LockerRoom: I'm not infected, so far as I know, with any sort of virus or bug but around this time every year I get a hankering to be let off to the cathedral in the pines. A right painful hankering it is too. Augusta! The Masters! The place where they dye the lakes and treat everyone like dirt. I wanna be there. Valhalla.
Other hacks who have actually been there like to put me off the idea. This always makes me suspicious. The town of Augusta ain't actually so nice, they say. There's the women thing and the racial thing and anyway it's not a wonderful place to work from. You can't get a decent club sandwich brought to your desk.
Blah blah blah.
Try the Ulster final in Clones on a wet day, lads. The press-box latte double mochas are cat.
Anyway, the panjandrums who run the Masters give out accreditations on what seems to me a perniciously unfair basis. They give first preference to people who know something about golf.
There's no second preference and no special dispensation for big bozos who just want to tramp about the place leaving fat footfalls and stealing souvenirs and shouting ya boy ya at Padraig Harrington.
So I pine for the pines and I yearn for the yonder. I daydream of the dogwood and I get melancholy for the magnolias.
I imagine every year that if only I could get my raggedy backside to somewhere so perfectly manicured and so, so wonderfully and redolently historic, well, then my prose would improve accordingly. I'd raise my game. The childer would get fed. Everyone would win.
And it would give me an excuse to write about Bobby Jones. Bobby Jones was sort of ill-used by the Augusta folk at the end of the day but his course stands as its own testimony and his comes to mind anytime you hear an athlete talking about retirement. Nobody ever went out at the top in quite the same way as Bobby Jones managed to get out at the top.
There's a lot to be said for getting out at the summit. Pat O'Neill, JBM, Donal O'Grady, Nicky English - they've all done it in recent times, but nobody has walked away from air as rare as that which Bobby Jones was sucking in back in 1930. In his final season he won the Grand Slam of golf, comprising as it did then the British Open, the British Amateur, the US Open and the US Amateur.
It's hard for us to imagine the impact Bobby Jones had. It didn't register in Nike sales or endorsement deals or celebrity girlfriends. When he won the two British events that year they gave him a ticker tape parade down Broadway. He clinched the US Open with a 40-foot putt on the 18th to make a birdie.
He made golf the game it is today. He introduced the game to America as a big-time sport. The sportswriter Grantland Rice described him as having captured the imagination of the American people like "no man since Lindbergh".
The final event of his triumphant tour was the US Amateur. So novel was the idea of somebody winning the four big tournaments of the year that the term Grand Slam only came into being to describe the windmill Jones was now tilting at. Some hack (related to this column no doubt) tried to fly a kite for an alternative name, The Impregnable Quadrilateral of Golf. Works for me I must say.
They had to call in the US Marines to keep the crowd at bay for that last tournament. Jones, in a special and defining moment of achievement matching expectation, won the event in style.
And then he went away and practised law, which he had been studying all along, and with Dr Alistair McKenzie he went and built the course at Augusta and founded the US Masters, which as a tournament would in time come to redefine the concept of Grand Slam.
Jones retired having played in 52 tournaments, winning 23 of them including 13 majors. He was 28 when he packed it in.
It's interesting to think of him. It was said at the time of his pomp he played golf no more frequently than the average dentist did and all his utterances and thoughts on the game run counter to everything we take for granted as the inescapable wisdom of modern golf. Jones didn't over think the game. He thought about it when he had to.
Sam Snead once asked him which tournament he'd most wanted to win and Jones just shrugged and said: "Whatever one I was playing in at the time." Way back then without the benefits of sports shrinks or swing doctors or whispering gurus or Big Berthas, Jones achieved just about everything there is to achieve even now three-quarters of a century later.
In the 1926 British Open at Sunningdale he played what is still regarded as one of the most perfect rounds of golf ever played. 33 out. 33 back. 33 putts. 33 other strokes. No twos on his card. No fives on his card. Six fours and three threes on the way out. Same on the way back. I had a round like that once but it was pitch and putt.
To make things worse he was good-looking and self-effacing. He once told Arthur Daley, the old New York Times journalist, about the first time he ever played a round of golf with the legendary Harry Vardon.
It was the US Open of 1920 and Jones was just a kid pitched in with the legend, who uttered not a word to him as they played around the course at Inverness. On one green they both landed just off and Vardon played a tidy little chip-and-run shot to within a few feet. Jones, looking to impress just a little, tried a fancy cut and skited the ball across the green.
He turned red-faced to Vardon and stuttered apologetically, "Well, did you ever see a worse shot, Mr Vardon?" Without glancing back at the young fella, Vardon just uttered one word: "No." And he continued surveying the line of his putt.
But it's Jones who has lasted. Not for his money - as an amateur, he never won anything - but for his class and his imagination and his construction of a golfing world within Augusta which has insulated itself against change both good and bad.
There's a little of the tradition of Bobby Jones left today as we start down Masters week. In the 1925 US Open Jones called a penalty shot upon himself when his iron touched the grass behind his ball as he lined up a shot. The ball moved fractionally. Nobody saw it. There were no TV cameras to tell the tale.
Just a few years ago in the gloaming of a US Open evening in Pebble Beach, playing the last hole before dark, Padraig Harrington did the same. He inadvertently moved the ball a fraction of a centimetre when nobody was looking. He put his hand up.
Jones's reaction to the praise he received for his act of sportsmanship was to say "you might as well praise a man for not robbing a bank". Harrington reflected much of the same modesty and logic.
A win for Harrington would suit history just fine. And anyone with an NUJ card who might be lucky enough to be there to see it should learn a little of the lesson of Bobby Jones. Get out at the top, boys! Let them accredit the ignorant and the indigent next April!
