Line between tradition and change is blurred as the Masters looks to

AUGUSTA, Ga. — IN ONE OF the strangest rituals in sports, which serves as a meta skeleton key to understanding the Augusta National Golf Club, three old men dressed in a quiet locker room to hit a ceremonial tee shot. Huge crowds of people waited for them down below, stacked five and six deep, from the big tree down to the middle of the first fairway. Members in green jackets huddled with cups of coffee on the clubhouse veranda.

The murmurs started.

“There’s Jack.”

“Jack!”

The most beloved golfer on the course, Jack Nicklaus, had arrived, beloved despite not hitting a meaningful shot in decades, beloved not in spite of his age but somehow because of it. He knew Bobby Jones. So did his friend Gary Player, who once had dinner with the old champion when Jones’ hands were so riddled with arthritis he couldn’t hold a dinner fork. He asked Player to wedge a fork in between his gnarled digits and, if he’d be so kind, to cut up his steak. Player did as he was asked and then tried to get some insight about how to birdie the impossible No. 3.

“You’re not supposed to birdie the third hole,” Jones told him solemnly.

These three men are a bridge that connects the old Masters, an insular southern rite of spring, with the new Masters, which at its heart is an experiment designed to discover, once and for all, if money can truly solve every problem. Tom Watson walked with them and all three golfers waited as the club chairman welcomed the crowd to another year.

It was first-light gray with the idea of blue visible in there, too. The air didn’t smell like cigar smoke yet. They all played their parts. Gary flexing and almost sneering for someone to challenge his physical prowess. Tom made a joke about wrecking a go-kart and Jack played the jester, which is what’s left now that his furious competitiveness has been tempered and cooled by age and scars.

I’d come out to…