Gary Player’s stream of consciousness characterises Masters opening day | Andy Bull

TThis year the start was slightly behind time at the Masters, three hours late due to the storm that broke through early in the morning. It was already 10am when Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player and Tom Watson reached the practice range, and just 10.15am when they walked from the clubhouse through the gallery to the first tee. The player stopped to press a ball into the palm of a lady waiting near the ropes. Her name was Barbara and she was 88. “We’re the same age,” she says, smiling like a little child who has just discovered the big presents at the back of the Christmas tree.

Player also gives her a kiss on the cheek as he goes back inside. Turns out this is one of his Masters traditions. “It’s the third time he’s done it,” says Barbara. “My husband said if he did it again this year, I wouldn’t be allowed to come home afterward.”

Nevertheless, she adds, she had put on the exact same yellow blouse so Player could distinguish her from the crowd. Which brings about a change. It’s more common for people here to wear green and pink when Player is around so they can hide behind an azalea bush until it gets blown over. When there’s a whisper in the trees at Augusta, it’s often someone asking, “Psst, is he gone?”

In the press room after the start, Player has a captivated audience. He does not regard questions as requests, but as invitations. “Can you describe what it’s like to put on the Green Jacket every year when you return to the Masters?” someone starts. “Who was that for?” The player says, “Was that on me?” He leans forward toward the microphone, like a man doing his backswing. “Well, obviously I’ve been here or associated with Augusta for 67 years and came here for the first time in ’57…” The ball was running, probably somewhere far off to the right and out of bounds.

“I met one of my heroes, President Eisenhower,” Player continues, “because, as we all know, he is a man who believed in freedom, and what he did for this great country is beyond words.” In the next breath he mentions his background, ‘growing up poor as a young boy and suffering a lot as a young family’, describes himself as the man ‘who has traveled more miles than any man who ever lived’ and the US as “the greatest land that God ever made.” We never find out what he thought about putting on that famous green jacket.

Then someone else made the mistake of asking about the secret of longevity. Watson raises his eyebrows. “I went to India, and there was a gerontologist, and he gave me the secret to longevity,” Player begins, and for a moment you wondered if it would be “gunga galunga”. But no. It is ice baths, undereating, exercising, laughing and “love in my heart”. At this point Nicklaus is staring at the carpet and Watson is looking at the middle distance. There is, Player says, “a man on this earth right now who will live to be 140 years old and that is a medical fact.”

He clearly has plans for that title too, which means we still have fifty years to go.

Watson uses his time to make an eloquent plea for LIV and the PGA tour coming together so that “the best players play against each other,” Nicklaus used his to reminisce about the time he hit a shaft who “nearly killed Clifford Roberts” and his youth organization First Tee.

But Player just keeps going, wherever his thoughts take him. He rambles on about Shakespeare – “I think it was he who said, ‘The youth of a nation are the stewards of posterity’” (it wasn’t) – Churchill, William the Conqueror, the Ottoman Empire, Ben’s golf swing Hogan and cancel culture. “Personally, I don’t believe in legacies. If you take my all-time heroes, Winston Churchill, he was probably the greatest leader of the last 200 years, not counting the Ottomans and all the great leaders and William the Great. But without Churchill we wouldn’t be here today. And in England they defaced his statue and called him a racist!

“So if you think people will remember you, you’re dreaming. Everything passes, that’s a true saying.” Everything, that is, except his answers.