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      The Roar of the Crowd Returns

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      AUGUSTA, Ga. — The roars were absent or diminished for two Masters Tournaments, so many spectators kept away because of the pandemic.But Augusta National Golf Club’s gates have swung open once again for the wealthy masses to convene along the course. For all that has changed just about everywhere else, not so much has at Augusta. Of course it hasn’t: This is tradition-bound Augusta, for better or for worse.And so the Masters is, as ever, a sporting event with the (sometimes vanishing) sensibilities of a garden party, the rarefied attendance of an elite fraternity gathering and a golf spectacle equaled by few places.Pairing sheets, free to anyone who perhaps paid thousands of dollars for a general admission pass, rustle. Ice cubes clink in plastic cups, and sandwich wrappers crinkle. Balls catapult off driver heads, setting up shots and, in the meantime, anodyne commentaries to no one in particular. There are nervous laughs, urgent shouts and communal ducking and shoulder-clenching when a shot goes astray and lands on the crossway of an entirely different hole.There are no cellphones, no remote doorbell chimes, no one squawking on a conference call that you, too, have wound up joining. But there is, at last, noise.“They just live and die with your success or failure,” Tommy Aaron, the 1973 Masters winner, said of the spectators in 2020.And they and their exclamations are back. A cheer someplace prompts heads to snap around, the volume and direction suggesting what might have made one man’s day and ruined another’s.The roars have been building all week. Headed into the final day, surely the safest bet at Augusta is that Sunday will elicit the greatest ones of all.Spectators leaving the golf course after the horns sounded to alert that lightning was in the area and play had been suspended during practice rounds on Wednesday.Cellphones are not allowed on the course, but the Masters provides free phones for patrons away from the action.Patrons posed outside the clubhouse dining area.The concession area during a practice round. While some prices have gone up slightly this year, it is stilll pretty cheap to eat and drink at Augusta National.Fans following a shot hit on the the 13th fairway in the second round.A young boy watching the golfers on the practice green.The crowd watching Bryson DeChambeau hitting from the tee on the third hole during the first round. More

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      At the Masters, Tiger Woods Will Take Some Ice With That

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      In Woods’s improbable quest for a sixth green jacket, his recuperation regimen may be more important than any read of any green.AUGUSTA, Ga. — Tiger Woods stood in the glorious sunlight of a Georgia spring one afternoon this past week, a lingering dose of warmth before the frigid, hellish hours ahead.“Lots of treatments, lots of ice, lots of ice baths, just basically freezing myself to death,” Woods said of his plans before his next tee shot at Augusta National Golf Club. “That’s just part of the deal.”Rare is the athlete whose medical history has been more scrutinized and documented — by doctors, as well as by plenty of armchair experts in tournament galleries, living rooms and the news media — over the decades. But with Woods pursuing his sixth Masters Tournament title not even 14 months after a car wreck made a leg amputation a possibility, the 46-year-old golfer’s recuperation regimen may be more important than any read of any green.