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4-02-09
BOOKS
Written By John Andrisani
The premise is spot on. Everyone remembers his or her first glimpse of the most storied golf course in America. Seve Ballesteros said it was a course that made him feel as if he were in a ring with a bull.”
Another first-timer spent two days looking for a single weed, and could not find one. And more than one visitor discovered the members’ wine cellar was perhaps the best in the country.
Then again, the irrepressible John Daly declared that Augusta could only be improved by adding ashtrays.
The surprising thing is that Andrisani included that last one. His fawning treatment of Augusta is less reverential than it is blasphemous. Walking the course for the first time he “felt the same sense of being tied to a higher power than I felt when I walked into
Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris,” he wrote at one point, and later that every tree and shrub “seemed saintly, like apostles. (At Augusta) I felt a surge of warm energy run through my body, as I suspect I will when entering the early gates of heaven and standing before God.”
I’ve been to Augusta, twice in fact, and remember both experiences as beyond special. But I’m not going to call down lightning strikes by likening a magnolia bush to the Apostle Paul.
–Dennis McCann
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