Atlanta and Augusta - 14 April 1989

Once a year – and always at this time – I go into retreat.

Not San Francisco. My regular trips to San Francisco are not of the same order. I suppose that if I had to fill out a work sheet for an employer I should call them working holidays, looking at America from the Pacific, instead of from the Atlantic, coast as a necessary corrective to seeing everything from the intensely parochial view of a New Yorker.

But even if I had no working obligations in San Francisco I should find it impossible to retreat from the daily ferment of life and politics. In fact, in San Francisco - because of its fortunate, or unfortunate, position in the time zones, eight hours behind England - every morning at breakfast I can get not only the Los Angeles and San Francisco papers and the New York Times, but also the London papers, which if they were flown from Heathrow at midnight would land in San Francisco at 5am local time.

Since I can no more avoid gobbling up available newspapers than a child let loose in a sweet shop can resist the merchandise, I have failed in every attempt to behave in San Francisco like a man on holiday. So come the first week in April, and I fly south to Georgia, the first step of which is to avoid Atlanta which is as much of a spaghetti tangle of motorways as Los Angeles and more of a hotbed of industry.

To give you a quick passing idea of the growth, the prosperity, the very busy business of Atlanta, I need say no more that it was the birthplace, the cradle and the nursery and, eventually, the shipping centre of Coca-Cola.

Atlanta is the great - what shall we call it - aviation junction of the south. Only Chicago's O'Hare Field has more passengers go through every year. New York's Kennedy Airport, which New Yorkers automatically assume is the biggest and busiest of its kind anywhere, has 20 million less passengers in transit than Atlanta which every year handles just under 50 million people coming and going.

It's, consequently, a great place to avoid, a huge rectangular design which can oblige you to walk several miles to reach a flight and if it didn't have its own underground railway system, floating on the Aeroflot principle, you'd probably get to your connecting plane by nightfall.

I toss in here a digression which is suggested by a news item that is certainly news to me. Somebody has had a bright idea to ease the suffocating problem of airport congestion.It's so simple it has all the beauty of that idea which about 70-odd years ago flashed into the mind of a dentist in New Haven, Connecticut as he looked out of his surgery on a street intersection and saw half-a-dozen motor cars going in four directions and jockeying for position.

How about, he thought, posting lights at the intersections of the main street, having them flash green to go and red to stop. This idea was resisted by the old and the middle-aged at the start. I remember an old editor of mine, a Lancashire man, who told me on his first visit here that when he first encountered - this was after the second war - the system whereby the lights said "Walk" and "Stop", he said, "What is this, a fascist state? Nobody's going to tell me when I can walk and when I can't."

Anyway, as we all know, it took only the arrival of the first generation of the cheap car, Henry Ford's jalopy, for this country and soon every other country to take to the invention. The undeniable beauty of it was it recognised the prime fact of two objects in contrary motion when propelled by human beings - namely, that a bishop and a gangster have an equal prejudice in favour of staying alive.

All right, so what's the new big idea? Well, in any given year the 20 main airports of the United States, none of which is a terminus, all junctions, where people fly in and connect to another flight and on to their final destination, those 20 airports handle every year 530 million passengers and the latest projection from the Air Transport Association of America foresees at least another 150 million in the 1990s. Indeed, at the end of the '90s, the possibility of doubling the load to one billion passengers.

Well, I'm sorry, I don't know the name of the man who thought up a solution. I will, but his idea is something which we shall soon all be calling a "way port". He proposes to build, all across America, airports deep in the countryside, say for example 30 miles outside of Chicago, which would handle only flights of people on their way to another city, big or small. The people who flew in or out of Chicago would be only the people who started or ended there. End of digression.

So I chose to go to Georgia via, this time, Charlotte, North Carolina, a smaller city and a navigable airport and then took the half-hour's hop to Augusta, Georgia. Until 20-odd years ago all I knew about Augusta was that it was a small southern town named after Princess Augusta, mother of George III, that during the War of Independence, when the British captured the port city of Savannah downriver the rebel families fled inland to Augusta as a sanctuary for about a month, after which the persistent British moved in there too, that during the Civil War, Augusta was the ordnance centre for the Confederate armies.

