On New Year’s Eve, my family and I visited St. Andrews. My mother and brother had been there for my wedding, but their indoctrination was far from complete. So I drove them across Grannie Clark’s Wynd (twice), scaled the vacant Himalayas Putting Course with them, and pointed out Old Tom Morris’s grave for them. Then, at dusk I snuck my brother and five-year-old son across the Swilcan Bridge for a photo op and a circular tour of the Road Hole green. The air was cool but clear, the breeze soft, and the sky streaked with pink and orange. Hogmanay in Edinburgh had nothing on this.
Four days later, the 2013 PGA Tour season began in Maui with the Hyundai Tournament of Champions. Or rather, it began seven days later, because the Tour’s attempts to get started on January 4th, 5th and 6th were scuppered by gale-force winds. Two rounds were started, then abandoned and discarded. Flagsticks tilted 45 degrees. A television tower toppled into a lake. St. Andrews was calm and peaceful, and Hawaii was bent sideways? The Mayan apocalypse may yet happen.
This is not why God put golf on television in January. I love a good gale and watching four-foot putts roll 30 feet sideways, but surely the PGA Tour starts in January – about half an hour after the previous season finishes – mainly to provide weather porn for weary viewers battling snowstorms in Minnesota or nor’easters in Massachusetts. Instead of digging out your driveway again, you want to watch tanned, perspiring men in short sleeves fight for their million-dollar checks while shielding their eyes from a blazing sun. Why else would most Britons flee to the clearly inferior courses of Spain and Portugal for their golfing holidays? Sun sells.
Anyway, for me the PGA Tour season really starts in February, on Super Bowl Sunday. The tournaments in Hawaii conclude too late at night to watch in Britain, and the first two events in California still feel too far away from Augusta in April to matter. Because that is both the point and our destination, right? The form of January is temporary, whereas the class of April is permanent. The final round in Scottsdale, on a fun course amidst a rowdy gallery, pushes you past the Super Bowl pregame and reminds you that the post-NFL sporting wasteland includes trips to Pebble Beach. Riviera, Doral and Bay Hill. The Masters is of course is the official start of spring and the ultimate combination of weather porn and gardening porn, but more importantly, it ends a long opening chapter whose plot twists and turns from Hawaii to California to Florida truly matter only if they end in the Butler Cabin.
Coincidentally, one New Year’s Eve ago I was staring down Magnolia Lane. I’d gone home to Atlanta for Christmas, and I had a spare day to myself, so I rented a car. Why not? As the best golfers in the world would surely tell you, Augusta is always a worthy destination.