At the Masters, a day without phones is a journey back in time
Otherwise, there wasn't much going on. For the golf fans who filled into the seats behind the range — making sure a nice attendant wiped away the dew with a towel first — it was a perfect time to text a friend or check the headlines. The Masters wasn't truly underway yet, so … grab your phone and see what's going in the world.
Except — and of course — there are no cellphones allowed at Augusta National.
At 8:17 a.m., I had my first pang of anxiety: What if someone was trying to reach me!
At every other golf tournament during the year — including the other three majors — fans can bring their phones as long as they're on silent mode. I have covered enough Masters that I'm familiar with the drill at Augusta: When you're watching golf here, you relinquish contact with the outside world. That's fine and even refreshing.
Reporters are allowed to bring our phones to the press building and use them as we see fit there. So if we spend a morning on the course, then return to our desks around lunchtime, we can check emails, make calls, shoot off some texts.
On Thursday, I committed to something different: a full day without my phone. How quintessentially Augusta.
'Just because of the fact that the patrons don't have their phones out, it actually makes it feel like they're so much more engaged,' said Ludvig Aberg, a Swede who is among the top players in the world. 'It's a lot more eye contact with the fans. You can really tell that they watch and appreciate good golf.'
The bold decision to spend a day without a phone shouldn't be a joke. A company called Harmony Healthcare IT conducted a survey this year of more than 1,000 Americans. The findings: The average daily cellphone use in this country is 5 hours 16 minutes. If you're awake for, say, 16 hours, that's approaching a third of your time.
Such a fixation has real consequences. Four years ago, the Journal of Mental Health and Clinical Psychology published a paper that concluded cellphone usage resulted in five symptoms of addiction: disregarding negative consequences, preoccupation, an inability to control behavior, productivity loss and feeling lost, and anxiousness.
'The lonelier someone felt,' the authors wrote, 'the more likely they were addicted to their smartphone.'
So maybe a day at Augusta National could help us be a better version of ourselves.
Put aside those weighty issues for a minute. Turns out spending a day disconnected requires some planning.
First off, are you meeting anyone at the Masters? You better establish a specific time and a specific place the night before or the morning of. There's no texting for quick adjustments. If someone's running late or got caught in traffic, you have to wait them out.
Secondly, being without your own phone doesn't mean you can't call someone from the Masters. Augusta National has no fewer than eight banks of landline phones scattered around the grounds, free for public use. Call anyone you like in any country around the world. What do you need to do that? A finger — and the phone numbers. Write down their phone numbers. These banks of landlines don't come equipped with your contact list.
So at 7:45 a.m., I headed out with a sheet showing the tee times, a notebook and pen and the official Masters spectator guide. I hit the range, where I watched warmups and met a friend.
Scottie Scheffler, the defending champion, and Justin Thomas, a potential contender, teed off at 10:15 a.m. So after grabbing a breakfast sandwich and an iced tea (total cost: $5.34), I headed to the area between the first tee and the 18th green. As I waited alone, I looked up — and saw a longtime friend.
David is the kind of person you run into at Augusta. An executive at a video game company (maybe even the one that makes the PGA Tour game), he had texted during the week that he would be here Thursday and Friday. He had a group he had to tend to, so we didn't schedule a time to meet up — and we did anyway.
'We should take a selfie,' he joked when we were finishing up. No phones. No selfies.
At that point, the tournament was just getting rolling. There's no checking for Masters updates on your phone, but there are leader boards — all hand-operated — throughout the course. At that point, the big board displayed the following:
Couples 1 1 1
Kirk 0 1 1 2 2 2
Rai 0 1 2 2
Johnson Z 0 1 2 2 2 2 2
Kent 0 0 1 2 2
Anyone who attends the Masters has to get used to reading those scores. The numbers other than zero were all in red, indicating the number of strokes that player was under par. (Even-par and over-par scores are in green.) So in deciphering: Fred Couples birdied the first and was 1 under through three; Chris Kirk birdied 2 and 4 and was 2 under through 6. Etc.
By the time I stood behind the fourth tee with Scheffler's group, he was 1 under. A huge roar came up from down the hill behind us. The crowd's roars define this place. Come here long enough, and you get a good idea of where a roar begins and what it means. This was clear: eagle at No. 2.
But who? And how? No way to know.
I didn't know it had been Maverick McNealy chipping in from across the green for a 3 until I looked it up at 5:45 p.m.
The information you can gain while on the Augusta grounds isn't about tariffs or the markets. It's about the tournament, and it's sparse. There are information boards that show only tee times for the field, with an asterisk after each group that made the turn. The only scoreboard that displays the entire 95-player field is to the right of the first fairway, at the bottom of a hill down from the clubhouse.
What you get are conversations that are very much in the present. And observations. So many observations. ('Scottie looks lankier in person.' 'No. 12 is so tiny.' 'That was a pretty poor shot.')
As I headed back to the press building (full disclosure: deadline meant I needed to be writing by 3:30 p.m.), I passed a scoreboard at 17 that showed Justin Rose with a red 5 after his ninth hole, the leader. I got to my phone at 3:14 p.m.: 11 texts, 54 emails and one Slack message.
Man, it was nice to miss them.
Oh, one other thing: Near the sixth green sat a set of tablets under a sign that said, 'Patron Survey.' I filled one out, mostly to get to the last, open-ended question, a spot where you could write whatever you wanted. My response: 'Please don't change the cellphone policy.'
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