It's hard not to have mixed, half-guilty feelings about The Masters. It's the most sinful pleasure in sport. The last day of the tournament is surely one of the great occasions, compulsive viewing, sport as soap opera cum lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-famous, an afternoon of theatre set in a sumptuous cathedral before a knowing and appreciative audience.
Yet, it's hard to sit down and look at it all without thinking of The Onion, America's satirical newspaper, which ran gleeful headlines to the effect that Tiger Woods' achievements at Augusta National were to be honoured by granting Tiger his own water fountain and eating area at the course. Members were "quoted" as describing Tiger as a credit to his race "and as far as we know he has no criminal record".
Needless to say I watch anyway, with a liberal's bleeding heart and a fan's racing pulse. I sit tut-tutting at every picture-postcard shot of perfect privilege, boring anyone that's watching with me with impromptu challenges to spot a few black faces in the crowd, tiresomely telling them again and again that they put dye in the lakes to make them blue, you know, that the green of the grass and the blue of the lake is the most diversity in terms of colour that Augusta National can stomach, that the town of Augusta is apparently a kip, that nothing good seeps back out of the golf club which put the town on the map. On and on I go till I am threatened with a lonely old age.
And of course the truth is that I long to be there, to be seduced by the whole damn place like every sportswriter I know has been. Even the cliches about the place are beautiful. If you see the words dogwood and azalea in the same sentence you know the person is writing about Augusta. Cathedral in the pines. Amen Corner. Donning the Green Jacket. The ghost of Bobby Jones. There is much in sport that you need to forgive to love it, and The Masters requires more forgiveness than anything else, but still . . .
For a while there, before the 18th mugged him on Saturday, we could fantasise about what it would be like if Padraig Harrington won the thing. Talk about Ronnie Delany - Padraig could have milked the thing through to his infirmity.
WATCHING the tournament this week, though, one thought recurred. Golf, a game whose social roots, at least in the US, are in the exclusivity which Augusta best exemplifies, is changing. It is being tugged along by the market and it is changing in more ways than the Tiger Woods water fountain and the increased length of Augusta would suggest. It is becoming a global game and the best stories come from the most unlikely places.
Going into yesterday morning the leaderboard was dotted with the names of men who won't be at the Ryder Cup this autumn. Men from Fiji, Argentina, Australia, South Africa. You looked through the names of the people who make golf such an interesting game these days and they aren't the Anglo-Saxons and WASPS for whom the Ryder Cup is built.
Vijay Singh, always glowering, always mesmeric, the whiff of golfing scandal always somewhere there in his deep background back in his Borneo days. What a story. You've never heard him say one thing that's especially interesting, but he bears his past around with him like an original sin. His past and his presence. His participation at any tournament transforms the event from Tiger Woods plus Supporting Cast into a gathering of easily identifiable high-achievers.
Has there been a better story in sport recently than Reteif Goosen, whose metamorphosis from virtual non-entity to world class player has been achieved with the assistance of a lank-haired, former Belgian pop star called Jos Vanstiphout, a self-styled guru of the mental side of the game, half horse whisperer, half psychologist. Goosen is his Mona Lisa. Stand on the putting green at any big tournament now and you will see big-time players bicker over who gets to consult with Jos first.
And there is the clinically cool, good looking young Australian Adam Scott, who since his breakthrough in South Africa last year has been looking more and more like the next big thing, or one of them. Then this week's long shot, the rugged Argentinian gaucho Angel Cabrera, a tough man who looks like a riverboat gambler.
All these stories have one thing in common: they can't be admitted to the Ryder Cup scrapbook. Japanese and New Zealanders and Zimbabweans, they all suffer the same exclusion. The Ryder Cup rolls on as a symbol of golf's old and outdated exclusivity.
Come the autumn and The Belfry, when all the silliness starts again between America and Europe (can we ever forgive Justin Leonard? could Monty ever get a fair trial in an American court?), we'll miss those faces and their stories and the Ryder Cup will look like more of an anachronism than ever, a huge event the original spirit of which has been long lost, a career landmark available to only some, an "honour" which has the undertow of players' greed and television's profits threatening to undo it.
A couple of years ago, after Brookline and the attendant ugliness, bad sportsmanship and bad losing, I was on a radio programme with David Feherty. Feherty noted wisely that what the Ryder Cup needed was a great and unnecessary act of sportsmanship. It needs that and it needs more.
September 11th brought little change to the blithe world of sport, but it booted the Ryder Cup to a different calendar year. It should do more, though. It should render the sort of rabid tribalism which has accompanied the Ryder Cup recently all the more distasteful and redundant. Why not broaden it out, take away the polarity, dilute the spite? The competition didn't die when Europe was added in. It might die if it is left as a vehicle of anti-Americanism.
Right now, apart from the pleasure of seeing three Irish players leave their mark on a big time event, the Ryder Cup stands as an oddity on the sports schedule, a huge event which excludes many of the sport's players. One guilty pleasure per golfing year is enough.
