If you’ve never sat in the darkness as a hurricane bears down on you, if you’ve never watched the Weather Channel hoping there’s no correspondent based anywhere near you, if you’ve never refreshed your phone and watched the wind speeds outside keep increasing … well, I don’t recommend it.
On the evening of September 27, 2024, millions from the Gulf Coast of Florida up through Georgia and Tennessee spent a sleepless night watching Hurricane Helene carve its way north. Forecasts put the storm’s route straight over Atlanta.
But late that evening, matters took a dramatic turn. Helene hit the Big Bend of Florida at an unexpectedly high speed. Like a driver taking a turn too fast, Helene skidded much farther east than expected, which put the hurricane’s fierce eastern wall directly over Augusta, Georgia. Atlanta had been preparing with many hours of warning. Augusta had none.
The result, in Augusta and later in the mountains of North Carolina — absolute, utter devastation. Biblical destruction on a massive, 250-mile-wide scale.
Six months later, abandoned homes, blue tarps, scarred lawns and uprooted tree stumps remain visible everywhere in Augusta and the surrounding areas. There are so many scars — on land, on psyches, on the people of Augusta — that will take years to heal.
But the healing has already begun, and this week is a key milestone in that long process. I spent time in Augusta last week reporting a story on the way the city and Augusta National Golf Club worked hand in hand to recover from the generational damage, and one key theme shone through. If you’ve never been, either to Augusta or to the Masters, here’s the bedrock truth: this town loves this tournament.
You don’t have to visit Augusta National to appreciate what the Masters represents. The Masters, like baseball’s Opening Day, comes along every year at the perfect time: at the end of a long winter. It’s a fitting reward for all those weeks and months spent indoors, cursing early sunsets and chilly winds.
For golf fans, this week is nirvana. This is the moment you’ve awaited all year. This is where all the outside noise falls away, where talk of breakaway leagues and multimillion-dollar purses vanishes, and we’re all living in the moment:
• Can Scottie Scheffler win a third green jacket and establish himself as one of the finest players ever to drive up Magnolia Lane?
• Can Rory McIlroy finally outrun the demons that have dogged him for more than a decade?
• Can Brooks Koepka win a sixth major and stand as one of golf’s greatest big-game hunters?
• Can Bryson DeChambeau become golf’s first true social media superstar?
• Can Jon Rahm recapture the mojo that made him one of the most fearsome players of his generation?
• Can Jordan Spieth reclaim a bit of that lost magic at the place where it all began?
• Can someone else play the best golf of their life in the biggest tournament of their life?
Hell, you don’t even have to know the difference between Scheffler and Schauffele to appreciate this week. After all, a Masters nap, with its piano undertones and gentle commentary, is the best kind of nap.
But there’s something more about the Masters that sets it apart from every other tournament, every other sporting event. Calling it “spiritual” might be a bit much, or it might not.
The finest element of the Masters is that, for a brief moment, time stops. When you’re watching it on TV, you’re watching the exact same course that Arnie, and Jack, and Tiger all conquered — the same fairways, the same greens. And when you’re inside the high hedges at Augusta National, the finest element isn’t the cheap pimento cheese sandwiches, or the souvenir gnomes, or the immaculate fairways and chalk-white sands.
No, the best part is the silence — the way you leave behind your cell phone and surrender yourself to the moment. At the Masters, people talk. People connect. It's a welcome respite from the rage-filled, anxiety-spewing phone waiting out there in the parking lot.
There’s so much more work to do in Augusta, serious and necessary and somber work. But just for this week, the town is taking a moment to pause, focus on the moment, and enjoy its greatest export to the outside world. It’s a good blueprint for all those times when the world gets to be a bit too much.
Let’s have us a fine tournament this week.