“If he can walk around here in 72 holes, he’ll contend,” said Fred Couples, the 1992 Masters winner who practiced with Woods before the tournament opened on Thursday. “He’s too good. He’s too good.”Couples was perhaps overly optimistic when he spoke on Monday. Woods shot a spectacular 71 on Thursday and a 74 on Friday to put his score at one over par headed into the weekend. Taken together, the rounds, up and down as they were, were remarkable showings of the ferocity and grit that helped Woods to dominate his sport for years. But those pre-cut outings were expected to be the least taxing.Woods spoke throughout the week about how he had little concern for his golfing skill, even as he openly worried about the wear and tear on a body that had its easiest days long ago.So he and his team must spend the hours between rounds trying to achieve dueling ambitions: reducing the swelling that comes with traipsing around the topographical nightmare that is Augusta, and keeping Woods’s surgically rebuilt limb “mobile and warmed up, activated and explosive for the next day,” as he put it.“Most sports, if you’re not feeling very good, you got a teammate to pass it off to, and they can kind of shoulder the load, or in football, one day a week,” Woods said. “Here we’ve got four straight days, and there’s no one that’s going to shoulder the load besides me. I’ve got to figure out a way to do it.”Woods stretches his injured right leg as he waits to tee off on the 8th hole.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAccording to Woods, he has not taken a day off from his rehabilitation efforts since he emerged from the three months in bed that followed his one-car wreck near Los Angeles in February 2021. The crash left him with open fractures of the tibia and the fibula in his right leg, and it led surgeons to add rods, plates and screws to his leg.The subsequent recovery has required trade-offs and gambles and, in something that is not new for Woods, unshakable confidence in his own talents, thrown off as they might be.Some changes appear somewhat easier to accept than others, like new shoes to help with stability on the course. But experts have also developed protocols for before and after rounds — “after I go ahead and break it out there, they go ahead and repair it at night,” Woods said on Friday — that have dramatically expanded the timeline that comes with playing.Those approaches, which may stretch for hours, have left Woods with less time for, say, hitting a thousand balls a day and refining, again, the nuances of his game.“It gets agonizing and teasing because of simple things that I would normally just go do that would take now a couple hours here and a couple hours there to prep and then wind down,” he said. “So, activity time, to do what I want to do, it adds more time on both sides of it.”The goal, he has said, was to build up the stamina that powered him and every other winner at Augusta, to give enough relief to make competitive golf more of a possibility than a pipe dream.But the strategies can only dull, not extinguish, the pain, which Woods said is present “each and every day.”He insists, though, that pain is not a problem. By his account, he did not have any unexpected physical setbacks in his first days back at Augusta.The question for Woods — and for everyone else left standing in the field at Augusta — is how long a leg already refashioned can hold up under such protracted duress. The course, lengthened this year, now stands at 7,510 yards, the longest in the history of the tournament, which was first played in 1934. Woods’s predictions have only gone so far.“I expected to be sore and not feel my best, for sure,” Woods said on Friday. “It’s the combination. I can walk this golf course — I can put on tennis shoes and go for a walk, that’s not a problem. But going ballistically at shots and hitting shot shapes off of uneven lies, that puts a whole new challenge to it.”He soon trudged off, presumably for another night of ice. More

