Master's Diary

IT has been quite a week down ol' Augusta way. St Arnold's departure on Friday night, after his 50th successive US Masters, left not a dry eye in the house. Rae's Creek was a-brimming with salty tears from 60,000 eyes.

Marvellous character that Palmer is, thank heavens we won't have to endure his canonisation again. After numerous false alarms, I think that we can assume his career in the Majors has now ended at the age of 74 years, seven months and a day.

"The Masters is Arnie," blubbed one CBS commentator as the great man took leave of the 36th green after posting rounds of 84 and 84 to miss the cut by just 20 strokes. Quite what the leaders, including Phil Mickelson, whose last two holes on Friday evening were completely blanked as the television station paid homage to Arnie, made of this remark we can only surmise.

DANG and dogone. One hesitates to discuss colour, especially here in the deep south of the US of A, but needs must. In the bad old days, when Tiger Woods and Vijay Singh would not have been invited to play in the Masters, there was at least some dosh on offer for the local black population - even if the jobs they were given were menial. Nowadays even the lowest of the low, the yellow-overalled litter collectors, are predominantly white college students all too willing to accept the American minimum wage of $5.25 an hour.

The biggest loss, though, has been amongst the white-overalled, green-capped caddies, who all used to be local black men. Now the players use their regular PGA Tour bagmen, who, while of a teak hue, have acquired that complexion through constant exposure to the sun.

IT was Tom Watson who, in the early 1980s, persuaded the Green Jackets that tour caddies should be allowed to work at Augusta. Why, he asked, could he employ his own advocate in court, yet not use his own caddie at the Masters? Watson's bagman for 31 years was Bruce Edwards, and the two men were close friends. Poignantly Edwards, who had been suffering from ALS, which is also called Lou Gehrig's disease, died on Thursday morning, just hours before Watson set out on his first round.

TALKING of the old days, St Arnold tells a lovely story about a local caddie, Nathaniel Avery, who was known as Iron Man.

When a relatively impoverished Arnie won his first Masters in 1958, the prize money was $14,000 - a sum far beyond anything he had ever seen, never mind got his hands on, before. Iron Man was on the bag, and the dashing, quiff-haired, Palmer instructed his late wife, Winnie, to make out a cheque for 10% of the winnings. In her excitement, she wrote one out for $14,000.

"That's funny now," Palmer told me the other day over a peach cobbler, "but it wasn't funny at the time. When we finally realised what had happened, old Iron Man was heading out the gate because he knew no-one here would cash the cheque for him."

Unfortunately for the caddie he didn't leg it quite fast enough - and when collared had to make do with the $1,400, which would still have been a fortune at the time. Young Arnold, meanwhile, went on to become a multi-millionaire saint.

ANOTHER caddie, Alastair McLean, would have pocketed $144,000 two Sundays ago had he been given 10 per cent of Adam Scott's winner's cheque at the Players Championship.

Nowadays the top caddies are on a salary and lower percentages, but even so McLean has been walking about Augusta National with a well-merited smile on his face.

Having borne the brunt of Colin Montgomerie's tantrums for a decade, McLean now spends balmy days in the company of even-tempered nice guy Scott. The contrast in natures was evident on Thursday when Monty blew a gasket after bogeying the last for a 71, while Scott, many shots worse, kept his cool. Both eventually missed the cut.

No wonder arts history graduate McLean is laughing. The owner of a house in Glasgow's Kirklee, he is likely to be looking for an upgrade soon. Like a museum.

THERE are a number of pot-bellied, pea-brained, golf writers in the Taj Mahal of press centres at Augusta National who believe the universe revolves solely around Arnie 'n' Jack, Phil 'n' Tiger. Exactly a year ago, though, they stopped to look, and then whoop, at the pictures of Saddam Hussein's statue being toppled in Baghdad.

Twelve months on, the situation in Iraq hasn't quite worked out as planned. Instead, it's George Bush who is likely to be toppled in November if the American elections are run fair and square. Dang, dang and double dogone.

Copyright 2004 SMG Sunday Newspapers Ltd.
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.