True Masters greatness: No ads or cell phones

AUGUSTA, Ga. - The vast majority of people who attend the Masters don't arrive in used cars.

They don't have breakfast at Waffle House before heading over to the course. Only a small fraction have tattoos.

However, I did see a man on the grounds of Augusta National Golf Club Friday who had a small Nike swoosh tattooed on one of his calves. He was wearing an adidas shirt. That was weird on too many levels to even begin to contemplate. I'm sorry I even mentioned it.

It could just be me being woefully unaware, but I don't think I'm in proximity to lots of multimillionaires in my life back home. While waiting in line to pay for my slice of pizza at Casey's, I tend not to wonder if the person in front of me is a hedge fund manager. Here, you can't watch a golf shot without being near a chairman of this, an executive director of that, or a retail sales manager of Agri Beef in Boise, Idaho.

But they're in regular-guy disguise here, wearing polo shirts, shorts and ball caps as if they were middle-class or something. (There are also a lot of middle-class folks in attendance who got their tickets through one happy circumstance or another. They could have been you had you only known someone with the right connections. But be thankful for clean water and electricity and fine television shows like 'Justified.” If you aren't a 'Justified” viewer, you've missed something. Don't you hate that when someone tells you something like that. People have told me the same thing about 'Game of Thrones.” Which makes me want to watch it even less.)

Some people are intimidated by people of other races or religions. Me, I don't do so well when I'm around the richy-rich. I always feel like they hold me in contempt for not devoting my life to the pursuit of power and wealth. I always worry they'll call one of the senators or governors they own and have me deported because my own polo shirt is faded and rumpled.

But those are personal idiosyncrasies, and I thank you for letting me try to work those out in print rather than getting professional help. Let's move on to something far more positive. I want to seriously praise the Masters, and not just because it's a storied athletic event at a fabled venue. Where, by the way, you can get caramel pecan popcorn. I'm not a caramel popcorn person, but the pecans take it to a much higher level. However, I have two other primary points of gratitude.

One: There is no advertising on the grounds of Augusta National. None

.

It's jarring. You can't go to a pro or major-college sporting event without feeling like you're at one long series of commercials occasionally interrupted by a game. The scoreboards aren't even called scoreboards anymore. They're video boards, and their main purpose is to move products.

But it's everywhere. Going to the movies is half seeing the film you paid to see and half waiting out multiple commercials and trailers for other movies you would never dream of paying to see, assuming you have a certain amount of taste.

You can't go to a website without darting through and around ads to get to where you want to go. I thank you for doing that here, by the way. And please support our sponsors.

That's all part of capitalism at work, but imagine how nice it is to be somewhere that's hosting an elite athletic competition without as much as one sign encouraging you to buy a certain smartphone.

Two: No phones.

No one can take a selfie of themselves at Amen Corner to try to impress others. No one can text friends to tell them they just saw the back of Tiger Woods' head. No one at the venue can watch video from another hole on the course instead of actually watching the golf being played in front of them.

What a concept!

I was on a train in the Atlanta airport the other day going from my gate to the baggage claim area. I counted 12 people in my car, and all 12 were locked into their phones. No conversation. Not even a fake smile could be seen, just a dozen phone-junkies locked into what author Joshua Ferris calls 'me-machines.”

There's no holier-than-thou about this, either. I looked up from my phone to notice that.

You can only get away with insisting on no advertising and no cellphones when you have great power and wealth. So maybe I should rethink my feelings about the richy-rich.

Yeah, right. As the great unwashed like to text on their me-machines, LOL.