Econo Lodge at Augusta

In 2015, my father and I rented a Nissan Juke from the Atlanta Airport and drove the two hours to Aiken, South Carolina. Aiken is a town bordering Augusta, Georgia, home of Augusta National and the Masters Tournament. We were in town for a Tuesday practice round. In 2023, Golf Digest reported the chances of winning the Masters ticket lottery is 0.55 percent, although I’m not sure if the practice round tickets are so slim. They can be purchased on the secondary ticket market for reasonable sums. Maybe $500 per ticket. If you love the place enough, as millions do, it’s reasonable to think you can get inside at some point in your life. Pops had been to the tournament before, another practice round, but was particularly elated this time, to take his boy. Augusta is a place for fathers and sons, as has been said ad nauseam on the broadcasts. But fuck if it isn’t true. Jack and Jackie in ’86. Tiger and Earl in ‘97. Tiger and Charlie in ‘19. There’s magic among the magnolias. History on every green. The Masters is perhaps the most excellent spectator experience in all of sports. It’s existence mystic, prestigious, historical.

Pops and I checked into the EconoLodge in Aiken where we were met with the familiar smell of stepped on cigarette smoke in the carpet. The roughness of the comforters on the beds. The sound of a greasy AC unit humming. Not the kind of hotel I’ve ever shared with my father. But The Masters in Augusta is highbrow and for mere unconnected, practice round guys like us, we needed somewhere to stay. The contrast of the Masters tournament and an Econo Lodge. It felt sort of like how my father was a serious college golfer. Tried to go pro. Probably the best player most people have seen up close. He gave it up in his early twenties, as many do, who are successful in sport, but top out a level beneath their peers who will go pro. There is a wide margin you can see with your eyes and feel in your gut. He found his way in the world, took dozens of jobs before starting his own business and becoming quite successful. He had always dreamed of playing at a country club and around the time of Phil’s first Master’s in ’04, he became a member at Rockland CC. Since then he’s been a member for close to twenty years. He’s won the member-member. He’s shot 68 thrice. He’s made two hole-in-ones. I am a 14 handicap who plays the muni track with his boys on Friday afternoons. We each drink between five and a dozen beers. We smoke several joints. We gamble heavy, insult each other, talk during backswings. We make the occasional birdie. We celebrate like we’ve won a green jacket. My Old Man is the Masters Tournament; I am the Econolodge. We’re different, but we are the same – like so many, we love the torment of joy that is the game of golf. We love the Masters Tournament in Augusta.

My friends and I play in a golf outing every year down in Atlantic City. It is ridiculous, drunk, low class. We joke and call it the Whiteclaw Invitational. The guy running it wears flamboyant Hawaiian patterns and white pants up over his belly button. We take bets on how soon upon seeing him he will regale us with stories of sexual triumph on the Jersey shore. It’s a goon fest. Last year’s winners, the Mahoney boys, came in at a staggering seventeen under. We came in second with a measly twelve under par. The Mahoney Boys were shy to come to the podium at the dinner afterward and accept their award. The Sex King of Jersey called out again from the podium for The Mahoney Boys. Nobody answered. Whispers from the crowd. We were drunk at our table in the front. Punchy. One lowly Mahoney boy eventually came up to receive the winning cash pot and sponsored gear. A disheveled man sheepishly walked to the front, beer gut distended over his blue jeans, sunburn on his face in the spots uncovered by shades and a hat. I shouted, “Seventeen under in dungarees! Look at them go!” The crowd jeered, laughed, seemingly waiting for someone to acknowledge the lie outright. The classlessness of the Mahoney boys. The juxtaposition of a drink-all-day scramble in AC and the highest honor of playing professionally at the Masters is what makes golf singular. Golf is a spectrum. On the one end there are The Mahoney Boys, the Sex King of Jersey, our lowly foursome at thirteen under. On the other end there is Tiger Woods.

