The start was running just a little behind time at the Masters this year, made three hours late by the storm that blew through early in the morning. It was 10am already when Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player and Tom Watson made it to the practice range, and just gone 10.15 when they walked from the clubhouse through the gallery to the 1st tee. Player stopped to press a ball into the palm of a lady waiting by the ropes. Her name was Barbara, and she was 88. “We’re the very same age,” she says, smiling like a little kid who’d just discovered the big presents tucked around the back of the Christmas tree.
Player gives her a kiss on the cheek on his way back in, too. Turns out this is one of his Masters traditions. “It’s the third time he’s done it,” Barbara says. “My husband said if he did it again this year then I shouldn’t come back home afterwards.”
Despite that, she adds, she had dressed in the very same yellow blouse so that Player would be able to pick her out of the crowd. Which makes a change. It’s more usual for people to wear green and pink here whenever Player’s near, so they can go and hide behind an azalea bush till he’s blown over. If there’s a whisper in the trees at Augusta, often as not it’s someone asking: “Psst, has he gone?”
In the press room after the start, Player has a captive audience. He doesn’t take questions as enquiries, but invitations. “Can you describe what it’s like to put on the Green Jacket each year when you return to the Masters?” someone starts. “Who was that to?” Player says, “Was that to me?” He leans forwards towards the mic, like a man taking his back swing. “Well, obviously having been here or associated with Augusta for 67 years and having come here for the first time in ’57 …” The ball was off and running, likely somewhere way off to the right and out of bounds.
“I met one of my heroes, President Eisenhower,” Player continues, “because as we all know, he’s a man who believed in freedom, and what he did for this great country, you can’t describe it.” In the next breath he mentions his background, “growing up poor as a young boy and suffering a great deal as a young family”, describes himself as the man “who has travelled more miles than any human being who has ever lived” and the USA as “the greatest country that God ever made”. We never find out what he thought about putting on that famous Green Jacket.
Then someone else made the mistake of asking about the secret to a long life. Watson raises his eyebrows. “I went to India, and there was a gerontologist there, and he gave me the secret to longevity,” Player begins, and you wondered, for a moment if it was going to be “gunga galunga”. But no. It’s ice baths, under-eating, exercise, laughter and “love in my heart”. By this point Nicklaus is staring at the carpet, and Watson’s looking off into the middle distance. There is, Player says, “a man on this earth right now who is going to live to 140 and that’s a medical fact”.
He’s clearly got designs on that title, too, which means we’ve another 50 years yet.
Watson uses his time to make an eloquent plea for LIV and the PGA tour to come together so the “best players are playing against each other”, Nicklaus used his to reminisce about the time he hit a shank that “nearly killed Clifford Roberts” and his youth organisation First Tee.
But Player just presses on, wherever his thoughts take him. He roves over Shakespeare – “I think it was him who said: ‘The youth of a nation are the trustees of posterity’” (it wasn’t) – Churchill, William the Conqueror, the Ottoman Empire, Ben Hogan’s golf swing and cancel culture. “Personally, I don’t believe in legacies. If you take my all-time heroes, Winston Churchill, he was probably the greatest leader for the last 200 years, without going into the Ottomans and all the great leaders and William the Great. But if it wasn’t for Churchill, we wouldn’t be sitting here today. And they are defacing his statue in England and calling him a racist!
“So if you think that people are going to remember you, you’re dreaming. Everything shall pass, it’s a true saying.” Everything, that is, except his answers.
