Some of the components of the illusion are a matter of speculation, as the club is notoriously stingy with information about itself. It is by now hardly scandalous to note that Augusta National-called the National by its members and devotees, and Augusta by everyone else-is an environment of extreme artifice, an elaborate television soundstage, a fantasia of the fifties, a Disneyclub in the Georgia pines. In 1994, Gary McCord, a golf commentator for CBS, the network that has televised the tournament for sixty-three years, said on the air, “They don’t cut the greens here at Augusta, they use bikini wax.” He was banned from the broadcast. Herbert Warren Wind, who for decades covered the sport at this magazine and at Sports Illustrated, once asked a colleague, on arriving in Augusta, “Are they firm?” The antecedent was understood. Amid all the other immodesties and peculiarities of Augusta, the greens, ultimately, are the thing.
The professionals who arrive at Augusta every April to compete in the Masters Tournament, the event for which the club is known, expect to be tested by greens that are hard and fast.
When the fans are reversed, they create a suction effect, and leach water from the greens. When the system’s fans blow one way, they provide air to the densely seeded bent grass of the putting surface. The SubAir System was developed in the nineteen-nineties, by the aptly named course superintendent Marsh Benson, in an effort to mitigate the effects of nature on this precious facsimile of it. Beneath Augusta National, the world’s most exclusive golf club and most venerated domain of cultivated grass, there is a vast network of pipes and mechanical blowers, which help drain and ventilate the putting greens.
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