Augusta, Georgia
Rory McIlroy is one of only six golfers ever to have won all four majors and achieved the career grand slam, but even he will experience a few nerves when he pulls up a chair at the champions dinner at the Augusta National clubhouse on Tuesday night.
This is arguably the most exclusive gathering in all of sports, a function attended only by past Masters champions and the chairman of the club. As the two-time winner José María Olazábal told CNN Sports, “It’s really very special to be a part of the dinner. You know inside that just in being there, you must have achieved something great.”
McIlroy will take a seat at a table once graced by the likes of Ben Hogan and Arnold Palmer. He’s now in the same club as the great Jack Nicklaus, and the 36-year-old knows he’ll be welcome here in his iconic green jacket for the rest of his days.
Every Tuesday of tournament week, the defending champion chooses the menu for his fellow champions, and the lore of the occasion continues to grow. This year, McIlroy will serve a three-course meal with dishes that signpost his journey to the jacket.
Among the appetizers: dates stuffed with goat cheese and almonds and wrapped in bacon, a dish that his mom used to make back home in Northern Ireland. There will be lashings of “Champ,” riced potato served with butter and cream and scallions, a dish he used to eat “by the bowlful” when he was younger, and he’ll also be treating his party to elk, a big game that he became particularly fond of as he was bigging up his own game to triumph at Augusta last year.
To wash it all down, a selection of four wines from Augusta’s cavernous wine cellar, including the 1990 Château Lafite Rothschild that he drank in celebration last year, and a 1989 Château d’Yquem, from the year of his birth.
Hogan proposed the dinner in 1952, and it has since become one of the Masters’ most cherished traditions, but it wasn’t until Bernhard Langer’s victory in 1985 that the menus started becoming more exotic. The German served up wiener schnitzel the following year, while in 1988 Scotland’s Sandy Lyle laid on some haggis – sheep’s offal minced, spiced and served in its stomach, and plated up to the sound of bagpipes.
There was no doubt in his mind that he would serve it, Lyle told CNN Sports, though there was a caveat: “I mean, it was only a starter, a little taste. I didn’t want to put them through the misery of a main course,” he joked.
The menu doesn’t just reflect where you’re from, it could also represent where you are in life. Tiger Woods marked the first of his five victories with a spread of cheeseburgers and milkshakes; he was only 22 at the time.
The champions put a great deal of thought into their menus, but the meal doesn’t always go to plan. 1991 winner Ian Woosnam told CNN that his main course was held up by US customs, and he had to make alternative arrangements.
“I was trying to fly in a leg of Welsh lamb,” he explained, “but it had a bone in it, and they wouldn’t allow it in. We had to use an American leg of lamb, and it wasn’t so great.”
As a 35-year veteran of the dinner, Woosnam describes the newcomer each year as looking “like a rabbit in the headlights,” especially since they are expected to make a speech. Every champion is presented with an inscribed three-piece solid gold locket during the dinner, a unique piece of jewelry, featuring the clubhouse silhouette and inscribed with an image of Masters co-founder Bobby Jones.
No matter how many Masters titles you win, there will only be one locket. It’s presented by unofficial Master of Ceremonies Ben Crenshaw and is really intended to be a gift for the spouse. Julie Crenshaw says that she wears her locket for the entire month of April every year.
There is no assigned seating at the table, but Crenshaw, the club chairman Fred Ridley and the defending champion always sit at the head of the table. Beyond that, it’s a free for all, or at least it’s supposed to be. As George Orwell might have put it, all Masters champions are equal, but some are more equal than others.
“There’s a little protocol,” explained two-time champion Scottie Scheffler to the media recently. “There’s not necessarily assigned seats, but I’m definitely not going to sit in the area where Tiger and Jack sit. Like, there’s kind of spots where you flow into.”
Scheffler admitted that when he was looking for a place to sit in his second dinner, he approached a friendly face in Zach Johnson. The 2007 champion had been sitting next to Jordan Spieth, but Scheffler suspected that if he had approached Spieth himself, then the 2015 winner would have pranked him.
For McIlroy, that’s a situation he won’t have to navigate until next year, but once he gets his feet under the table, he’ll embark on building a lifetime of memories.
As 2013 champion Adam Scott once put it when he found a seat next to 2008 winner Trevor Immelman, “I’m going to sit next to my mate for the rest of our lives at this dinner.”
