Augusta National and winning a golden ticket to golfing paradise

On the 30th January, Paul McBride – along with five other golfing scholarship students from Wake Forest University – swung in off Washington Road, leaving behind the string of fast food restaurants that blot the thoroughfare, and drove up Magnolia Lane.

“It just pops up, out of nowhere,” says the Dubliner of the most famed entrance in golf that offers a portal to another world.

McBride, a 20-year-old who once upon a time captained an underage Dublin development hurling team before being lured to the fairways, was suitably enthralled by what lay inside the gates. For as anyone who has been lucky enough to play Augusta National has discovered, it is a special place.

"It's a bit like going to a golfing mecca," remarks Paddy Murphy, a former president of the Golfing Union of Ireland (GUI), who also got an opportunity to play the course. In his case, though, the method of transport into the club was probably unlike any other, before or since.

It was back in 2000 that Murphy attended the championship – won on that occasion by Vijay Singh – and, along with then GUI general secretary Séamus Smith, he was invited to play the course on the Monday morning.

Unreliable

Taxis are notoriously unreliable in and around Masters week and, when the scheduled cab failed to arrive at 6am, alarm bells rang. By 7.15am, panic had set in and those in the rented house were dispatched to flag down whatever means of transport could be found.

Shortly after 7.30am, just half an hour before the allotted tee time, a red pick-up truck pulled up outside the house. It belonged to the janitor of a local school who had responded to frenzied hand-waving.

"We'd caught him on his way to work," explains Smith. "We threw our clubs in the back and said, 'Augusta National please'. We arrived at the gate, showed our letter to the security guard, and he pointed at the driver. 'Drive up and drop these gentlemen off and come straight back.'

“But there was more panic because we were five minutes late for our tee-time and we jumped out of the truck to be met by a group of caddies in their white jumpsuits. ‘Relax man, play is delayed by 45 minutes because of frost.’”

In McBride’s case, there was no such drama. One of the perks of attending Wake Forest on a golfing scholarship is an opportunity to play Augusta National.

Logan Jackson, a college alumni, had arranged for the invitation for the team and their arrival was straightforward, a hotel stay down the road on the Friday night and a trip to golfing paradise on the Saturday morning.

Like most people who venture through the gates and onto the course for the first time, the sheer scale of the hills, no matter what advance warning is given, comes as a shock to the system.

“It’s so much more hilly than you imagine. I mean, there is a drop of 40 feet from the first tee to the fairway. It is like a massive valley that you never see on television.”

Pristine and perfect

As Shane O'Donoghue – nowadays part of Fox Sports golf broadcasting team and also presenter of Living Golf on CNN – says: "I learnt my golf in Clonmel, and that is hilly . . . but trying to impart [the hilliness of] Augusta is hard, because it looks so pristine and so perfect [to those watching on television]."

And, for Murphy, there was physical evidence of the course’s rolling steepness. In walking up the 18th to the green, Murphy keeled over.

“My playing partners thought I was having a heart attack. But it was my hip, it was the first sign that I had a problem with my hip,” he recalls.

For all of the professionals and champion amateurs who comply with one or more of the 18 qualifications conditions for an invitation to next week’s Masters, the quest – pure and simple – is for a green jacket.

For those other amateurs who manage to get a chance to play the course, it is very often a high point, offering an insight into the challenges that this golfing masterpiece presents.

“Every hole you step on has some piece of history. You’re thinking, ‘I remember Tiger’s shot from here, I remember Phil’s shot from there, Bubba’s shot . . .’ It was amazing to just experience what they do. It is not something everyone gets to do, which I think is the best part about it,” says McBride of his round, where a bogey on the 18th had him sign for a level-par 72.

There’ll be many next week who’d grab that scorecard.

Before their round, McBride – and his fellow students – got a glimpse into this other world. In the clubhouse, there was no menu: you could order whatever you wanted and it would be served.

On the range, they rubbed shoulders with Major League Baseball superstars. “It is the who’s who of the business world and it is the who’s who of the famous people who go there,” says McBride.

He adds: “We got to enjoy it. Our coaches told us, ‘you only get four-and-a-half or five hours on the course, just enjoy it. It doesn’t matter how you play.’ It is something you don’t get to experience every day.”

In McBride’s case, a highlight of the round came on the par-three 16th. “I hit a perfect eight-iron. It landed just up the slope and trickled down. I thought it was going to go in but it was just about a foot short. Pity it didn’t go in, just to say you had a hole in one there.”

Although the stretch of holes around ‘Amen Corner’ remains the iconic image of Augusta National and a place where tournaments can be won and lost, that 16th hole has – particularly since Tiger Woods’s chip-in there for birdie in 2005 – become increasingly famous.

O’Donoghue first got to play the course on the day after that mind-boggling chip-in by Woods, which cut like a knife into the heart of Chris DiMarco.

“You’re not supposed to play an extra ball, but I took out a couple and hit two chips from close to this sprinkler head on the left of 16th, and you’re wondering, ‘how on earth did he do this?’

Remarkable

“I didn’t get close at all. I was trying to chip it up to the top [of the slope] like he did, but I’d say the nearest I got to the hole was 25 feet. It’s remarkable to think what he did in the cauldron of the Sunday of the Masters.”

The hilliness of the course is something that doesn’t come across so dramatically on television, but the other thing – and perhaps the most difficult for any player to cope with – is the speed of the greens and the slopes.

“They’re like lightning,” says Murphy, of putting surfaces that run up to 14 on the stimpmeter, adding: “I remember, at one stage, the caddie said to go in exactly the opposite direction to the hole and, sure enough, the ball landed down beside the hole.”

When playing the 14th, O’Donoghue also discovered that appearances can be deceptive. “To me, it was like 15-foot putt, a gentle enough right-to-left break, but my caddie, a gentleman called Travis, said, ‘no, you need to aim 10 feet right, gently, you need to get off on that line’ and, lo and behold, it did trickle down.”

And, then, there’s the sand. It is imported in from North Carolina and has filled each one of the 44 bunkers on the course for the past 40 years. It’s called Spruce Pine sand for the area where it is found and is actually quartz . . . and impossibly bright.

“I remember going into a bunker and I actually had to step back out, the sun was shining directly in and it was like glass and it was blinding. I had to step out to readjust myself before I could hit the shot,” recalls Murphy.

As for McBride? His first taste of Augusta National has only served to whet the appetite for more. As an Irish international and a student at Wake Forest, his desire is one day go out on tour.

“Hopefully I will be playing competitively there someday because there is only one tournament that you can play professionally . . . it would nice if that happened.”