Magnolia
June 21, 2026
Rory CarrollThere's a lot to think about when you're alone and unplugged at the world's greatest golf tournament.
A Mercedes-Benz rep asked me what car I wanted to take. I said maybe a G-Series, since I’d already driven the Maybach SL 680 down from Atlanta. But then I checked myself, and requested the SL. I was headed to Augusta National for The Masters golf tournament, arriving via Magnolia Lane. The idea of catching the cool morning from the passenger seat, Air Scarf engaged and Maybach logos on the hood as I passed beneath magnolias seemed like, yeah, why not? I’m definitely more of a G-Wagen person than a convertible person, but my dad was a dyed-in-the-wool convertible man.
I can’t say that I’ve always wanted to go to the Masters. My dad and I would watch it from a TV so massive that it had its own deep built-in pocket in the wall. We’d talk about it. For a few weeks after, he’d call everything “A tradition unlike any other”. But the idea that I’d ever go there was too far outside the realm of possibility even to make it onto my list of ambitions.
My dream of going to the Masters was born instead at a Mercedes-Benz factory in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. That’s where I was when Michael from Mercedes-Benz invited me. My first thought was of my dad, who is the primary reason I have any interest in golf. After a long time disappearing, he died last fall of Lewy body dementia.
Not long after I started walking, he started trying to turn me into a golfer. He wasn’t obsessive like Earl Woods, so I never really got good at it. But, he did what he could to encourage my interest in the game. I can remember trailing him with a cartoony plastic driver, taking dozens of swings at a plastic ball. I remember him driving me and my brother and sister to lessons and I remember standing with him in a workshop while an old guy cut a set of clubs to my size and re-gripped them. I remember him and my Mom waking up before dawn to shuttle me and my buddies to junior golf tournaments. I may never forget the look on his face when I missed the ball teeing off on a par 4, only to fire it backward with the back of my driver, prompting a short discussion with the other dads about the protocol for such a situation. (Play it where it lies.)
There was a summer in my pre-teen years where the two of us played a lot. We had some kind of running bet where I stood to win a Gentle Lady R/C glider that had been recommended as a first R/C plane at one of the local hobby shops. I think he wanted me to win the glider, but one day when I was close, we were walking down a hill to putt and he couldn’t help but needle me, trying to get in my head about the difficulty of closing out the hole at my position on the green. I don’t remember if I made the putt or won the bet, but I didn’t get the Gentle Lady.
I know he’d have loved to see me excel athletically as he and a lot of my cousins did. I had the body for it, big, fast and strong. But I didn’t really know how to practice and my brain didn’t fully connect with my limbs until after high school. My brother had cystic fibrosis but he could hyperfixate until he mastered something—the yo-yo, basketball, drawing and any musical instrument he could get hands on. He died at 26, in the midst of realizing his brilliance.
Even as my lack of interest in organized sports waned, my dad and I would still play golf together. He understood that if I could golf, I’d have access to a world that he didn’t when he was a kid. He wasn’t wrong. As a younger guy, playing golf does put you in social situations with people you might otherwise barely know professionally. This is especially true if you can hit the ball a mile off the tee, which I have been able to do sporadically over the years. I’ve gone through spurts of playing a lot; in high school I’d cut classes to play all afternoon, I sort of remember being in a league at one point. I am now a guy who plays a couple times a year and gets by on maybe one decent shot per round and being fun to hang out with.
The guys playing in The Masters play golf in a way that’s broadly familiar but ultimately unfathomable to me, even having watched them for years on TV. It’s not even the way they swing really, but how they move away from ball, how they set up and practice. Everything is effortless in a way that only comes from years and years of expending maximum effort practicing something.
If you go to an NBA game and sit up close, you find yourself mesmerized by guys dribbling in warmups or throwing what look like routine passes on TV. Standing behind a tee box at Augusta you can get lost watching a guy you’ve never heard of setting the height of his tee. You can watch some other guy read and then sink a put that you couldn’t make in a hundred or a thousand attempts. They miss too, but even their bad shots look unfamiliar to me, a guy who should be plenty familiar with bad golf shots. Like your first lap sitting in the right seat with a pro driver, you just cannot understand how differently they do it until you see it up close. You cannot understand how far away you are from getting it until you’re around someone who, for many years, has thought about and done very little else.
