My post-Masters recovery often has begun in Aiken, South Carolina, a charming town of wide streets and big houses, horse tracks and stables, a half hour’s drive east from Augusta. There I am often to be found having my breakfast in a charming joint called the Track Kitchen, where Miss Alice serves two eggs sunny side up with bacon, whole wheat toast and coffee accompanied by a cackling laugh. With peeling wallpaper and faded black-and-white photographs, the surroundings have seen better days, but the food hasn’t. It is an ideal start to a wind-down day.
Seve Ballesteros always used to say that he couldn’t play the week after a major championship because he needed time to recover from the mental and physical effort of the previous week. In some recent cases, there has been no question of a gentle and quiet recovery. Victory in a major championship required a major celebration.
Not long after winning the 2019 Open at Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland in the late afternoon of a Sunday, Shane Lowry arrived at a bar in Dublin in the Republic of Ireland in the early hours of Monday morning. Rumours, which, of course, are exaggerated, suggest he didn’t get home until Tuesday, or was it Wednesday? Who is to say? And no one could accuse Darren Clarke, Lowry’s fellow Irishman, of not knowing how to celebrate his win in the 2011 Open. That, too, lasted for days. Clarke is a big man and known for big celebrations.
After Ernie Els had won the 2002 Open at Muirfield, he travelled south to his home near Ascot, England, and the next day ventured out with the old claret jug to show it off to friends and fellow residents of his village. Everything was going swimmingly until at one port of call a gruff voice called out to him from a corner of a bar. It was Sam Torrance, himself known to celebrate occasionally with a high degree of vigour. And there we had best leave this story and let Els or Torrance tell it themselves.
One supposes that Zach Johnson celebrated his victory in the 2007 Masters quietly because that would be in character. I can’t imagine that Collin Morikawa did anything very extravagant after his triumph in the Open at Royal St George’s last summer, either.
The point of a recovery week is to recover, and each player is entitled to do it in any way he sees fit without any hint of disapproval. The player has won a major championship, an extremely difficult thing to do.
As for me, I’ve written about one, which is not exactly a piece of cake either. Settling into my chair at the Track Kitchen last Tuesday, I felt I had deserved my breakfast, and I hope to celebrate another Masters in the same way next year.
John Hopkins
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