CLAYTON: Masters of Philosophy

The striking and brilliant 13th hole of Augusta National can be as easy as punishing with one bad swing.

There is hardly anything that the half-involved golf observer does not know about Augusta and the Masters.

Although this is not the most important tournament in the game – something reserved for the national opening of the United States and Great Britain – it is increasingly becoming the most famous event and undoubtedly the best-selling.

The iconic brands of the world, famous companies such as Mercedes Benz, McDonalds, Nike, Chanel, Coca Cola or Wimbledon, have not done much better work by creating something that so many people recognize, even if they never participate.

Geoff Ogilvy describes it as Disneyland for adults – golf-addicted adults anyway – and both the beauty of the course and the genius of the architectural concept make golf attractive.

The brilliance of the design concept of the club founder, Bob Jones, and Scottish architect Alister MacKenzie was their understanding of how to make golf relatively easy for higher markers, but difficult for & # 39; the world's best players.

Jones and MacKenzie understood that this principle was the basis of The Old Course in St. Andrews and MacKenzie translated it to both Royal Melbourne and Augusta National despite the fact that the land, vegetation and soil are much different from the land of the Scottish coast .

Augusta generally celebrates the width – although not as much as before – giving players room to tee off with a little freedom. But with that freedom, the following shots from different parts of the vast fairways and wildly different. It goes without saying that the simpler approach images only come after you have performed the more daring tee-shots.

This is of course the brilliance of St Andrews.

MacKenzie hated narrow golf and tight courses full of green grass, because he rightly identified those elements that ensure tight and restrictive golf and who would like to play like that?

"The course makes you nervous," says Ogilvy.

"There are problems everywhere and there are crazy places to miss it. There are difficult shots that you can only play well if you are not nervous, but the course makes you nervous."

That is the dilemma of the course.

Any reasonably skilled 18-handicapper could ride it on the 13th fairway and be at least six centimeters above your feet from a hook with the ball, play a little draw with a mid-iron short from the creek, pitch over the water and two – putt for a par.

The difficulty comes for the best players when they play for the green in two shots and find the hook, but then face MacKenzie & # 39; s green oriented to favor a massive blur. It's practicable (and considerably easier for a left-handed), but it's better to have total control over your swing and over the years we've all seen an equal share of heroic long shots and disasters in the cost of tournaments.

The irony is the famous back-nine par-fives, holes that so many tournaments have decided, were originally on the first nine. But the low point of the course is at the 11th, 12th and 13th holes. The fairways were the last to be free of morning dew and it was therefore decided to change the nines.

The course is perfect golfing in so many ways, but was golf meant to be that perfect?

Augusta National can easily afford to create the perfect fairways, the impeccable greens that can have both the speed and the firmness that have been turned up or down in hours and the impeccably consistent, almost blinding white bunkers

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It's all about huge costs, but regulators from around the world are then expected by their members to approach something that Augusta approaches, but within a budget.

Annoying things, budgets.

And although there is nothing wrong with "perfection", golf is at least as good on the original links as there was a randomness of circumstances and part of the game's challenge was dealing with the built-in unfairness of it all

Everyone seems to have a chance on who is likely to be the winner this week and they usually choose the obvious ones.

Rory McIlroy is probably the most obvious of them all, and winning the Players Championship last month only added to our expectation that he would one day complete the Grand Slam career.

To become a member of Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods as winners of all four major professional golf sports events, it is a heavy burden if history is important to you.

We all watched and waited for Greg Norman's inevitable Masters victory, but the time finally ran out for a man who, like McIlroy, played a lot of great golf in Augusta. Ernie Els and Tom Weiskopf too.

All four had the ideal game for the job, but how is it possible that no one has a seat during dinner on Tuesday evening?

Augusta may have been perfectly conditioned, but it is an unpredictable course; one where fate has a lot to do with the outcome.

Jones and MacKenzie may not have approved every element of the much-changed course, but they would certainly enjoy how it still contains the elements of unpredictability, drama and fate that thus define golf at St Andrews, the favorite course of two men whose influence was so deep that it is still relevant to this day.