The course itself is at once familiar and also a world away from even the very nice golf courses I’ve played. Spectators tromp around but somehow there’s not a bare spot or a blade of grass out of place; it is utterly pristine, everywhere. There are teams of two, walking the course with pickers and bags, but there is nothing to pick. There’s no trash. The pine needles are arranged. The teams of pickers suggest the existence of a single branded plastic coffee stirrer standing proud of the grass, a gum wrapper tumbling across the turf or a smuggled airline bottle of candy-flavored liqueur abandoned among the pines. But the bags remain empty and the teams snap the jaws of their pickers absentmindedly at the spring air.
The course that opened for play in 1932 has become an impossibly sophisticated facility in the intervening years. It is an optimized simulacra of the natural world that still somehow feels real even after you know that its greens are heated, cooled and aerated by sophisticated systems of underground vents, valves and pumps. Playing surfaces are underlaid by fiber optic cables and backup generators are buried so you can’t hear them. Every shot taken on the course has been tracked and plotted for the last decade on a system developed by IBM. They are cataloged in a searchable archive. In 2025, that expanded onto the practice range, with all that data made available to fans on the Masters app. There’s supposed to be a three-story underground parking facility on the site, but like much of the subterranean infrastructure on the property (and there is a lot), it’s invisible. The infrastructure for the national broadcast is similarly imperceptible—Augusta can invest in hiding it because they know there will be a major TV broadcast there every year. The scoreboards are billboard sized, with names and scores displayed on actual hanging cards. It’s a little like the Goodwood Revival, where massive investments are aimed at creating the unhurried vibe of the pre-smartphone era. In case you didn’t know, cell phones are banned on property. If you stay with Mercedes-Benz, they lock them up for you every morning.
Walking the course, eyeballing the little details, it’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that it all has to be preposterously expensive. We think there are around 300 members (invite-only) at Augusta National. Golf.com estimates Augusta National’s real estate holdings, which have been made difficult to track, at about half a billion dollars, including $280 million in recent acquisitions.
According to Golf.com, memberships may cost between $40,000 and $500,000 with annual dues of $10,000–$40,000. That said, tickets for The Masters are surprisingly affordable, $150 for practice days, $160 for the tournament itself. Though, you have to apply and be randomly selected to purchase them. Depending on the day, there might be 40,000 fans, or as Augusta calls them, patrons on site. (Aside: When I got back from Augusta, I ran into a friend at the grocery store who said something like, “I hope you appreciated it. I’ve been applying every year since I was eighteen.”)
The Masters also runs the most ruthless branded merchandise operation I have ever encountered. Over the course of the weekend, I heard more talk about where to purchase merch and what to get than I did about golf. It’s not exactly for me, but everything from the garden gnome sets to the hats and sunglasses is tasteful without being stuffy, the sort of stuff Vineyard Vines guys can turn up to the country club in if they want to draw a little attention. On the course, you’re never far from a little merch shack with a long line. There are six golf shops that you can access through a secret door to avoid the lines if you’re with Mercedes and there’s a secret pro shop with items that can’t be purchased anywhere else. You can access that if you ask Mercedes discretely. I heard someone say that the tournament does about $150 million in merch sales and I believe it.
There are little open air concession stands with reasonably-priced beer, cigars and cocktails. (The Azalea is ice, 1.25 oz vodka, 5 oz lemonade, and 0.5 oz grenadine, garnished with a cherry and a lemon wheel.) There are the famous pimento cheese sandwiches, egg salad sandwiches and now barbecue pork sandwiches in little wax paper bags. There are cookies and potato chips. It’s simple and charming, it feels old-timey. Augusta will deliver this stuff to your door in kit form, anywhere in America, during Masters week.
The Masters is the finest point of the global golf phenomena: relaxed without being casual, it is exclusive and expensive and governed by aesthetic and etiquette more than rules, and it rides that line between dignity and cheer unerringly. It feels a little magical, maybe even holy, and it may be the last American thing that anyone reveres.
ESPN and CBS pay nothing to broadcast The Masters, which usually draws around 15 million viewers. According to sports business site Sportico, broadcast rights could be worth as much as $125 million. Amazon came on to add streaming coverage this year, but details of the deal were not announced. The tournament stipulates that advertising interruptions are limited to four minutes per hour and that Jim Nantz and his colleagues have to use Augusta-approved terminology like “patrons,” “second cut” and “War of Northern Aggression” (JK, JK). Sportico says that the companies you see advertising in the TV broadcast pay just enough to cover production costs. Mercedes-Benz, IBM, AT&T and now Bank of America are the big “Champion Sponsors,” with companies like Delta, Rolex and Coca-Cola maintaining other relationships with the tournament. The Masters’ exclusivity carries over to who the tournament will do business with, and the feel of the event benefits from the limited commercial activity. Augusta National’s discernment does not, however, deter other big brands from setting up tents and semitrailers in parking lots around Augusta, forming a series of weird golf midways. Equipment makers and online sports books don’t have to adhere to the genteel sensibility that governs everything inside the course, and from what I’m told, they don’t.