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      With Son as Caddie, Stewart Cink Gets a Hole in One

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      Cink sank the 24th hole in one on No. 16 in Masters history. He would have rather made the cut.AUGUSTA, Ga. — Stewart Cink knew the shot had a chance, the way so many shots seem to on No. 16 at Augusta National Golf Club. So did his youngest son, Reagan, who was his caddie for the Masters Tournament.The ball thunked onto the green, commencing a leisurely, 11-second roll before it fell into the cup for Cink’s first hole in one in 20 appearances at the Masters. Cink, who had wielded an 8-iron, raised his arms and embraced his son. A double high-five followed.“Happy birthday,” Stewart Cink told his son, who turned 25 on Friday, Reagan Cink recalled in an interview later. “It’s a pretty good present.”The marquee shot hardly redeemed Stewart Cink’s frustrating week at Augusta, where he missed the cut after scoring a 76 on Thursday and one shot better on Friday, leaving him at seven over par. But the shot was a bit of a balm.The setting was familiar for hole in one aficionados: With Cink’s shot, No. 16 has now been the site of 24 such successes over the history of the tournament, which was first played in 1934. No Augusta hole has surrendered more.Known as Redbud, the par-3 hole runs just 170 yards, making it the second-shortest at Augusta. Players strike the ball over the water to a green where three bunkers lurk nearby.“The way I do things with my approach shot, I don’t just try to hit a number — I try to hit a zone of numbers, usually like seven to 10 yards of space,” Cink, whose best finish at the Masters was a tie for third in 2008, said after his round. “On that one, I knew to push it a little further back because that bank brings the ball not only left but also back toward the tee. So that extra couple yards is exactly where it landed, and it hit my spot. It was the exact right curve, perfect contact.”Like his father, Reagan Cink said he thought the shot could find the cup. With his father still hoping to make the cut after finding the water at No. 15, Reagan Cink tried to keep his ambitions in check as the ball made its way toward the pin.“When you think it’s going,” he said, “then it pretty much never does.”True enough. But that did not stop his British Open-winning father from expecting the ball to wind up in the cup.“Usually a lot of times anyway, you hear it was kind of a mis-hit or whatever,” Stewart Cink, 48, said. “This was not a mis-hit. This was exactly the way I would have drawn it up. It was like a dream shot.”And as he watched the ball travel, the spectators sitting close by became a giveaway about its trajectory on the green.“They knew it was in, and they all got up,” he said. “When they got up, I knew it wasn’t missing.”No. 16 has seen a burst of hole-in-one activity in recent years, with nine golfers now having aced it since 2016.“It’s very special,” Tommy Fleetwood said after he holed a tee shot on No. 16 last year. “Doing it at a major is great, doing it competitively is great, but at Augusta is probably just another edge.”But Cink, who had been playing exceptional golf recently, would have sacrificed the triumph for a chance to play on Saturday and Sunday.“I’d throw the hole in one ball right in the water if I could make the cut and compete for two more rounds, but I’m missing the cut,” he said. “That stings more than the hole in one. It doesn’t boost my spirits like missing the cut hurts my spirits. I absolutely loathe not playing here on the weekend, and it hurts.”The shot, though, did make for an easy birthday present for Reagan.He got to keep the ball. More