I also remembered that some time in the mid-19th Century, when Augusta was a winter holiday retreat for merchants, William Makepeace Thackeray appeared as one of the first of those dependable perennials, the visiting British lecturer, and that he declared himself enchanted by the beauty of the place, by the towering Georgia pines as also, no doubt, by my vastly handsome fee of £100.

Came a day almost 30 years ago when I discovered, and took up, the Scottish torture, the lovely, appalling, narcotic game of golf. So a few years later I started to go down there in early April to attend the annual golf tournament, played on a course built by and for the immortal Robert Tyre Bobby Jones, who at 28, having conquered every championship in golf retired, looked around for an ideal place to build his ideal and found it on a southern plantation which during the civil war had been a fruit farm for the Confederate armies.

Subsequently it was bought by a Belgian baron, a distinguished horticulturalist who turned it into the south's first great nursery. Now you need, say, 120,130 acres to build a golf course. Here they have 365 acres and there are - well, there is one stretch of undulating meadowland between two holes where the people stroll which are spacious enough for another golf course.

I won't go on, except to say that it is a vast private forest and botanical garden without compare as the most beautiful stretch of inland landscape ever transformed into a golf course. Each hole is named after a Georgia flower and the whole rolling landscape, the creeks and the banks, abound with them and with white and pink dogwood trees and whole hills of azaleas and the firethorn and the pampas grass and on and on.

You might wonder why a golf tournament with 25,000 people sifting around could possibly be designated a retreat. Well, there's one feature, the prevailing feature of a golf tournament, which never strikes the television viewer because he's always hearing the forthright chatter and the sidelong remarks of the commentators.

On the course, whenever a player walks down a hill to approach his ball, and all throughout the course, the main thing is silence, a cathedral hush never quite achieved by the coughers in a lofty cathedral. Also, you can wander around the Augusta national course without seeing any golf.

You can sit by a creek and smell the flowers and eat a sandwich and smile from time to time as there rises against the sky from far away a great cheer like a washing tide which dies down again into the prevailing silence. Also, a roving army of 200 helpers prods and stabs every errant wrapper, paper cup and other dreck.

The crowds are remarkably well-behaved and keep the faith which Jones, in a memorable sentence, dictated to be printed on every ticket of admission, to stay still, to applaud good shots, never to applaud mistakes and thereby ruin the tournament's reputation for sportsmanship and good manners.

Now surely, as a sporting event in the 1980s, this is, as they say, unreal. It is. Moreover, in the inn where I stay, while you can get the Augusta Chronicle you cannot get a metropolitan paper and during the week of the Masters tournament, the Augusta Chronicle has about 20 pages devoted to the play and the players and about four to the unreal events of the real world.

I make a point, therefore, of not touching those events or ever of listening to the evening news. This act of self-denial, when it's indulged only once a year, is as ravishing as a child's annual visit to the circus.

There are, however, even at Augusta, even among the players, even the professional players, men who do not think they are devoting their lives to a game divorced from the real world. To a small group of them, men whose profession it is to play golf four days of every week from January into November, life is real, and earnest, not to say a religious exercise.

This group is the professional golfers' bible class. It meets on Wednesday evening, the day before each tournament starts, and prays for strength and guidance. It meets again on Saturday evening, before the final day, and prays for a little bit of luck and for more strength and guidance - guidance preferably towards the $200,000 winner's prize.

A very memorable sentence came over the telly from the president of the players' bible class. He was asked by an interviewer, "Don't you find yourself a little embarrassed playing golf on the Sabbath?" Without a second's hesitation, this godly man replied, "No, the lord commanded us to do his good work all the days of our lives. And that's the whole ball of wax."

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING OF THE ORIGINAL BBC BROADCAST (©; BBC) AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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