Later this week, private jets from around the country and globe will descend on my hometown and for a few days the sports world will focus on Augusta, Georgia.
Every April the best golfers in the world swarm Georgia’s second-largest city in an attempt to tame the notoriously difficult Augusta National golf course and, if luck holds, slip on the traditional green jacket that is fitted for each year’s Masters champion. For those who don’t know, the Masters, which will take place next week, is the first major golf tournament of the year and attracts, by one estimate, 200,000 people.
The rhythm of life in Augusta conforms to the yearly golf invasion. Spring break for Augusta’s public schools is the same week as thousands of Augustans flee to escape the fans, celebrities and thousands of well-heeled corporate types looking to impress clients with tournament passes. It helps that corporations and golf fans are willing to pay hefty fees to rent all those empty homes for a few days.
Despite growing up five miles from the Augusta National, I am not a golf fan, never have been. That is not to say I am unfamiliar with its culture or immune to its charms. To some degree, to grow up in Augusta means you grow up immersed in golf’s mythology and can pull from a caravan of memories created around the sport. One is of my family sitting one booth away from Jack Nicklaus at a local restaurant in the 1970s. Another, from 2019, is of my brother and I following Tiger Woods around the Augusta National course. It was early in the tournament and Tiger hadn’t yet made the run that would win him his fifth Masters jacket.
2019 was an anomaly. I didn’t make it home regularly for Masters week as I lived around the country the past 30 years, so I didn’t get the chance to walk the course with my mom, dad or brother often. So I wasn’t about to turn down an invitation that year, mostly because it was quality time with my brother and a chance to see a childhood friend or two. As one ages, I’m discovering, memories from your early years grow in importance. Seeing family and friends is like a healing balm.
That year was likely the last time I’ll ever set foot on the Augusta National golf course.
Two years later, in March 2021, my mom died. And my parents’ annual passes to the tournament reverted to the Augusta National Club. Neither my brother nor I cared enough about the tickets to put up a fight.
I traveled home for her funeral. Afterward, my brother and I spent the next three months — including Masters week 2021 — getting our childhood home in shape to be sold later in the year. My mom had refused to move out. It had been home since 1973, and no matter how much she talked about all the clutter, she stayed put.
It turns out, the clutter was a gift our mom bequeathed us.
For three months I worked during the day from my childhood home and in the evening my brother and I cleaned out closets and drawers, reminiscing as we stumbled upon photos of the four of us — mom, dad, my brother and me — on vacation, at graduations, at weddings. Reams of mom’s academic papers and sermons — she was a Presbyterian minister — captivated us, too, but they were too numerous to read, although we attempted.
Sitting there with my brother, it was as if mom and dad — and all the others we’ve loved and lost over the years — were in that room with us. As for walking the Augusta National one more time, what my brother and I have is more treasured than annual golf passes: our memories.
This year, as I watch the final round of the Masters from Albuquerque, I’ll think of mom, dad, my brother and our family and friends, and all the fun I had growing up in Augusta in the shadow of the Masters golf tournament.
Trip Jennings started his career in Georgia at his hometown newspaper, The Augusta Chronicle. Since 2005, he has covered politics and state government for the Albuquerque Journal, The New Mexico Independent and the Santa Fe New Mexican. In 2012, he co-founded New Mexico In Depth, a nonpartisan, nonprofit media outlet that produces investigative, data-rich stories with an eye on solutions that can be a catalyst for change.