The SubAir System was developed in the nineteen-nineties, by the aptly named course superintendent Marsh Benson, in an effort to mitigate the effects of nature on this precious facsimile of it. This promotes growth. When the fans are reversed, they create a suction effect, and leach water from the greens.
This promotes firmness. The professionals who arrive at Augusta every April to compete in the Masters Tournament, the event for which the club is known, expect to be tested by greens that are hard and fast.
Amid all the other immodesties and peculiarities of Augusta, the greens, ultimately, are the thing. It is by now hardly scandalous to note that Augusta Nationalβcalled the National by its members and devotees, and Augusta by everyone elseβis an environment of extreme artifice, an elaborate television soundstage, a fantasia of the fifties, a Disneyclub in the Georgia pines. Some of the components of the illusion are a matter of speculation, as the club is notoriously stingy with information about itself.
It has been accepted as fact that recalcitrant patches of grass are painted green and that the ponds used to be dyed blue. Pine straw is imported. Pinecones are deported. There is a curious absence of fauna.
One hardly ever sees a squirrel or a bird. In , CBS got caught doing some overdubbing of its own, after a birder noticed that the trills and chirps on a golf broadcast belonged to non-indigenous species. Pimento-cheese sandwiches, egg-salad sandwiches, peach-ice-cream sandwiches, MoonPies, underpriced beer. You are urged to adopt the terminology favored by the tournament hosts and embraced by CBS. Gary McCord may have been onto something. The traps are bunkers, and what appears to patrons and television viewers to be the whitest sand in golf is technically not sand but waste from feldspar mines in North Carolina.
