Mystery members, trees with no birds… and a queue for John Daly at Hooters. Augusta is marvellous, fun – and very weird

John Daly is back in Augusta and the local Hooters are happy to have him. We know this because a sign outside their restaurant on Washington Road, about a mile from a very different kind of establishment, bears a message: Meet John Daly Here All Week. And that’s exactly what people do, queuing around the bend until they encounter their huffing, puffing master of chaos.

But a year ago he seemed a little less welcome. A few of us had gone out to do an annual survey of the wildest wave, and he was nowhere to be found at the spot he frequented for 26 years.

The table where he sells his autographs and stuff was gone. The camper place in the parking lot was gone. His packs of Marlboros, his Diet Coke, all gone. So what happened? What had driven away the 57-year-old winner of two majors, whose presence on this strip had become as familiar as the monuments down the street?

Well, there was some kind of answer to that from a waitress. “Indecent behavior,” she said, and those two words, along with a few others, invited a series of curiosities.

It boggles the mind, but then you get a bit of this, in this enclave of strange and wonderful contradictions and sensory distortions.

It is a place where you will find the world’s most exclusive golf club and where one in five of the population lives in poverty. A place where a black golfer has been the biggest draw for almost 30 years and where the first black member was only accepted in 1990.

A place where Tiger Woods can waltz into the weekend on one leg and where super-fit Rory McIlroy can tango between life and death with the cut. A place where some of the game’s legends ceremonially waved around to open the Masters and a different kind of star was temporarily barred from Hooters.

Those thoughts can chatter uneasily through your head, like a McIlroy drive bouncing from branch to branch along the perfectly ordered rows of pine trees. You may love it like I do, but you may also catch yourself asking the question: where the hell are the squirrels and birds?

That’s become a strange fixation in my mind over the past week, just as it did this time last year. One of the sweet buggy drivers who shuttle the media from the sport’s most lavish press center to golf’s manicured playground because they don’t want us walking behind the scenes, or maybe they just don’t, claims she saw one on Tuesday. She’s been doing that job for a few years and wonders the same question I do. “I didn’t see any squirrels last year, but they’re pretty strict about having ID,” she said, and that was fun.

It’s all fun. The sport is fun, the sense of history surrounding golf’s youngest major is fun, the setting is beautifully fun. The quaint white clubhouse is nice, and amazingly we as journalists can go in there if you fancy some shop talk.

A few colleagues with more privilege than me regularly wonder if that particular privilege will one day be revoked. If the green vests will eventually say no and pull down the hatches, as has become the norm in so many sports. But that hasn’t happened yet.

And so you walk in, passing the fireplace on the right, where a former reporter took a nap a few years ago, and up the narrow staircase on the left, where I once passed Jack Nicklaus on the way to the surprisingly small room where they on Tuesdays and always held the Champions Dinner. This way you get to the balcony and have the best view of the city. On Friday I was having coffee there and watching the politest form of bedlam downstairs as Woods stepped out of the same front door and headed to the first tee. Again, a privilege.

Last year Sir Nick Faldo sat to my left; sitting on my left on Friday was one of the older members, a business looking sort, but it makes you think twice about striking up a conversation with some of those lofty guys from Augusta National. That could be the invasion that breaks the arrangement. That could be the trigger for the drawbridge.

Because this is what the clubhouse is all about: it has an open and a closed door at the same time. You can come in, but you don’t take too much with you. They won’t tell us who is among their 300 or so members, but we know that includes Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. And we know of at least one former American president in their history: Dwight D. Eisenhower. Just as we know that a sticking point in the trivial matter of golf tour mergers is that Yasir Al-Rumayyan, the head of the Saudi wealth fund, and a man for whom the heads of state will draw up a schedule, has not yet succeeded.

We also know that they probably didn’t want us to know too much about last year’s falling trees, which almost affected some customers. Or to know where the squirrels go. Or to know how much green paint is used to correct the imperfections. Or to discuss the suggestion that hidden speakers play simulations of birdsong in the trees. Or to explain why some are given green jacket permission (through a system that some have assumed includes some sort of identification device and our passes) to ask questions at a press conference and others are not. At this point, at least a half-dozen people wanted to inquire about Woods’ recent golf meeting with Al-Rumayyan and all that controversial LIV merger stuff, and curiously, no one made it.

Small beans actually, in a place where the utopia has been so well preserved. In a place that can conjure up the thought that it exists under a glorious dome painted in the colors of a perfect blue sky and that occasionally introduces a storm for kicks. A place where you would rather spend a lot of time indoors than outside.

And that’s because it’s all great fun. But would it be a form of unchoiceful behavior to wonder why great can also feel a little weird?

Let Woods continue

Many wanted to see Tiger Woods retire when he limped seven holes out of the Masters last year to his third round.

We hear the same argument around Andy Murray and perhaps soon a similar argument towards Ronnie O’Sullivan if the world championships don’t go his way next week.

It’s the selfishness that comes from a good place and our desire to maintain heroes in a state closer to their greater form. It’s also nonsense and self-defeating. It was as uplifting as some of his best wins on two good legs to see Woods use his brains rather than diminished brawn to make the cut. Let them break through.

Kane and Haaland are both to be cherished

Harry Kane scored his 39th goal of the season for Bayern Munich against Arsenal in midweek.

Erling Haaland, meanwhile, has scored a clean sheet for the fourth time in five games, which has turned into a bit of drama that overlooks the fact he had 21 in the previous 20.

Kane is a better all-round player; Haaland becomes one of the greatest sports killers of all time and gives peace a brief chance.

Using one to defeat the other feels very much like a distraction when you can just sit back and watch them both.