Augusta’s time warp
AUGUSTA, GEORGIA | “What time is it?”
Such was the most oft-repeated question at the 2025 Masters as one patron after another was worried about missing some pre-arranged meeting with old friends or business acquaintances.
No-one, though, was blaming Masters' hierarchy for all this quizzing. Rather was it the fault of the patrons themselves, since it was only after following instructions in leaving their mobile phones outside the gates that it had dawned on them that they had forgotten to wear a watch. (Long gone are the days when people used to put one on automatically.)
Of course they could look at other people’s watches, just as they are permitted to sit down on other people’s green canvas Masters seats until such time as their owners need them for themselves. However, with only 35 percent of the global population still watch-wearers, it was not the easiest thing to do, especially when a goodly proportion of the latest devices are of the black-face variety. Maddeningly, a surreptitious glance at one of those wasn't going to tell you whether it was 1 o’clock or 5 o’clock.
... I began to wonder if asking someone the time was akin to an invasion of privacy, or to insisting that a perfect stranger should share his sweets.
Most of the Americans who’d had the sense to bring a regular watch along were bemused rather than bothered at having to respond to yet another “time” question. Certainly, that applied to the one who gave me a wink when I approached him and said he was going to start charging people if it went on for too much longer.
Another fellow, or rather his wife, was less inclined to see the lighter side of the situation.
I happened to be sitting at the end of the stand behind the practice area, with the wife on my right and the husband in the next seat along. Not wanting to disturb the wife, who was studying the Scottie Scheffler swing, I looked across her lap towards her husband’s left wrist. Yes, he was wearing a watch, only so small were the digits that I couldn’t read them. When I tried for a second time, the wife turned to me with an irritated, “Do you mind?”
That was the point when I began to wonder if asking someone the time was akin to an invasion of privacy, or to insisting that a perfect stranger should share his sweets. Because of it, I gave up on my questions and successfully relied on luck to meet up with my granddaughter.
Others were not so fortunate. The man who had been waving furiously at his missing friend on the far side of a fairway never saw him again. And the distraught parents who had lost a couple of daughters could only assume that the teenagers had clean forgotten what time they had agreed to be where.
Moving on from watches to clocks, the lack of them left me wondering if Fred Ridley, the chairman of Augusta National Golf Club, had worried lest such instruments might do as old-fashioned grandfather clocks in chiming on the hour every hour. Yet judging from the number of players – they include Jon Rahm and Brooks Koepka – who have connections with Rolex, you would have to think that Rolex and Augusta could sort something out.
Mind you, Rolex clocks have been known to disappear. At the 2011 Walker Cup hosted by Royal Aberdeen Golf Club, the handsome edition which had been standing behind the first tee in front of the clubhouse was whisked to its next port of call long before the match was over.
By way of a warning for next year’s Masters, it is worth noting that it is not just iPhones that you cannot take onto the course. In what is the patrons’ equivalent of the Rules of Golf, there is a list of “can’t dos” which includes bringing your own food, a radio, a TV, “or any noise or music producing devices.”
Laura Davies, now a Sky Sports television commentator, may have been responsible for the banning of TVs. On the final day of the 1996 Evian Championship, she had a mini TV tucked into her golf bag and was able to keep an eye on England’s quarterfinal match against Spain in that year’s European Football Championship. England won in a penalty shootout and Davies, though she was fined £50 for her indiscretion, won the tournament.
Lewine Mair
E-MAIL LEWINE
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