a 2 and are par-3s, such as the fourth hole that was pushed from 205 yards in 2005 to 240 in 2006.

"I didn't think you needed to mess with No. 4," said Woods, the defending champion. "I thought it was one of the cool ones the way it was. I never hit lumber (a wood, really a metal wood) into four before. That's different."

That's the Masters, where they're doing whatever possible to take the enjoyment out of golf.