The masters is as much about the voice of Peter Alliss as it is the intrigues of the 16th hole. There has always seemed to be something vaguely sinister about Augusta, as though it were less a sports contest and more a morality tale acted out by men with astoundingly poor dress sense (The core purpose of the tournament is, after all, to win a green jacket so garish as to render you inadmissible to most self-respecting social houses).

There is a fakeness about the beauty of the place; if Truman Burbank had taken up golf, you could imagine him grinning his way around a course like Augusta. Those images that are beamed across to us this time every year are vividly gorgeous technicolour and, curse them, almost give succour to notions of taking up the game. Almost.

Every camera angle and shot radiates an illusory quality and the place has a dangerously healthy look about it. Augusta commands appreciation through the sheer impeccability of its lovingly manicured acreage. It engulfs the stars and their comfortable sweaters, encourages us to sit back and revel in the perversity of a pretty patch of ground designed to make grown men cry.

When Tiger Woods temporarily defied the aesthetics of the course two years ago, golfing affecionados trembled with fear at the prospect of the coming decade and it was a question of how long he would take to surpass the likes of Hogan and Nicklaus. "He's only twenty-one," you know, murmured Alliss at the time, inscrutable to the last but unmistakably unhinged by what he was watching. Woods came back and finished eighth and although he was still in contention going into yesterday's final round, we saw him doubled up in anguish on more than one green.

The Masters cheats because it always ends with the civility of the presentation at the clubhouse, with smiles, cheers and that jacket. We forget about the trail of skeletons left on every hole, dismiss the desperate look of players who - even for a hole or two - had maybe been contenders only to find themselves humiliated even as they dared believe they were getting to grips with the course. It is these players, the stragglers who leave with the burning recollection of a scuffed drive or a birdie putt that turned into a bogey or a shot that looked perfect but which found water - these are the guys that are fodder for Augusta.

And these are the men that Peter Alliss watches over, murmuring and cooing his way through the natural order of events, much like a benign old Prospero who can but sympathise with their follies and, occasionally, rejoice in their individual triumphs.

Within this pantheon of Masters pawns, Greg Norman is king. The old course loves to mock the forthright old Australian like no other, propping him up in front of the world, letting him get close enough so we can see the zeal in his eyes and then stripping him for TV ratings. There are probably many reasons why Norman hasn't won the Masters (his choice of headwear springs to mind as a particularly obvious one) but whenever you see Greg stride confidently along the first fairway, you get a queasy feeling in your stomach. The man could finish the first round on 18 and you'd still expect him to blow it somewhere along the way.

Yet here he was again this year after day two, back for more, his name shimmering on the leader board like an ominous caution to the golfers who would retire for the evening dreaming of green.

At the 10th hole on day three, we saw him play out another of those tiny melodramas, running the whole gamut of emotions and taking us along for the ride. An ordinary approach shot left him with a tough downhill putt for par. He sank it.

"Come tomorrow night, that's the one shot that might win him the tournament," whispered Alliss. Too loudly.

Two holes later, Augusta had the great white shark rooting frantically around bushes and scrubland just off the green for his ball. On his knees, for heaven's sake.

"And now all sorts of things are going through his mind. It's a sorry sight," offered Alliss sadly. Norman walked back the fairway and replayed the shot perfectly.

"What a stupid game it is," sighed Peter. Although Norman fell two behind at one point in the round, we loathed every moment the cameras strayed away from him in favour of Olazabal, the leader.

While this was a mammoth weekend for sport and one given particularly to Irish celebration - Bobbyjo and three consecutively completed Irish rugby passes on Saturday afternoon - the most relevant image was to be found not in the pits in San Paulo or on the soccer fields in England but in pretend land at Augusta, watching Norman banish the demons, set his jaw and silence us with that wide-shouldered, swooping swing of his which rent the air like a whip.

And he held his nerve through the penultimate day, leading us to think. Maybe there was a God. Maybe he sold his soul. Maybe he was just setting himself up for one last unforgettable humiliation, one last turn of smiling wanly at us and explaining that he'd just lost a tournament.

At the time of writing, of course, it's all academic but hopefully big Greg is on the flip side of this supplement, doffing his ostentatious hat and expelling all those ghosts.

More likely, though, his rightful place has been usurped by Beckham or Hakkinen or some such other who knows little of his plight. As of Saturday, Greg Norman was a marvellous athlete who seemed destined to evoke in us that most damning of emotions: sympathy.

Better off to ignore him and take refuge in the plastic world of Shearer and company. The straight-jawed one contemplated on the virtues of his team-mate, Temuri Ketsbiah on Saturday. "'E's a good lad," he revealed. Nice, safe, worthless.