The climax of Mad Men’s first season is Don Draper’s emotional pitch to Kodak for its Carousel slide projector. “Nostalgia,” he tells them, comes from a Greek word meaning the pain from an old wound. “It’s a twinge in your heart,” he says, “far more powerful than memory alone.”
Fred Couples (pink shirt) and Tiger Woods (blue shirt) seen distantly on the 16th green during their Wednesday practice round ahead of the 2013 Masters.
The Masters is, arguably, not golf’s greatest tournament (whatever that means). But no other event in golf — or maybe anywhere in sports — delivers that pain, that ache for sand that long ago slipped through our fists, like the Masters.
With no more than three notes on a piano, we remember where we were in 1995 when Ben Crenshaw, just seven days removed from the death of his mentor, Harvey Penick, dropped his last putt on No. 18 and then dropped his head, doubled over with his face in his palms, weeping underneath the magnitude of it all. We remember where we were in 2005 for Tiger Woods’ impossible chip-in on No. 16 — a shot that, no, in our lives we had never seen anything like. And it makes us believe like nowhere else that, if just for four days, a bygone past can come back to improbable life, as it did with Jack Nicklaus in 1986.
The 10th fairway at Augusta National, as seen during the Wednesday practice round of the 2013 Masters.
More than anything — and more than any other event — we remember the people we were with. I remember sitting on my couch with my mother in 2017 — neither of us Sergio Garcia fans, but both our voices cracking when his winning putt sank. I remember my stepfather striding triumphantly into our kitchen on Sunday afternoon in 1996, after four days of predicting that Greg Norman would choke. In a sport desperate to move forward past a stuffy image 400 years in the making, the Masters offers exactly the opposite: retreat, for a few days, to the places and people we shared those moments with. It is a seduction.
Nowhere else pulls at our heartstrings even without having physically visited Augusta National. But for those lucky few who have been, the pain is even more acute. There is a feeling of going home at Augusta National. I spoke recently to someone who played the course after decades of watching the Masters on TV. “My son asked me, ‘Was it really freaky standing up on the 12th tee and hitting that shot?’ And I said no,” he told me. “It was like I’d been there a thousand times.”
Nostalgia clouds our senses, though. Human beings have a natural urge to preserve the sanctity of their own memories. How else do we keep such a special place in our hearts for a tournament held at a golf club that spent decades defending racial and gender discrimination? I distinguish between the club that created those policies and the tournament that the club hosts, and I hope that I’m not deluding myself. But nostalgia keeps me from wondering too deeply.
That nostalgia seeps from Augusta is no accident, of course. It is not organic; it is mined — manufactured, even. It is produced in a venue that is as much television studio as it is golf course, an impossibly perfect — too perfect — shade of green, somewhere between verdant and sickly sweet. The nostalgia, not the golf, is the true commodity for sale at the Masters, and we willfully buy it up. It’s the Truman Show, with all of us starring, except we know the secret and don’t mind.
Even in fiction, though, that ache for the past is a chase toward a mirage. After Don Draper’s heart-wrenching pitch to Kodak, nostalgia drives him home to his family to catch them before they leave for the holidays — to be with them, like it used to be. But when he walks in, his house is dark. His family is gone. The past is sand through his fists. Nostalgia is real, but it feeds on an illusion.
There is a comfort to indulging nostalgia. And there is a serenity in surrendering to seduction. No one wants to acknowledge that the house is empty.