The Augusta National

I've just had, for me, the most extraordinary experience of living outside the real world for a whole week. No television, no newspaper that reported anything but the matter in hand – which we'll come to in a minute – no contact with people who talked about the real world or anything going on in it.

Perhaps I'm being a little snobbish in using that phrase, 'the real world'. I suppose I mean the world we cannot help rubbing elbows with once you're home from your job and, even on your job, you have to contend with traffic, telephones or tractors, a crop not coming along as you'd expected, and in the evening, unless you're a monk or a nun, you see and hear about the Cyprus hijacking, the patrolling Israeli soldiers in the Occupied Territories, about the French election, about Prince Charles and modern architecture, about Mayor Koch in New York saying that any Jew who voted for the Reverend Jesse Jackson would have to be, his word, crazy.

I learned about these things last Monday on my return from Shangri La. I should say that Shangri La, which is way down yonder in Georgia, has newspapers and television with all the regular national stations and a flurry of cable stations, too, but there was never any time to read or listen. This was my daily round in Shangri La. Wake, breakfast of various fruits and juices, scrambled eggs, country sausage – that is, sausage patties, no skin, no bread – crisp bacon, grits with pepper and butter and hot, southern biscuits which are an unsweet, floury scone. Back to the motel room, grab a badge and a shooting stick, the telephone rings. The car is there.

Whisked off, the last glimpse of the real world of supermarkets, petrol stations, lunch counters, pancake parlours and the like, into a long driveway bordered by magnolias, down to a circular lawn with flowerbeds and into a small, white, Southern, colonial plantation house, flanked by what once were slave quarters and are now, on one side, suites for the older members of this club, and, on the other side, the locker room for the players. There. The word is out. The word is golf and let me say, at once, that I have long appreciated golf is possibly, next to chess, the most impossible game to talk about to non-players so we're not going into the four-day tournament itself, but the sanctuary from the real world in which it's played.

After nodding and chatting up various old friends and acquaintances, you emerge from the far door of the plantation house into the burning Southern sun and on to a lawn of blinding green, shaded by three immense evergreen live oaks and, beyond them, are the rolling, the majestically sweeping, 300-odd acres whose walkways and great stretches of grass between the different fairways are cut finer than any lawn. The fairways themselves have been sculptured for the tournament to different cuts of the grass so that over any hill there will be three or four different carpets of grass in different shades, say, 400 yards long, rippling over the undulating land like vast strips of velvet.

An English bible I keep close at hand when I'm at home, an encyclopedia of golf, says it is probably the most beautiful course in the world for it has made the most of its Berckmans' inheritance. This huge parcel of land had been, during the American Civil War, a fruit farm for the Confederate troops, but when the war was long over, it was bought by a Belgian, the Baron Berckmans, a noted horticulturist who created there the South's first great nursery. So by now the wide, sweeping fairways are fringed by trimmed forests of the slender, towering Georgia pines. The Baron's son was also a flower and tree maniac and down the years, father and son confined the wild flowers to the creeks of running water and planted on all the banks all the native Georgia flowers, so that you move down one cathedral aisle of fairway called Camellia and on to the Azalea hole and then the Red Bud and the Firethorn and the White Dogwood and the Pink Dogwood and on and on.

So you see it really is a magnificent park, kept immaculate throughout the day by an inconspicuous army of men with spiked rods who spear every vagrant plastic cup or cigarette butt. Incidentally, in our swiftly changing time, I doubt whether there was one smoker in a hundred of the 25,000 people who padded quietly, almost reverently around the course. It is Augusta National, as even non-golfers know, a sort of huge memorial garden to the supreme golfer and gentle man who acquired it and built the course and invited a few friends to play it and never guessed, in 1934, that soon this would become one of the four major tournaments in the world. The immortal, the unforgotten, Bobby Jones.