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      Playing the Masters Is Different With Tiger Woods in Your Group

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      “It’s way different when you play with Tiger,” Stewart Cink said. Often, it’s hard to hear a thing.AUGUSTA, Ga. — Joaquín Niemann could not hear his caddie.He had made another Masters Tournament. He had navigated the thicket of spectators. Now, as the 23-year-old Chilean stood at Augusta National Golf Club’s first tee on Thursday, Gary Matthews, who was carrying Niemann’s bag, may as well have been anyplace else.Such is life playing alongside Tiger Woods.It was only weeks ago that Woods, whose doctors weighed amputating his leg after a car wreck last year, seemed certain to miss the Masters. But his decision to play in the tournament, his first professional competition since November 2020, instantly transformed how spectators would follow the action — and any player accompanying the five-time Masters winner at Augusta National.Woods’s presence in a pairing or group has long defined the playing environment around his slice of just about any tournament, with his fans, and quite often just the curious, offering up a barrage of cheers, commentary, cameras, bustle and scrutiny. The spotlight, it seems, only barely tilts away from him, if it does at all.And so the chaos, or whatever counts for chaos on a golf course, can make Fred Couples — a Masters champion, once the world’s top-rated golfer and a hero to baby boomer duffers — look more like an afterthought than a leading man. It can render Stewart Cink, a British Open champion and one of the finest golfers of his era, a merely thrilling bonus, or Francesco Molinari, also a British Open winner, something less than a pairing’s marquee name.“It’s way different when you play with Tiger anywhere, and Augusta National is no different,” said Cink, who has often had an up-close view of Woods at the Masters, and who had a hole in one on No. 16 on Friday.At times, Joaquín Niemann struggled to hear his caddie because of the crowd.Doug Mills/The New York TimesWoods, who earned the first of his Masters green jackets 25 years ago, has long commanded one of the largest Augusta galleries, with some other champions certain that a “Tiger roar” through the pines simply sounds different than cheering for other players. And with Phil Mickelson, one of Woods’s rivals for attention and affection, absent from this year’s Masters, Woods is even more the player with the greatest following around Augusta this week.The frenzy of this particularly intense week began well before Niemann, Woods and Louis Oosthuizen found themselves peering down the 445-yard No. 1 on Thursday. Couples, who played in his 37th Masters this week, joined Woods for a pair of practice rounds and was left agog on Monday, the first day the course was open to spectators.“I’ve never seen anything like it,” he marveled. Couples said he found a way to get to the tee where Woods’s fans “were only four deep.”He added, “They wanted to see the big guy, and they saw him, and they saw good golf. He gets that here all the time.”But frequency does not necessarily make the scenario easier for others pursuing their own ambitions.“The biggest thing is just the energy in the crowd and the intensity of the reactions and the scrambling for position,” said Cink, whose best finish at Augusta was a tie for third in 2008. “There’s a lot of movement out there.”Cink said that Woods had routinely tried to keep it a fair fight by allowing others to finish playing a hole before he did, keeping the crowd in place just a little while longer.“When you play with him, it’s busy, it’s noisy,” said Molinari, who won the 2018 British Open at Carnoustie when he was paired with Woods and, the next year, played with Woods on Sunday at Augusta. “I don’t think it makes a big difference if it’s here or somewhere else.”Woods, mighty as he is, has only so much control.Woods chatting with Oosthuizen, left, and Niemann on the 8th tee.Doug Mills/The New York TimesOn Thursday, the spectators began to amass around the first tee box long before Woods emerged from the clubhouse to start his tournament. A drone flew overhead. At least one man shouted “let’s go Tiger!” at least twice, though it was hard to tell in a crowd that seemed about 25-deep in places so people could see Woods (or maybe just the top of his cap) as he took his first shot.Niemann and Oosthuizen received polite, restrained welcomes from the crowd, which started to break up as soon as Woods, who hit first, finished swinging his driver, all the better to get a head start down the fairway or to the second green, to see Woods again.The din quieted enough on later holes that Niemann said he could, in the end, hear Matthews as he played his way to a three-under-par 69. He said he had even come to find pleasure in the enormous crowds.“They were always telling me to make sure you try to finish before Tiger, that way the people don’t start moving,” Niemann said. “But they were really respectful, so it was an enjoyable round.”Daniel Berger suggested that a worse fate than being paired with Woods was playing just in front of him.“If you are one or two ahead of him, then it’s always a struggle with people trying to run up to see him,” said Berger, who debuted at the Masters in 2016.Padraig Harrington, another British Open winner who has played with Woods, had a similar assessment.“It’s very difficult if you’re the group ahead of him,” he said. “It’s very, very difficult because the crowds are watching him and they’re moving on to see him. When you’re playing with him 20 deep, you can’t hear a thing because there’s so much going on.”But Harrington, who has won two Opens and a PGA Championship, had no complaints about life with Woods as a playing partner.“He’s actually one of the easiest guys to play with over the years,” he said. “He’s a very simple guy to play with. He plays golf. He says ‘good shot’ only when you hit a good shot. There is no messing around, no rubbish about it.”Woods and Fred Couples bumping fists during a practice round on Monday.Doug Mills/The New York TimesPractice rounds are, of course, less pressurized, and Couples, who has long been close to Woods and is now in the twilight of his career, signaled that he sometimes plays the court jester. It appeared that way this week when Woods played with Couples, who won at Augusta in 1992, and Justin Thomas, who was born the next year and was 3-years-old when Woods first won the Masters.“I like to tell them stories, but usually on the tees it’s very quiet and I let them do their thing, and as soon as we step down the fairway there will be a story about this guy or that guy or me or Tiger,” Couples, who said that Woods and Thomas make him hit last, recalled this week. “Then we laugh until we get to a ball.”The crowds are always thick, and always watching, and always bouncing. But Couples said there is a benefit of playing with Woods and Thomas, all of the theatrics and distractions aside.“It’s nice because they only want to play nine holes,” Couples, 62, said. “I am great with nine holes.” More