Mercedes-Benz for its part hosts probably the best-conceived and best-executed live sports activation I’ve ever seen up close. Augusta’s Firethorn Cabin, along its namesake 15th hole, was the onsite hospitality headquarters for guests. There was a bar with great coffee, three incredible meals a day and a healthy stock of Augusta sandwiches. Outside, golf pros would guide patrons through putting on a green they said was a slightly downsized replica of the 18th green. Current and former NBA and NFL stars mingled with Mercedes dealers, executives and some of the brand’s best customers, referred to as Silver Arrows.
Offsite, Mercedes rents individual houses in a subdivision in nearby Evans, Georgia. Guests share a house but spend most of their time at the 1886 Club, a sprawling, rustic cottage overlooking the Savannah River. For them, the line between Mercedes-Benz and the tournament itself is blurred. The two are so-tightly integrated that they almost feel like the same entity, or that where one ends, the other begins. It feels natural and it’s executed with the kind of confidence that separates Mercedes-Benz from the handful of other luxury carmakers who spend their time trying to imagine how Mercedes-Benz would do things.
My Masters invite came somewhat late and it included a plus-one. Unfortunately, the Venn diagram of Rory’s friends who would really love to go to the Masters and Rory’s friends who could 100-percent be relied upon to not embarrass Rory in front of the Mercedes-Benz people barely overlaps at all. I ended up inviting my friend Michael Render, Killer Mike, who lives nearby in Atlanta. Mike and I have become close over the years, taking every opportunity to catch up in between his touring, recording and now acting, and my work. I was drawn to Mike’s early work because he is a gifted rapper and performer with a unique and incredibly expressive Atlanta accented voice. He never writes his lyrics down, preferring to freestyle in the studio over a beat, live. In person, it’s incredible to watch. We met in 2013, around the time my brother died, after I’d written something about his Hot Wheels collection for Autoweek and he called the office to invite me to an early Run the Jewels show.
After years of record-industry chicanery, his career was getting back on track on the strength of the album R.A.P. Music, which was produced by Brooklyn rapper and producer El-P, who would become the other half of Run the Jewels and another good friend. In the time between Mike’s first Grammy for a feature on an Outkast song and R.A.P. Music, things got bad enough that he was thinking about hanging it up to focus on his barber shop. He kept releasing music through that period, including a series of mixtapes called Sunday Morning Massacres that I ended up spending a good amount of time with. When I drove my brother to Cleveland, where we were told his transplant was failing and they’d need to do another one, I listened to R.A.P. Music most of the way home. There’s a desperate bravado in it, a sense that Mike is going to get this one to work because it has to. It did. A little more than a decade later, he’s got a consensus all-time rap duo, another three Grammys (for 2023’s Michael), an acting career, a number of successful businesses and he’s been an effective political advocate and activist at home and nationally. Near as I can tell, he’s the same guy I met in 2013. Our wives talk about us and my girls tell their friends about Uncle Mike and Aunt Shana.
Mike also seems to have a sixth sense for when a hang will be good for me, and he showed up for a day at The Masters with his friend Gerrad, who grew up in Augusta. When they arrived, we went for a long walk on the course and I peppered Mike with questions about his ascendent acting career. We talked about Tiger Woods and Lee Elder and how many Black people were making their way around the course, how a lot of rappers and pro athletes were getting involved in the game. I told him he should meet Mercedes guests Olajuwon Ajanaku and Earl Cooper, Atlantans who founded the booming golf culture company, Eastside Golf.
At the top of a hill overlooking the Hogan Bridge, I told him I wished my dad could see this. Mike reminded me that his wife, Shana, is from Savannah and that in the West African spiritual traditions of Gullah-Geechee people, the dead remain with us, and you can talk to them. He talks to Niecy, his mother, and to his grandmother and grandfather. He said I should talk to my dad about what I was seeing. I said that I would. We hung out for the rest of the afternoon, having what could fairly be described as an “unc conversation”—kids, fishing, cars, etc.
When he was alive, my dad and I talked about sports and fishing, about boats and projects. We also spent a lot of time together in silence. Sometimes he’d have the radio on, when I was little he’d rehearse arguments with my mom aloud in the car. As an adult, I’d try asking him about women or work, or later parenting, and he became maybe the only person I’ve ever known to be uncomfortable talking to me one-on-one. He’d clam up, often just sitting totally silent like he was working through a math problem in his head.
