When the world says Augusta -- breathy, whispery, church-of-golf Augusta -- the world always, always, means the acres of this city that lie behind a foot hedge of bamboo, pearlbush and red-tipped photinia. Say Augusta and the world always means one week among Before commercial breaks, the CBS cameras linger in soft focus almost indiscreetly on shots of flugelhorn azalea blossoms.
Those same cameras never pan to the horizon. Outside that hedge is an Augusta that is by turns squalid, handsome, proud, defeated, race-haunted, yearning, mired, God-fearing and frequently utterly exasperating. It is Georgia's second-largest city -- and a most unlikely First City of Golf.
If you've ever been to the Masters, chances are you haven't seen much more of this city than Washington Road in all its Olive Garden'd, drive thru'd, strip-mall'd unremarkableness, and which, if it looks vaguely familiar, is because it's the millennial geography of your town, too. Facing the gates of the National, as the locals call it, lies yet another strip mall, all of whose storefronts have been consumed by the evangelical Whole Life Ministries and which is called, slyly, The Master's Plaza.
If you return to Washington Road any other week of the year, the stores will all be as you remember them, and the traffic almost as bad as you remember. What's gone, however, is the frisson: Gone are the smiling white men in Easter egg-hued pants streaming onto the grounds clutching their golden badges. Gone are the entrepreneurs selling those men Macanudos and Cohibas and Ashton Churchills as fat as a pipefitter's fingers.
Gone is the tent for the Christian Motorcyclists Association Resurrection Riders with tattooed men in "Riding for the Son" jackets hawking pop the color of antifreeze, and the black guy on the sidewalk with a hand-lettered sign advertising "cold juicy apples" from an old Styrofoam cooler that appears to have recently held bait.