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      At Masters, Tiger Woods Shows Flashes of Greatness and Signs of Struggle

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      AUGUSTA, Ga. — The sun emerged through a narrow opening in a cloud-filled sky as Tiger Woods approached the first tee on Thursday at the Masters Tournament. It cast the area in a kind of glow. But the spotlight was not needed.It already felt like every eye on the grounds at Augusta National Golf Club — as well as millions of others watching around the world — had turned toward Woods, who was making an improbable return to elite golf 408 days after a horrific, potentially life-threatening single-vehicle car crash.Roughly five hours later, Woods marched up the 18th fairway to resounding applause, not only an acknowledgment of his successful return to competitive golf, but also recognition that he had done so at a more-than-commendable level.In his first professional round in 17 months, Woods shot a gritty, plucky one-under-par 71 with three birdies and two bogeys. To be sure, he looked rusty, and many of his usually dependable iron shots came up short of easily reachable greens. He was erratic off the tee with his driver and played Augusta National’s par 3s in two under and the par 5s in even par, the reverse of his usual pattern.But Woods’s putting, always his greatest strength, repeatedly saved him. He left the 18th hole with a far wider smile than the somewhat timid one he had briefly flashed on the first hole.Afterward, Woods was thankful, and his usual competitive self. He was already looking forward to moving up the leaderboard as the tournament continued.“I’m right where I need to be,” Woods, who was tied for 10th, said of his position (Sungjae Im led the field on Thursday with a five-under 67). Of the thousands of fans who flocked to every hole he played, he said: “The place was electric. I’m very lucky to have this opportunity to be able to play and to have this type of reception.”While Woods indeed looked a bit out of practice at times, he seemed hardy enough to withstand the duress of walking up and down Augusta National’s many hills. There were, however, signs that he was making concessions to his surgically rebuilt right leg and foot, which now has a rod, plates and screws holding it together. He rarely, for example, squatted behind his golf ball as he once did to read putts close to the level of the playing surface.Woods, on No. 15, at Augusta National.Doug Mills/The New York TimesOn the ninth hole, as Woods left the tee, he noticeably winced as his right leg appeared to land awkwardly. He grimaced through each of the next several steps. While Woods regained a steadier stride thereafter, he limped more and more as the day went on.“The walking is not easy; it’s difficult,” he said. “It’s going to be difficult for the rest of my life. That’s just the way it is, but I’m able to do it.”Not one to accept a partial victory, Woods nonetheless conceded that just being at Augusta National and completing 18 holes was triumph enough. Asked why, he said: “If you would have seen how my leg looked to where it’s at now — to get from there to here, it was no easy task.”Woods began his day with a confident march onto the first tee, where he was met with enthusiastic cheers. After tipping his cap, he hammered a drive toward the first fairway. But his approach shot, like many he struck on Thursday, came up short. After a mediocre pitch onto the green, Woods faced the kind of putt no golfer appreciates on the first green — a slippery, breaking 12-footer. But he sank it for par, and the gallery around the green let out a roar.He was not as sharp on the par-5 second hole, which had typically been a place where Woods could almost count on a birdie, if not an eagle. But an inferior tee shot led to a bailout, an unexceptional chip and a two-putt par. Three more pars ensued as Woods settled into a comfortable rhythm. Then, hitting from an elevated tee on the par-3 sixth hole, Woods artfully powered his tee shot high into the air. A few long seconds later, it dropped onto the green and came to a quick stop roughly 18 inches from the hole for an easy birdie.Fans around the Augusta National grounds, where the giant white scoreboards are omnipresent, watched as Woods’s name appeared near the top of leaderboard at one under par. More roars.Woods putting on No. 3.Doug Mills/The New York TimesLeaving the sixth green, Woods shrugged his shoulders impishly and covered his mouth to — barely — conceal a grin. Perhaps contending for the lead at the Masters only an hour after his return to the tournament seemed a little far-fetched, even for him.But, beginning with the seventh hole, recurring errors had Woods scrambling to keep up with the leaders. For five holes, from the seventh to the 11th, he squandered quality tee shots when he missed the green with his approach shots.Woods saved par with a nervy putt on the seventh green, but he did not come close to sinking an 8-foot par putt on the par-5 eighth hole and exited with his first bogey of the round.On the ninth hole, he yanked his drive into the trees left of the fairway before leaving another approach short, though he again saved par with a clutch putt. He did the same when his approach to the 11th green went wayward. He had an uneventful two-putt par at the tiny, treacherous 12th hole, then birdied the par-5 13th hole after reaching the green in two strokes. That moved him to one under par for the round.Another errant drive into the woods on the next hole brought out the Tiger of old as he took a ferocious swipe at the ball to get it over some mammoth pine trees in his path to the green. His putter, however, could not save him, and he fell back to even par for the day with a bogey.Woods tipped his cap to cheering patrons on No. 12.Doug Mills/The New York TimesAnother missed fairway led to a routine par on the par-5 15th hole, but Woods, as he has so often in the past, saved a little drama for the par-3 16th hole as he sank a twisting, uphill 23-foot putt for birdie. That sequence also prompted Woods’s first animated fist pump of the day.A round in the 60s was not out of the question, but Woods managed only a routine par on the 17th hole. At the closing hole, yet another crooked drive derailed him momentarily. But the round finished with a flourish as he recovered to sink an 8-foot putt and secure an under-par round.Leaving the final hole, Woods, a five-time Masters champion, seemed to be almost giving the rest of the field a warning.“We’ve got a long way to go,” he said of the tournament. “This golf course is going to change dramatically — cooler, drier, windier. It’s going to get a lot more difficult.” More

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      Tiger Woods Played a Practice Round Wednesday Ahead of Masters Return

