Augusta National must be the only known corner of the western world where you can’t buy a Coca-Cola. The company has its worldwide headquarters a couple of hours’ drive down the I-20 in Atlanta, its chief executives seem to receive a standing invitation to join the membership, and the club’s co-founders Clifford Roberts and Bobby Jones made their money running a chain of bottling plants. But still, there’s no Coke. Or Sprite, or Powerade, let alone, God forbid in this part of the world, any Pepsi if that happens to be your preference. Instead, the concession stands around the grounds pump “Lemon-Lime”, “Sports Drink”, and good old generic “Cola”.
There’s no Bud, Coors, or Miller Lite either, only “Domestic”, no Heineken or Corona, only “Imported”. Outside of what’s written on the players’ own kit, there’s only one brand allowed at Augusta National, and it’s the club’s own map and flag logo.
Which might be why the one brand that’s bigger than Coca-Cola’s right now doesn’t have a lot of a whole cut-through here. The odd thing about the atmosphere at Augusta National this week is that it seems to be the one place on Earth where no one is talking about the one thing everyone is talking about.
So that on the newstands on Wednesday morning, the New York Times front page lead was “Brushing off Concerns, Trump Pushes Forward with His Steep Tariffs”, the Wall Street Journal’s was “U.S. Sets China Tariffs at 104%, Beijing Vows ‘Fight to the End’”, and the Augusta Chronicle’s was “Renovations by Augusta National bring in golf’s biggest name”.
Which is Tiger Woods, if you were wondering. But the sad fact is that Donald Trump might just be the second-most famous player on the planet. The biggest golf story in the sport last week wasn’t Brian Harman’s win at the Valero Texas Open, but Trump’s decision to skip the ceremony to mark the return of four US soldiers who had died in a training exercise in Lithuania so that he could meet with a group of executives from LIV and play in his club championship at Jupiter. He, ahem, finished in an unlikely tie for first place. Again.
Trump has inveigled himself into every aspect of the sport. He is entangled with LIV and has been busy trying to broker a deal between them and the PGA. Even Woods, who, like just about every other famous player on the tour, has played plenty of rounds with the president, has just announced that he’s dating his former daughter-in-law.
But Trump is mercifully absent from Augusta. “A colder than usual January has been conducive to a near-perfect early spring bloom of azaleas,” opined chairman Fred Ridley at the start of his annual press conference, like a man reading the crop report for flowering ornamentals.
Ridley roamed over a range of topics, slow play, driving distance, the club’s stance on domestic violence and whether or not they were right to invite former champion Ángel Cabrera, but Trump’s name didn’t come up once. The fire may be ranging out on the other side of the pine trees that surround the grounds, but apparently the air’s sweet as Georgia peach ice cream sandwiches here inside them.
You wonder if it’s the same in the clubhouse. If you want to know the gossip on Wall Street right now, Augusta National’s about the best place you could be. The membership is a who’s who of corporate America: Warren Buffett’s one, so is Bill Gates, so are the CEOs of Amazon, Delta, and Santander, the former CEOs of Bank of America, American Express and IBM, Condoleezza Rice is here, and so is Rex Tillerson, and those are only the ones you know, there are hundreds more you don’t.
Trump isn’t thought to be one himself. It’s impossible to formally confirm one way or the other, but you know it the same way you do that someone’s just become a vegan, you can be sure they’ll tell you themselves.
Augusta’s president is, and always will be, Dwight Eisenhower. I like Ike, You Like Ike, around here they all like Ike. He has a driveway named after him outside the grounds, his own cabin by the 10th tee, they even keep preserved slices of the old oak tree that he always used to hit with his drives up the 17th.
The same Eisenhower who argued so forcefully for both foreign aid and free trade, and who signed the Reciprocal Trade Agreement Act, which has shaped US economic policy around the world for the past 70 years, less the past seven days. Eisenhower’s policies were the antithesis of Trump’s, and Augusta’s attitude towards the game is the obverse of his, too.
Not that they’d ever say it publicly. How many millions have the members here lost between them in the past week? How many of the thousands who travelled here from around the world felt uneasy crossing the border? How do the four Canadians in the field feel about the prospect of becoming the 51st state? And yet all anyone wants to talk about is the weather out. You notice Trump most by his ringing absence from the conversation and to be honest that’s something of a sweet relief. Augusta National’s always been an oasis, but this year’s tournament feels a bit like the final scene of attending the dinner party at the end of the world. – Guardian