After the Mahoney Boys took our title we drove back to my buddy’s place on Long Beach Island. There isn’t much to eat on LBI in late March. We toss on the first round games of March Madness, make insane bets on the first team to score ten points in a given matchup. We’re shooting blind, bonded from the day, from taking turns at missing ten-footers, nuking greens from a hundred out. You spend five hours with a group of guys, something is built there. Let’s call it good will, or shared suffering. We wait for a driver to accept our WaWa order. Four chicken bacon ranch subs. It takes over two hours for the subs to find our place. We had lost many first-to-ten NCAA bets by then and we were quite drunk from the day and the events after. We took some weed gummies. We ate the subs. My one friend, Steve, felt the gummy in ways the rest of us did not. He paced the place all night, stood in doorways waiting for us to ask, Are you okay? A boys golf trip to AC is not Augusta. There are goon fests and there are final pairings on Sunday. Both are delicious.

I found some hipster spots on Google I was not expecting in Aiken. There was a vibrant steakhouse with a brick façade online. They had an expensive website, positive reviews in the hundreds. Signature cocktails. Pops and I snagged a table for two as we entered and the place was clapping with conversation. The energy was high; the drinks went down fast. I was on this misguided kick of straight alcohol on the rocks, an attempt to grow up in some way. Fancy, now, down at Augusta. We crush a couple medium filets and toast red wine with some new friends also from New York/New Jersey. A father-son working team. They were in solar panels out of Elizabeth, down by Harrison, where we had customers, too. Several bottles and goodbyes later and we were taking a pit stop at the bar around the corner. It was quieter, later then. So many asleep before they’re set to walk the grounds of heaven. We tossed a cocktail back and kept on our warpath. I thought of it as a rite of passage. Wasn’t it fun getting hammered with Dad? Yes and no. We stopped for a nightcap at a bar café, where Dad talked to the bartender, who was happy to indulge him. He was acting like a pro because he’d been to Augusta before. Definitely a practice round, but he’d done it a couple times. I was the rook. The young one ready for his golf baptism or maybe his first golf lay. It felt definitive and I was hammered. We were walking in the street after laughing and falling over ourselves. It turned out, the kid can’t drink like his old man. I collapsed on the starched-out comforter of the Econolodge, sometime around two in the morning. I heard some Mets spring training highlights before knocking out completely. The next morning he woke me up at five to prep myself for the day. “You don’t want to be hungover for this,” he told me as I scooted around his bed and dove headfirst into the toilet. There was an aged-over piss stain in the middle of the bowl. I puked a few times and then I started the shower. I heard him laugh, or maybe scold, through the door before it closed. One must purge themselves before they are offered up to God. I showered and shaved and put on my golf attire, met the old man by the Nissan Juke.

We entered the gates as patrons with our badges. To nongolfers, there is a vernacular to golf and more so at The Masters. You call things by their proper names. They took our phones as we entered. Pops told me we were to walk every hole. That’s what you have to do your first time. Isn’t that what you want to do? And to be honest I just wanted to stuff several pimento cheese sandwiches and start on the hair of the dog. But once I was out there something changed. The morning mist started to burn off and the sun hit everything. The grounds were magnificent; the vibes holy. It’s natural beauty that’s been perfectly placed. I mean, it feels like Magic Kingdom mixed with Yosemite. The Super Bowl and the PCT. It was time for our first pit stop. There were little halfway houses spread out over the course, something you might not know from watching on TV. There were tons of people hanging at these places, pounding drinks on little picnic tables or standing in circles. It was not as classy as I’d imagined, save for the course itself and the bathroom attends who cleaned each stall after every use. There is competition and prestige, indiscernibly beautiful. The costs of food and beverage have remained the same for years. Another juxtaposition. An exclusive event, with a simple menu. You can order all of the twenty-seven menu items for around sixty dollars. There was an egg salad sandwich for a dollar fifty. The famous Pimento cheese for the same. The beers were five bucks. The mix of high and low was thrilling. The hangover was gone.