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      Woods played nine holes with his favorite practice partners on Wednesday. But one noticed a change in the five-time champion’s demeanor.Follow our live coverage of Tiger Woods’s return to the MastersAUGUSTA, Ga. — Tiger Woods’s final day of preparation for the 2022 Masters was typical of the laid-back vibe on the eve of the tournament, when the goal is to play a little golf, but not too much — just enough to stay loose for Thursday’s first round.With that in mind, Woods played nine holes with his preferred practice partners, his Florida neighbor Justin Thomas, whom Woods considers a little brother, and Fred Couples, who has at times has served as something of a big brother to Woods.Befitting the atmosphere, the group smiled regularly thorough the round, although Couples, 62, the 1992 Masters champion, noticed a slight change in Woods’s demeanor since playing practice rounds with him earlier in the week.“He was a little more serious; he’s getting ready to roll,” Couples said. “The first practice round I played with him on Monday we had both flown in that day and we were laughing a lot. He was lighter. Today, he and Justin were pretty serious. They’re getting ready.”Couples, left, Woods and Thomas skipped their practice shots over the water on the 16th green.Doug Mills/The New York TimesFans lining the holes that the Woods group played Wednesday alternatively cheered Woods, the five-time Masters champion, on the tees and in the fairways and remained quiet as they almost reverentially watched him practice his putting from different spots on each green.Couples said Woods, who had a more pronounced limp on Wednesday than on any of the other days he practiced at Augusta National, appeared to be swinging the club better than any other day this week. Woods’s surgically rebuilt right leg, however, is clearly causing him some pain.“The pain is there, but he’s dealt with that before,” Couples said. “In terms of his swing, I think he’s a little sharper, a little better.”Couples added that he continues to be mesmerized that Woods is back at the Masters so quickly after his horrific car crash on Feb. 23, 2021.“It’s a miraculous thing, I mean, 14 months ago I’m bawling like a baby every day worried about him,” he said. “And now you’re paired with him and he looks strong. He’s hitting it plenty far enough to play this course, and he plays this course so well. He knows what to do here. I think it’s amazing for him to be out here.” More

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      Masters Invitations Endure as a Signature Detail for the Tournament

