Why the Masters Really Is the Greatest Live Sporting Event on Earth

I have attended two Super Bowls. I have been to the World Series and the WNBA Finals. I have seen a Copa America semifinal game featuring Lionel Messi, and a Knicks playoff game at the Garden. I was there when Liverpool beat Manchester United 7-0 at Anfield. I have been in the building for three MLB no-hitters. As a kid, my dad brought me to the Rose Bowl and NCAA Tournament games.

But I have never experienced anything like the Masters.

Everything that people say about Augusta National—the sanctified golf course, shrouded by forest in Augusta, Georgia—is true. You’ve never seen shades of green quite like the ones you see there. The club’s insistence on banning cell phones from the premises during the Masters makes it feel frozen in time, like you could be in 1975 or 2025. It is surely the only place in the world that can make thousands of straight men care about azaleas this much. But above all that, the uniqueness lies in one pretty undeniable fact: Everyone at the Masters is in a great mood. Particularly for the midweek crowd, who are watching the most prestigious golf tournament in the world rather than sending emails or attending Zoom meetings, there’s a collective sense that, outside these 365 acres, nothing else matters or even exists. For Wednesday’s practice sessions and par-3 exhibition, plus Thursday’s opening round, the seismic pressure and swarming crowds of the weekend haven’t yet arrived. Everything’s pretty blissed out—the social acceptability of a 10 a.m. vodka lemonade certainly helps in that regard, as does being able to stroll around puffing a cigar—and it’s not just the patrons who feel that way.

“I’m glad to be here. It’s really cool,” golfer Ludvig Åberg told me on Wednesday. The 25-year-old Swede entered his second Masters ranked fifth in the world—and finished the tournament on Sunday with a respectable seventh-place finish. “It gives you some nice little feelings and makes you feel good. There’s so many stories about Augusta, like myths. Is this really true? Is this how it is? Is this what they do? There’s so many things that we don’t really know!”

While walking the grounds last week—blessed with the type of Goldilocks sunshine that puts a smile on your face, but not an overwhelming layer of sweat—my mind kept returning to that tweet that called the event Coachella for dads. That really is an apt comparison: As someone who’s been to both, I think the Masters really is much more similar to Coachella (or even Disneyland) than it is to any other sporting event. Also, I was literally there with my dad, an avid golfer who wriggled out of his own work obligations, dropped everything, and happily flew across the country to experience the mecca of golf for himself. Rather than braving the sea of Vineyard Vines, Zyn-popping bros, and Southern belles in their best floral dresses by myself, I got to do it with the man who raised me, returning the favor for all those games he took me to when I was younger.