In what was supposed to become an annual tradition, I took him to Gettysburg in 2015. It was a good thing to do, and we had fun, but I remember thinking that I’d never been in a car with someone for so long and talked so little. That’s why golf was good for us, and why it’s good for a lot of people. There’s space enough to have a conversation, and when the conversation falters, there’s the game. There’s usually a woman with a golf cart full of drinks if that helps.
I think he was very comfortable as a dad for the most part, even if he didn’t know how do the deep father son conversation part of it. I was there when he told some family that his fondest childhood memory was walking home from ice skating and encountering my grandpa, Bob Carroll, walking to work at the bakery he owned. As they passed on the sidewalk, Bob smiled down in acknowledgement of his son. There was a pause as we all waited for the payoff, but that was it. Bob would later have a stroke and would rage against the limitations imposed on him by his condition before dying young. He’d leave six of seven Carroll children (Aunt Nancy died as a toddler) to be raised by each other and my sainted grandmother, hero of heroes, Rose Carroll.
At some point, I understood his situation and gave my dad a break when he’d screw up or lose his temper. I always knew he loved us, but there are parts of being a dad that must be hard to figure out without having watched someone else try to do it very closely. It’s one of those things that nobody really knows how to do, but it’s important that you try. He got that part right.
When we were kids, and especially in the run up to my brother’s double lung transplant, my dad did an unbelievable amount of driving from Traverse City, where we lived, to Cleveland, Ohio, where there’s a decent hospital. The strain on his eyes worsened a condition that, one blind spot at a time, would take his vision. For years, I bought him various hi-vis golf balls thinking it would keep him playing a little longer, but it was not to be. Every time we played was worse than the time before. As I understand it, it’s common for old people who lose their vision to start losing their minds.
We played golf together for the last time in 2023 or 2024. I took him out to a par 3 course thinking that maybe his brain would click into something that he’d done hundreds of times, that the familiarity and muscle memory would connect him, put him in order. Of course, he really struggled. His athletic ability had always been a point of pride for him, but in this moment his situation was clear to both of us. I don’t remember much of it, but it was not fun.
As a kid, I thought of him as a great golfer, but it’s possible that he was just my dad. So I called his friends, the Jones brothers, Ron and Fred. Both of them said that he could hit the ball a ton, but didn’t have much of a short game, which is the inverse of how I remembered him playing. They both told the same story about him winning a long drive prize at a tournament by accidentally bouncing his ball off a rockpile and getting a very lucky roll, which resulted in a 440-yard drive. There’s no way to verify that figure, but it was corroborated by two primary sources in separate taped interviews so I’m publishing it.
The Jones brothers weren’t sure when and why he started golfing, but it was either to spite our neighbor at the little family cottage my grandparents bought for $1,500, or to ingratiate himself with my maternal grandfather, Doc McGowan, who was a dentist by virtue of the GI Bill and his time driving B-24s around Europe. Doc liked golfing enough to choose a retirement condo on the edge of a fairway and some of my first driving experiences were behind the wheel of his personal golf cart, which was fast and prone to rolling because he’d removed the governor. I interviewed my mom, who said my dad started playing with Doc and that Doc was a father figure to him.
Everyone I talked to mentioned his love for two guys, Puerto Rican golfer Chi-Chi Rodriguez and Spanish pro Seve Ballesteros. To this day, I can hear his voice triumphantly yelping out Se-ve! Balle! Steros!, something he’d do in celebration of basically any small personal triumph.
On my last day at Augusta, I tried to visualize him there on the course. His 90s golf attire–short shorts, a rope hat and a baggy crew neck sweatshirt would not be out of place, but I think he’d be climbing the walls in the Firethorn Cabin. As he started losing his vision, he’d get anxious among people who were unfamiliar to him, by the end, he didn’t like being in public at all. When we were kids, he was a history teacher and had a gift for booming out an impromptu speech in front of a crowd. He could hold court at a bar or a party and was always talking someone into letting us do some unforgettable thing that was against the rules. He thought I should golf, so I’d grow up to be comfortable around the Silver Arrows and the executives. But, because I was around him as a kid, I ended up being unnaturally comfortable with pretty much everyone and in virtually any situation.
At his funeral and his wake, like at my brother’s funeral and wake, I smiled and joked, squeezed hands and thanked everyone for coming. I hosted. Afterward, I wondered why I’m like this, why these deaths don’t make me feel sad, why they don’t even really register. Am I hollowed out, or do I just not know how to grieve? For a long time, I thought I’d just grown out of having feelings.