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      Follow our live coverage of the first round of the Masters.AUGUSTA, Ga. — The invitations have come his way for half a century, and Ben Crenshaw, now 70 years old, has kept each and every one.“The Board of Governors of the Augusta National Golf Club,” the handsome cards invariably begin, “cordially invites you to participate” in the year’s Masters Tournament.“I’m elated every time,” Crenshaw, who won the Masters in 1984 and 1995, said in an interview. “Every player will tell you that. They get that formal invitation, and it’s there before you, and it’s, ‘Wow, I’m qualified to play in the event.’”Few competitions in sports openly cultivate and savor mystique like the Masters, whose opening round will be played on Thursday. There are the green jackets for winners and Augusta National members, the Tuesday night dinners for past champions and the cheap pimento cheese sandwiches for fans, the manicured rectitude of a course splendid with azaleas and dogwoods and largely, proudly devoid of modern life’s conveniences and intrusions.One of the tournament’s throwback rituals, though, begins months before the field faces Augusta National’s punishing greens, and it usually unfolds in private: the mailing and receipt of invitations to the men who have qualified for the Masters.Augusta, quintessentially Southern, asks the golfers to R.S.V.P. to the invitations, which it has sent since the tournament’s start in 1934.The 2019 R.S.V.P. sent by Tiger Woods, who won the Masters that year.“Good style is always right at the time, good taste is always in taste,” said Gary Player, who won nine major tournaments, including three at Augusta National. “When you get that invitation, if you see it, it’s so exquisitely done with such class. Everything in business is negotiable except quality, and that embraces it to the hilt.”Player, one of the honorary starters for this year’s tournament, added in an interview in January: “I still look at it and I come back to the same conclusion: I’m just overwhelmed at how they do things with class.”The Masters has always been an invitational event, even before it was called the Masters, though its appeal and prestige have swelled since the tournament’s early days. The opportunity to play today is hardly a surprise — Augusta National publishes a roster of clear-cut ways to qualify, from being a previous Masters champion to finishing in the top four at the previous year’s P.G.A. Championship, though it has the authority to ask others to compete. But players aren’t always aware that the storied tournament comes with a physical invitation.Patrick Reed, who earned one of Augusta National’s green jackets in 2018, recalled that he had been tipped off to keep an eye on the mail for his first invitation after he won the Wyndham Championship, but that it was still “unbelievable” when the envelope from the club near the Savannah River arrived ahead of the 2014 Masters. He kept that first invitation, as well as the one from the year after he won.“Both of them are ones I’m going to save and cherish forever,” he said at a news conference in 2019, even though he did not know where his other invitations had wound up over the years. He added, “Just the chills when you’re opening it up, it’s just an awesome experience — even though it’s just a piece of paper that has your invitation on it.”Neither Crenshaw nor Player could recall any other tournament with quite such a habit, or, at least, not one quite so polished. (“I don’t remember getting a letter from the R&A,” Player, who has long described the British Open as his favorite tournament, mused wryly of that event’s organizer.) Many in golf, including Crenshaw, ascribe the enduring formality to Bobby Jones, an Augusta National founder who died in 1971.“To me, it reflects what Bob Jones always retained on nearly everything that’s at Augusta: It’s proper, it has a certain amount of grace to it, there’s a touch of humility,” Crenshaw said. “It’s beautifully done, and the font has never changed, and the seal is on it. It’s the way they do things.”Gary Player sometimes sent warm holiday cards.If the invitations are almost entirely unchanged across the generations, the responses are still evolving. Many of today’s players reply by email. But for decades, pen and paper were the way of Augusta National, and the club recently allowed The New York Times to review a selection of the written responses it holds in its archives — pages of golf history, to be sure, but also glimpses of players’ personalities and changing fortunes.“It will be a pleasure to be there,” Herman Keiser wrote in cursive on “Herman Keiser Golf Pro” letterhead in February 1946, about two months before he won the Masters, his only major victory.“It is with pleasure that I accept your invitation to play in the Masters Tournament,” Claude Harmon said in a Western Union telegram the next year. “It is always a treat. Thanks.”Sam Snead used the letterhead of Miami’s Hotel Dallas Park — players over the years also corresponded from the Sands Hotel in Tucson, Ariz., and a Holiday Inn in San Ysidro, Calif. — to write in 1949 that he would “accept with pleasure,” while Lloyd Mangrum simply declared his intention to play in 1955 on the invitation itself and returned it to Augusta.Tom Watson, Jack Nicklaus and Nick Faldo opted for brief, if warm, letters.Clockwise from top left: Nick Faldo in 1988; Arnold Palmer in 2003; Doug Ford in 1957; Tiger Woods in 1995. Arnold Palmer’s wife often appeared to prepare his replies, Player sent one on a Christmas card and Crenshaw, in 1995, accepted as he wondered what José María Olazábal would choose for the menu at the Champions Dinner. That same year, someone wrote an acceptance and noted that it was from “Eldrick ‘Tiger’ Woods,” who had just turned 19. Then there is Woods’s distinctive signature on a piece of paper that could have been bought in a department store stationery aisle.When Woods told Fred S. Ridley, Augusta National’s chairman, in 2019 that he would play the Masters, the letterhead, emblazoned with the logo and the name of one of his corporate ventures, reflected his new station in life. (Woods’s agent did not respond to inquiries about who wrote the 1995 letter.)Some replies, like Palmer’s, felt formulaic, though he reflected in a 2003 letter that he anticipated “seeing my many friends at Augusta National during the week.” Others said they sought variety in how they crafted their responses, even as they were aware of what Augusta really wanted — simply an acceptance or regrets.“I tried to change it up a little bit,” Crenshaw said, “but they are just needing a response.”This year, in one way or another, 91 golfers accepted the invitation. More

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      Appearing This Year at the Masters: Azaleas, Green Jackets and Inflation

