The Canadian Masters

    I see that I have not posted in ten days and part of the reason for that is I spent a fair amount of time watching the Masters, which is very American. You probably did as well, even if you are not interested in golf, just as you likely would have watched the Rose Bowl, even though not interested in college football.  It is a fine thing to see roses in January and it is a relief, up here, to see azaleas in April, which give us hope that in a few months something colourful will sprout in Ontario. 

   You are likely to be unaware of the 'Canadian Masters', unless you are thinking about that athletic event for the elderly, but that is not my subject for today. Before I get to the 'Canadian Masters', I will offer some information about the American one, because it is hard to come by. It will also be contrarian in nature, as is usually the case. I always realized that I would not be getting a green jacket as a golfer and knew that if recommended as a member, I would surely be black-balled.  But, what is even worse, I seem to have been rejected by their random lottery system, which allows a chosen few to mingle among the magnolias every April in Augusta. So I now have a dimmer view of this colourful event which we all know is, "an environment of extreme artifice, an elaborate television soundstage, a fantasia of the fifties, a Disneyclub in the Georgia pines." 

   Since you are eager to know more about the Canadian Masters, I will present quickly some Factlets, a term loyal readers will be familiar with, before I get to our main subject for today. 

   * In the old days, the only Black folks allowed on the course were caddies and perhaps a few in the kitchen. Now many of the caddies are millionaires and none of them are black. This year, Lee Elder, the first Black golfer to compete in the tournament, was honoured. There is no indication that the tournament will change its name, although the word 'masters' is now problematic. Although the All Star Baseball game was removed from Atlanta, I don't think there was any attempt to move the Masters from Augusta.

   * Women are now allowed membership and one of them is even a Black Woman - Condoleezza Rice. Back, just a few years ago, when the lack of women became a feminist issue, the members decided to hold the Masters without sponsors, to save them from embarrassment. I don't know if Dr. Rice is allowed to use bikini wax while on the premises (see below.)

   * If you behave badly, the Pinkertons will pitch you out. A spectator was jailed for stealing a cup of bunker sand in 2012 (it is not really sand, but feldspar and the bird sounds are often piped in and some grass tinted green.)
      Back in 1994 when golf commentator, Gary McCord said, "They don't cut the greens here at Augusta, they use bikini wax," he was banned from the broadcast.
      This year, Gary Player's son, Wayne, was banned after he tried to upstage the Elder ceremony by holding up a sleeve of branded golf balls.

   * I recently offered a couple of posts about major landowners and Augusta National is another one of them. If you are attempting to offer a 'Technicolor fantasyland" you need to make the surrounding territory presentable and the National is doing that: 

In the areas immediately surrounding golf's most exclusive club, there are generally only two types of properties: the ones Augusta National has acquired -- and the ones it will acquire....In the last 20 years, the club has spent around $200 million to buy more than 100 pieces of land totaling no fewer than 270 acres, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of property and tax assessor records and interviews with people familiar with the transactions....The extent of the land grab, which vastly exceeds any previously reported estimate, has been obscured by the club's use of limited liability companies. Rather than buying land in its name, the club has instead done so using more than a dozen LLCs, which have no other known purpose. The National is a very private, for-profit operation.

   * The press building on the course is described as the "Taj Mahal of media mollycoddling" and the ink-stained wretches leave it only reluctantly to actually visit the course outside.

   * Another structure somewhere along a fairway is described as an  "Oz within Oz". Known as 'Berckmans Place', the 90,000 square feet contains five restaurants and for an entry fee of around $10,000 you can graze through each of them.  Like most of the things at Augusta National, including the golf course, it is used only a few days throughout the year.

Unlike Any Other

   The tag line you have heard Jim Nantz utter over the years - "A Tradition Unlike Any Other" - could be spoken in French along the St. Lawrence in Quebec where what I am calling, "The Canadian Masters" is held.  The equivalent of Augusta National in Canada is Les Quatre Ventes, in Malbaie, Que.  Just like Augusta it has bridges. The one Georgia.

The one in Quebec.

Just like Augusta National, Les Quatre Ventes is private and only open to the public for a very few days each year. Unlike Augusta, however, the flowers, gardens and birdsongs are all real. The only thing missing is the golf. 

Sources:

   The gardens at Les Quatre Vents were created by Francis H. Cabot and they are regarded as among the most beautiful in the world and if you go to this website you can take a virtual tour. Tours are allowed for small groups over a few days each year, but they may not be offered in 2021 because of the pandemic. 

   This beautiful book is available and it contains almost 400 photographs along with a history of each garden.  I happen to have a copy so don't attempt to buy one. On the Amazon website, one sees this: 

I think at the website offered above you will find a more reasonably priced copy.

   The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation offered a very good documentary - The Gardener - which you may be able to access.  It is about 45 minutes long and is offered on CBC Gem.

For most of the quotes in this post see: "Unlike Any Other," the very good account by Nick Paumgarten in The New Yorker, June 24, 2019 and "Augusta National Makes a Land Grab --- The home of the Masters has expanded its territory by more than 75%, paying massive sums for surrounding properties," Brian Costa, The Wall Street Journal, April 11, 2019. 

Post Script:

   Unfortunately I have to admit that, just as Augusta National is an enclave for very wealthy Americans, Les Quatre Ventes is owned by very wealthy Americans. Francis H. Cabot, who died in 2011, was a Boston Brahmin. His grandmother was given the Malbaie property as a wedding gift in 1902.

The Bonus:

  One of the founders of Augusta National was Clifford Roberts. In the 1970s he had a stroke and made the decision to exit  on his own terms:

"Roberts organized his suicide with the same attention to detail he had applied to the club and the tournament. On his last day, he got a haircut from the club barber and asked a receptionist to buy him a new pair of pajamas in town. He asked a waiter to help him walk from his room to the first tee, where he looked at the trees behind the first green to assure himself that the house that had once stood there - the only result of an early club plan to sell home sites - was indeed gone. He took dinner alone in his room.

Late that night, he called security to report hearing something outside his room, and a watchman came and helped him load the .38- caliber Smith & Wesson pistol he kept there.

His body was found the next morning on the club's par-3 course, near Ike's Pond. There was a single gunshot wound to the temple. He was wearing slippers, the new pajamas (with trousers pulled on over the bottoms) and a raincoat.

Roberts was the second suicide in his family. His mother, Rebecca Scott Key Roberts (a relative of Francis Scott Key, who wrote the national anthem), had killed herself with a shotgun in 1913."

"The Man Who Made the Masters," Alan Tays, Palm Beach Post, April 4, 2001.