Several hours in, Pops and I made it to Amen Corner. He took me to one of the best viewing location on the course. The back of the green at eleven, where you can see the guys coming in and also the guys teeing off at twelve. There may not be a better place in all of sports for patrons. No assigned seats. No section you have to stay in. You get to walk the course as the pros do, albeit on the other side of the ropes. We hang there for some time, enjoy all there is for fathers and sons to enjoy. The sun. The course. The golf. The food an bev. The making of the memory. Later we walked beside the fairway of thirteen, through the pine straw, where Jason Day chatted with his caddie. We watched him pipe a 4-iron towards the green. It landed pin-high and then careened off the back. Whatever that guy did with a golf club is not the same thing we did with ours. To see these pros up close was spectacular. Something perhaps you cannot understand watching it on TV. The sound of the club face hitting the ball, the speed with which they strike through on the downswing. After we walked all eighteen holes we heard there were some big boys on the practice range. There were small bleachers set up behind the practice area, outside the course itself, so we took a couple beers and a couple BBQ sandwiches ($3.00 each) to watch. “Ricky is no bigger than you,” Pops said as we watched Fowler pound 8-irons onto the range. Justin Thomas was there and Spieth was there. Pops said, “Doesn’t this just make you want to play?” And he was right. It’s all I could think about after walking the course and seeing the players hit. That’s the thing about golf, unlike football or any other major American sport. You can play it, too. And sure there are men’s softball leagues and over forty basketball games to join. But it’s nothing like the way you can watch golf and you can play golf your entire life. There’s just as much glory to be had watching The Masters as there is playing a golf outing in Atlantic City, or walking nine holes after work. Well maybe there isn’t, but you know the truth, it feels like it at times. Our hands shake over twenty dollar putts. And isn’t that what sports are about? Feeling, glory, success, failure. Competition. Moments of grace amidst great hostility.

In midsummer, when the sun stays out late, my friend Derek and I play a local nine-hole course after work. We call them Sundown Matches. I pack a little cooler to leave in my truck with six beers, three each. We walk the nine hole muni as the sun begins to set over the Hudson Valley. No frills to the place, it costs twenty-five dollars to walk it at that time of day. I get there early to chip and putt, a tall boy in hand, No Laying Up through my earbuds. I wait for Derek to get out of work. We tee it up with the usual format. $10/hole, $5 junk. Nobody wins much money, but we keep a tally on the matches to talk shit later on. After we finish we walk over to my truck, parked in a bit of woods next to the main lot. That’s where everybody in the know parks. Groups of guys sit by their cars and have a few drinks after their rounds. The last bit of summer sum hits the horizon with the red glare as the final beers go down triumphantly. A deer bums by in the parking lot. We share a joint before we go, dump the ice out of the empty cooler. Same time next week. What could be better?

Jordan Spieth went on to win the 2015 masters after leading the tournament wire-to-wire. He tied the scoring record with a total score of 270 (-18). My father and I watched the Sunday round at the house with new eyes. Memories of watching The Masters throughout my life shot back up from whatever memory hole they were in in the back of my brain. There was Tiger’s first win in ’97. I was seven years old, my brother and father watched with a sense of inevitability, the future playing out in front of them. There was Phil’s first win in ’04. I was a freshman in high school, watching with the family, my father’s birthday, burgers and dogs hissing from a grill on the back deck. We laughed when Phil did his goofy jump. The embarrassment of joy on his face. There was Phil’s second win in 2010, where I watched from a dorm room in Tampa Bay. My friend Coogan and I were blasted from a trip to Plant Park and when he made that shot from the trees on fourteen, we said aloud HOLY FUCK. We marveled at his boldness. We chuckled when he missed the eagle putt. The last major memory from viewing the Masters was Tiger’s emotional win in ‘19. I live streamed my crying face over Instagram. If his stroll down the fairway and his hug with Charlie didn’t move you to tears, then you don’t know golf and you don’t know sports.

When I watch the broadcast now I have a new perspective. I was able to walk the grounds of heaven and come back alive. Reborn as a true golf sicko. There is golf at Augusta, there are country clubs, there are municipal courses. There are beers in novelty Masters cups, and there are beers from a cooler in your truck bed. There is the Masters Tournament in Augusta and there is an Econolodge in Aiken. There is the Sex King of NJ with his Hawaiian golf shirt tucked in too high, so proud of his annual outing in AC. There is Tiger Woods and all his glory. For fathers and sons, rookies and five time champions, Good Good Golf and Bob Does Sports. We can all dump a wedge into the water from a hundred out. We can all bang a putt from fifty feet. Imagine celebrating with your father or your son behind the eighteenth green, slipping your shoulder in the green jacket. Finally beating the Mahoney boys in their damn blue jeans.