Maybe some things are just too big to engage with, so you go back to your life. You wonder sometimes if your brother’s last infection started with a visit from your puppy, or the time when you decided not to shut the window while someone cut the grass outside. Sometimes you wonder if your dad was getting the right medications, or too much medication, or if you should have called his doctor again. You know you should have fought through your own shit and spent more time with him in his last years, soaking up whatever moments of lucidity you could chance upon. We could have both sat there staring into nothing, dumbstruck and silent, like father, like son.
I think Mike is right, some of the departed do remain with you. You can talk to them. You can say their names when you’re alone and hear their voices in your sleep. But, they will not be in touch to tell you what exactly happened, or how they felt. You will not know if they’re ok. That’s yours to think about, maybe forever. Some people, when they go, take enough of you with them that it gets hard to find anything you recognize.
When we took my brother off life support, we sang to him while he died. Then my dad and I went down to a bar for a beer. He said he was, in a way, relieved. I was still angry that we’d given up and I was angry at him for being relieved. But, the gravity had been with him for 26 years. He’d been told his baby would die a baby and managed to keep him alive while doing everything else that was required of him. While I’d been developing my ability to detach and compartmentalize, he’d been living and dying on every quarterly doctor’s visit for two and a half decades. I don’t remember when I started thinking I’d be relieved when he died, but it was a while back.
When Pat Carroll, who wrote his name on the long-drive stake but is now addled and frail and gone long ago decides to stop eating, it sits outside the fog you’ve been in. When he says he’s “on borrowed time,” you say, “let’s just see how it goes.” You hug him and he does not hug back. Days later, you move him into a little cabin in the woods with the other men finding their way to the end. You sit with him and read a long list of everything you remember doing together. You sleep in a chair in his room and allow yourself to wonder who you’ll hear from when it happens. Then, you sit with his still body, not wanting to be the first to suggest wrapping it up and getting out of there. You read your speech at the church, which is about a lifetime in self-directed pursuit of mastery and you wonder how you could have learned so little about someone you spent so much time with. What was the deal with his first wife? You wonder if at some point you knew more and lost it. Is your brain ok? You stay late at the bar and at your mom’s, letting everyone who wants to cry in your arms. You go back to your beautiful house and your adoring wife, and the two kids that shock everyone with their goodness and their kindness and their persistent enthusiasm. For the millionth time, your brain slips you a “There is nothing for you here.” and you have to say “Come on, brain. That is not true. That’s embarrassing.”
And months later, the leather soles of your shoes slip on the dry piles of Georgia pine needles and you remember the first time you felt that sensation, walking in shoes you borrowed from him when you were 10 or 12. You see him there, with his dark hair and blue eyes, tan and vital with a little beer on his breath standing next to his old Precept irons. You say, “Ah Dad. I wish you could see this.” You get a flash of waking up, cheek stuck to his fighting Illini sweatshirt, on the old navy surplus bunk beds at the lake. Rose laughs with Mary Ann in the kitchen. You go back to sleep. That’s all you get.
More than any one skill, golf rewards you for managing your emotions. Once you have the basics down, it’s a fight to stay out of your own head, to avoid letting one mistake take so much of your focus that you make another one. As a dad, Pat Carroll was pure emotion. He was playful, prone to fits of rage and incredible at making it up to you. He took big swings, he made grand gestures and put in more effort than was required. On the golf course, where he could prod and coach me, he’d tell me to keep my head, he’d admonish me for pounding my driver into the tee when I sent one deep into the trees. He would wait until I was just about to putt to say, “There’s a lot of pizza left in that box, Joe.” just to see if I’ could handle it’d lose my cool. All of this was somehow, fun.
Another thing about golf is that you benefit from watching someone else go first. If you and the guy you’re playing with have a similar shot, watching him can show you how the wind will effect the ball in the air, or how the speed and topography of the green will shape the direction of a putt. Even if he doesn’t get it completely right, if you pay attention you can learn from his mistakes. But, a lot of times, that shot sits in your head and your subconscious brain forces you to copy it. The key is to know when to copy and when to try something else, but regardless, the example is invaluable.
When I was asked, “Do you want to go to The Masters?” I said that I did. I wanted him there, too–the version of him who could look up to see the Magnolias breaking up the sun, like waking up in th deep woods in our old tent. I wanted to watch him social-engineer some forbidden access to Augusta. Maybe he’d loosen up over dinner and tell everyone a long, endlessly digressing story about sneaking aboard the South American to steal beer as a teenager.
What would that have been like, to have a few things turn out a little differently? It would be nice to remember and miss him on Father’s Day, it would have been nice for him to have seen what the game looked like as it approached perfection.
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