You wander around this paradise until the early evening, when the long inky shadows fall across a horizon of emerald and then, if you're normal, you enjoy what the former Speaker of the House, Mr Tip O'Neill, called 'a few poops with the boys' and talk golf and nothing else. I ran into many men and women from what we used to call various walks of live, but without compulsion or guidance, they all seemed to talk about the golf that was going on, the golf that happened here two, ten, thirty years ago, the rise and fall of great players, the chances of this favourite and that. I gladly succumbed to this beautiful tunnel vision of things. At the end of each perfect day, there was no obligation on my part to catch up with the outside world and, after the first day, I had no inclination to.

On a day at the end of the week I sat alone on a balcony of the clubhouse, overlooking the lawn, and studied the numerous trios and quartets of people sitting at tables under spreading umbrellas. Admittedly, they were a favoured lot, favoured in the first place at having tickets to get in to the tournament which limits the gate and closes down applications usually by the end of November. The tickets cost $100 for the four days, which is not beyond the reach of most people who have the foresight to write in the previous autumn.

By the time the tournament begins, you see lone men standing by the side of the highway outside the grounds of the course, waving little placards or sheets of paper on which are scrawled, 'Need two tickets' or 'Will buy Sunday ticket, please'. They are very naive losers. By the weekend before the tournament, at meetings of all sorts of people – businessmen, professors, other professionals in various cities, in the north as well as the south – men are nudging up to other men and wondering forlornly if a family illness or other emergency has made a ticket suddenly available for purchase.

A friend of mine who was attending a fund-raising dinner for the centennial of his old college told me about a Japanese guest approaching a man who was taking his wife and son and daughter to Augusta this time. The Japanese bowed and wondered with respect if it might be possible to buy the tickets. Four tickets were just what he was looking for. 'Not for all the money in your corporation,' the American said. 'Not,' suggested the Japanese, 'for $6,000?'. The man gulped and recovered his family feeling. 'No, indeed!' he said.

I noticed, looking down over the smiling, affable people on the lawn, that there was not a glum face. There were several players in there both famous and less famous and pretty women and portly members of the club in their statutory green jackets. Nowhere, I should say, a hint of what I called, at the beginning, the real world. From time to time, a player would stop by or a member I knew or a visiting Briton and a small troop of golf writers. They're all genial and congenial types. Then, it struck me, I must say a little late in the day, that they ought to be genial. What, for me, is a very rare, blessed escape from the world and its troubles, is for them a regular routine. They live and breathe and have their being in various Shangri Las, scattered around the world.

Old Henry Longhurst, the most affable, but unfooled, of all golf writers, said it in just about the last sentence he ever wrote: 'To me, golf has brought a congenial life – a life spent among pleasant people who have mostly been at their pleasantest in the circumstances in which I've met them, often in some of the greatest beauty spots in the world'.

The giveaway phrase there is 'at their pleasantest'. You don't see them at home wrestling with tax forms or gloomy school reports or at protest meetings to stop them throwing a six-lane motorway across the Stevenson's place at bottom of the garden. And the players, as one writer said to me apropos of some menacing changes that are casting a dark cloud over the face of this tournament, mainly money, he said, 'You're not going to get much of a protest or an original idea from the players. They talk only among themselves. They play golf by day and talk it by night'.

Well, mooching through a party once, among a half-dozen of the most famous players alive, somebody broke into the general talk with a remark about a politician. It was as if a man had broken into a prayer meeting to talk about golf. A look of mild disdain rippled across the famous faces. Most of them, I believe, knew who was President of the United States. I would not take bets on their knowing this time who is running for president.

So the lesson from this experience is, it's not difficult to be genial and friendly in a green paradise where the skies are not cloudy all day and never is heard a discouraging word about the Russians or the homeless or drugs or next Tuesday's New York primary in which, it occurs to me, as I come awake from this guilty dream, we shall know whether the Jewish vote of New York city will outweigh the black vote and move the Reverend Jackson back, if not to square one, to a place in which he may begin to think of a job in the Cabinet of President Dukakis.

That is, in the rosy, enormous hope that Governor Dukakis is going to beat Vice President Bush.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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