The Interview Room

AUGUSTA, Ga. -- There is a building a few paces from the first fairway at Augusta National, out of sight behind a row of trees. Inside, a crowd is gathering. The press, those credentialed representatives of the Times, the Post, the News, the Chronicle, mostly abundantly-logoed veterans in khakis and golf hats, take their places in the Interview Room on green upholstered seats. It's springtime, the official start of the golf season, and all the familiar faces are here, like grizzly bears returning to their same patch of Alaskan riverbank to hunt for salmon. There's that old-timer, post-bypass, a little more stooped over this year--he should have retired years ago but can't give up the circus. That young firebrand who always asks the hardball question. That oddball who doesn't even play golf, who wandered in here on the way to some other career, years ago, and never managed to find a way out. Plenty of new faces too. There's even a small contingent from India this year as Jeev Milkha Singh becomes the first from his homeland to grace the Masters' extravagant fairways. Writers, editors, photographers, pundits, bloggers, golf media types--more than 1,000 people are sporting a media badge, from more than 40 countries. It's the eve of the 2007 Masters, and there's a full house for the Wednesday morning press conference with the chairman of Augusta National, Billy Payne.

Perhaps a tenth of Augusta's membership is lined up at the back of the room, silver-haired captains of industry, masters of the universe, accustomed to barking orders from behind a mahogany desk but today, in their matching green jackets, they resemble nothing so much as a team of employees from a discount car rental firm. This is Payne's debut. The press conferences of his five predecessors, including William (Hootie) Johnson, Jackson Stephens and Hord Hardin, used to be known as the annual throat-clearing ritual in which, with perfect manners, and in a lyrical Southern drawl, nothing at all would be said. But Payne, the man who brought the Olympics to Atlanta, who works out as much as Tiger, who has visited 110 countries, seems to be a different animal. He smiles, jokes, and offers intelligent comments. He recalls the first time he attended the Masters, in his sophomore year in college, driving to Augusta in a pink 1947 Chevrolet coupe. He is folksy. The chairman, who sits magisterially on a raised platform at the front of the room, doesn't mind if you call him Billy.

Payne's chairmanship has gotten off to a flying start, with a flurry of feel-good news. The day before, it was announced that Arnold Palmer would be the tournament's honorary starter, after years of saying he didn't want to do it. The popular old qualifying system of giving automatic Masters berths for PGA Tour winners is to be reinstated. There would be bonus Internet footage of tournament action this year, the first step toward online video coverage. The more Payne gives credit to other people for these initiatives, the more everyone thinks they are down to him.

There are the usual questions. The changes to the course. The possibility of Augusta introducing a tournament ball for the Masters. The city of Augusta (following some unflattering press stories). A new practice ground (ready for 2010). Golf in the Olympics. The cost of on-site pimento cheese sandwiches. There is the obligatory annual question about when Augusta will finally accept its first female member, and the obligatory non-answer answer--such things, says Payne, "are subject to the private deliberations of the members and other than that, sir, I'm simply not going to talk about it."

Afterward, there is another Payne innovation: the inaugural Masters Major Achievement Awards, to be given to members of the press who have covered at least 40 Masters Tournaments. Each of the 14 honorees is presented with a plaque carved from a hardwood tree that was removed from beside the second tee the previous summer. The most venerable member of this august body of men is John Derr, who missed the inaugural Masters in 1934, but began his long Masters career the following year, attending on behalf of the Gastonia Gazette--he wouldn't have been there, he jokes, if North Carolina had any child labor laws at the time. He was on the clubhouse balcony that year when a caddie came running up to report that Gene Sarazen had made a 2 on 15. "It took us 15 minutes until we realized it was actually true." Edwin Pope, the man from the Miami Herald, recalled hitchhiking to his first Masters in 1946, when he was 18. The press tent was "about the size of a big Boy Scout tent, and it had about 16 seats, 16 typewriters and 16 bottles of whisky, each in various stages of fullness or lack of fullness. I was so dazzled that day. I've never gotten over that day. That was the most thrilling day I've ever had in my life."

There was no Interview Room in those days. The press would hang out with the players in the locker room instead. "The locker room was upstairs in the clubhouse," recalls Golf Digest's Dan Jenkins, who this year will be covering his 58th Masters. "So everyone was upstairs. That's where the work was done. There'd be Hogan here, Snead over there, writers standing on chairs and sofas and laying down on the floor to do their interviews." A lot of people have a time and a place that they come to regard, in hindsight, as the pinnacle of their existence, when they were in their prime, and at their happiest. For Jenkins, you get the feeling that it was at the Masters in the 1950s. The press and the players went out to dinner together in those days. He was pals with Hogan. He was young. Life was simple.