Masters’ Schwag

Donna and I don’t golf. We really don’t even like the sport. The only thing we do like about it, is one day we might live on a golf course (just so we have some­one else take care of our back­yard.) We don’t fol­low golf except for one lit­tle tour­na­ment, for four days dur­ing the first week in April the TV is tuned to cov­er­age of the Masters.

We moved to Aiken in May of 1989 and in the spring of the fol­low­ing year we attended a Mas­ters’ prac­tice round. In those days prac­tice round tick­ets were unlim­ited, you walked up to the gate on Mon­day, Tues­day or Wednes­day and $5 got you in. This went on for 2 or 3 years and in an attempt to mel­low out the rowdy Par 3 crowd and reduce the traf­fic sur­round­ing the course the Mas­ters orga­ni­za­tion decided to limit the atten­dance each day to some super-secret num­ber. The use a lot­tery sys­tem to dole out the tick­ets, Donna and I got tick­ets for the next two years and have been shut-out ever since.

In one of those first vis­its I bought a really nice ball cap. A per­fectly shaped brushed twill that had a dark green body and a navy bill with the word Mas­ters in script embroi­dered in white on it. I wore that thing out. Well fig­u­ra­tively at least. Every year I hope anx­iously that we will get an invite to the ball, so I can get a new hat and every year the wicked step mom denies us.

There is a lit­tle gift shop by the main gate that you can buy offi­cial mer­chan­dise at, but there is a very lim­ited selec­tion of stuff to choose from. I’ve been hold­ing out on get­ting an exact replace­ment, so I left that option off the table, until now. This morn­ing I could stand it no longer. Donna and I drove over to Augusta, parked about a mile from the National in a Kroger park­ing lot and walked over to buy me a hat.

The selec­tion was so small I almost didn’t want to buy any of the avail­able hats. But, we came all this way, so I grabbed a black ball cap with a small Mas­ters’ logo in yel­low and a tiny lit­tle green embroi­dered “Mas­ters.” It won’t become the hat that sits on my head every time I leave the house, but it will make it into heavy rotation.