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      Famously low concession prices increased a bit, injecting a small dose of the real world at Augusta National Golf Club.Follow our live coverage of the first round of the Masters.AUGUSTA, Ga. — The lush confines of Augusta National Golf Club, a sanctuary of sport, power and privilege, are showing a harsh economic truth: Inflation can be as invasive as kudzu weeds.There may be no athletic event in the United States that has been more defiantly immune to the outside forces of economics, politics and modernity than the Masters Tournament. But two aggravations of the present — inflation and supply-chain pressures — are encroaching at concession stands that have long sold sandwiches and sweets to the well-heeled for rock-bottom prices.Measured merely in dollars and cents, the changes are hardly seismic, especially for spectators who routinely pay thousands for tickets on the secondary market. Ham and cheese on rye, for example, has gone from $2.50 last year to $3 now, while the price of a chicken biscuit has increased by 50 cents, to $2. Augusta National is a place, though, where shifts on much of anything are so scarce that they attract attention.Now, in addition to being the first major showcase of the golf season, the Masters is an example of how inflation, running at nearly 8 percent nationwide through February, is trickling into corners of American life that traditionally tilt toward the economically obdurate.“The change in the price of concessions at Augusta is a little like the dollar store being the dollar-and-a-quarter store,” said Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary (and a self-described “very enthusiastic and very bad golfer”) and among the first prominent figures to warn about this surge of inflation, which he characterized in an interview as “strong enough to break even longstanding traditions.”Augusta National is not prone to raising prices. The pimento cheese sandwich, a white bread ritual whose price remained untouched heading into the tournament that will begin on Thursday, has been $1.50 since 2003.At $6, Chardonnay is the most expensive item.Doug Mills/The New York TimesBut the menu, simple and typically static, and its prices are fixtures of the Masters and signature ways for Augusta National, which has faced decades of accusations of classism, racism and sexism, to convey hospitality, warmth and grace.“We want the experience to not only be the best but to be affordable,” Billy Payne, who was Augusta National’s chairman for 11 years, said during his tenure, which ended in 2017. “We take certain things very, very seriously — like the cost of a pimento cheese sandwich is just as important as how high the second cut is going to be.”Some economists and sports marketing executives, though, believe that the club’s motive for keeping prices low is not as benevolent as Southern gentility. Instead, they think that the club, whose members include titans of finance and industry, may deliberately use cheap concessions to construct a feeling of an earlier, less capitalistic era in sports — and the aura that has made the Masters brand among the most revered and valuable in sports.John A. List, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago who has attended the Masters, has said that Augusta National’s strategy amounts to wanting to “shock and awe you on the low side.”Even after 2022’s assorted hikes, the prices are certainly still low. The most expensive item is a $6 chardonnay, and a lunch of an egg salad sandwich, a bag of potato chips (plain or barbecue) and a soft drink totals $5. Patrons, as the club refers to the fans who crowd along the fairways, have been more likely to notice a menu item that vanished — like the Georgia peach ice cream sandwich, formerly sold for $2 — because of the supply chain, than their expenditures of a few extra quarters.“We have had some modest price increases,” Fred S. Ridley, Augusta National’s chairman, said on Wednesday, when he acknowledged that supply-chain troubles had also affected construction projects. “I think that most, if not everyone, would say there is great value in our concessions, so we are very comfortable with that.”The finances of Augusta National, a private club, are opaque, with the club not even saying how many general admission passes it sells for up to $115 on competition days, when some estimates have pegged crowds at about 40,000. But it has shown a willingness over the years to weather the more ordinary trends of inflation. Had Augusta been keeping pace, and assuming the pimento cheese sandwich was priced appropriately in 2003, the sandwich would have been about $2.14 at around this time last year, before steeper inflation began.Tied to inflation or not, Augusta was perhaps due for some price increases. Although the pimento cheese sandwich’s price, long memorialized in newspaper accounts of the tournament, held steady for this year, the club has not lately gone so long without nudging it higher. In 2003, when the price climbed to $1.50, the $1.25 standard had been in effect since just 1999. And when that price took hold, it was after only five years of $1 sandwiches.But the economic environment now, Summers suggested, gave Augusta “more need, more cover and more opportunity to raise prices than any year in the last 40.”Federal data shows that the price of ham increased about 7 percent between February 2021 and February 2022. The cost of white bread climbed 6.5 percent, coffee went up 10.5 percent and “limited service meals and snacks” increased 8 percent.“Because every other price is being raised in the economy, it probably feels easier to justify raising prices,” said Summers, who has played at Augusta but said that the course record had been left “safe by at least 40 shots.”Despite its pervasiveness across the country, inflation has not swamped the entirety of the Masters ecosystem, distinct as the only one of the four men’s golf majors to be played at the same course each year.TicketIQ, which tracks resale data, reported that most competition days were fetching lower prices than in 2019, the last time Augusta National was open as usual for the tournament. For the competition round on Thursday, the cheapest ticket at one point this week was $2,018, according to the company. It was $332 more in 2019.And STR, a travel research company, said that the average daily hotel room rate around the Augusta area had been about $390 for the week of the 2019 tournament. Although complete figures for this year are not yet available, many hotels in the region have offered rooms for around that level this week.It is also not clear whether Augusta National has increased the value of its premier tournament’s purse, which has been $11.5 million in recent years, for 2022. The club is expected to announce its intentions on Saturday.On Wednesday morning, though, another round of storms briefly forced players and spectators to depart the course. The grounds fully reopened right around lunch, just in time for a meal that was maybe a little more expensive than last time. More