Scottie Scheffler rarely gets a bad review at Augusta National. But there was one evening three years ago when his choices didn’t play so well to the gallery.
‘It was f***ing rocket fuel,’ says Danny Willett.
We’re talking about one of the most famous traditions of the Masters – the Champions Dinner – and Willett has recalled the starter from 2023, when, as is custom, the previous year’s winner Scheffler took his first swing at setting the menu.
‘It was a Mexican tortilla soup,’ Willett adds. ‘I asked him if he was trying to kill us all off. Brutal. We’re sat at that table and sweating.’
That table. It might just be the most sanctified in all of sport, approximately 40ft long and squeezed into the small library on the second floor of Augusta’s stately clubhouse. If you win their tournament, a seat is yours for life. But you do have to eat whatever the defending champion has chosen.
Each Tuesday of tournament week, it is a ritual. Sacred, almost. And sure as Azaleas will bloom in spring, so too do the syrupy reflections about what it all means. But where better for syrup than dinner?
Two-time Masters winner Scottie Scheffler (right) rarely gets a bad review at Augusta National. But there was one evening three years ago when his choices didn’t play so well to the gallery
That table. It might just be the most sanctified in all of sport, approximately 40ft long and squeezed into the small library on the second floor of Augusta’s stately clubhouse
If you win the tournament, a seat is yours for life. But you do have to eat whatever the defending champion has chosen
By consensus of the gilded few, it is a uniquely charming evening of reminiscence, where past champions gather as links in a chain across the generations. The oldest boy is Gary Player – 90 years young, owner of three Green Jackets and usually sat apart from the other big beasts – and the youngest is Scheffler, aged 29 and still a touch awkward about where he should park himself; the newest is Rory McIlroy and tomorrow he’ll serve elk.
They all have their tales from the library. And they all share them in reverential tones.
‘When you sit in that room, you are surrounded by the history of that great tournament,’ Player told me last week. ‘It is not simply a dinner. It is a celebration. Special.’
But like all celebrations, it can get messy.
The late Herman Keiser, a man of a few grudges, once got started on the booze early and was found asleep in the toilet, Sam Snead used to clear the decks with his dirty jokes, and Ian Woosnam regrets what happened to his lamb. Willett? He reckons someone opened the oven door early, deflating his Yorkshire puddings, and Bernhard Langer wishes Arnold Palmer never raised the subject of the damned grass.
It takes an awful lot to get into that room of status and standing and secrets. But every so often, a few stories do creep out.
Butch Harmon is laughing. He’s one of the most renowned coaches in golf, a Svengali to Tiger Woods and McIlroy once upon a time, and he is also among the sport’s best raconteurs. The tale in his mind was inherited from his father, Claude, Masters champion in 1948 and a regular at the dinner between its inception in 1952 and his passing in 1989.
‘The funny stories were always about Sam Snead (champion in 1949, ’52 and ’54),’ says Harmon Jr. ‘He would always be telling off-colour jokes and Byron Nelson (1937 and ’42) couldn’t handle it. Eventually Byron would say, “Okay, Sam, we’ve heard enough of these risqué jokes. Let’s get back to talking about golf”.
‘The funny stories were always about Sam Snead (right, pictured with Arnold Palmer after the third round in 1958 when they were tied for the lead)’
By consensus of the gilded few, it is a uniquely charming evening of reminiscence, where past champions gather as links in a chain across the generations
The 1958 dinner, hosted by 1957 Green Jacket winner Doug Ford with Claude Harmon bottom left
‘My dad used to say Sam couldn’t help himself. He would just jump right in and tell them.’
Alas, times change and eras dilute. As Butch Harmon says: ‘In the old days, it was a little different than it is now. The old-timers were kind of a close-knit group.’
There were nine men at the first dinner in 1952 – seven champions and Augusta National’s two co-founders, Bobby Jones and Clifford Roberts, all brought together by the 1951 winner Ben Hogan under one stipulation: ‘You wear your green coat.’
Today, there are usually 30-plus who make the trip in their jackets, in addition to the club chairman, Fred Ridley. Responsibility for keeping the evening on track passed to two-time winner Ben Crenshaw from Nelson in 2005, a year before Nelson died.
Predictably, Augusta National tend to provide little information on the evening beyond publicising the food and wine. Woods, who has had to think up the menu five times, has served everything from burgers and milkshakes to porterhouse steak, fajitas and sushi. Sir Nick Faldo went for fish and chips. Scotland’s Sandy Lyle chose haggis, Langer’s offering included Wiener schnitzel. Usually, the chefs rise to the request; occasionally the intention and output do not align.
Ian Woosnam once told me his grand plan in 1992 went wrong. ‘At a hotel in Oswestry I had this lovely leg of Welsh lamb in hay and that was what I wanted,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately, this was a time when they banned shipping meat if there was bone in it.’ Augusta ordered a few joints over from Wales minus the bone, and the end product wasn’t quite as imagined. ‘Everyone was chewing through this thing!’ Woosnam added.
McIlroy’s choices have already been noted – grilled elk sliders, a main of Wagyu filet mignon or seared salmon, which follow a course of yellowfin tuna carpaccio, along with bacon-wrapped dates inspired by his mother. Recalling how he celebrated last year by raiding the club’s cellar, McIlroy has picked a 1990 Château Lafite Rothschild, which costs up to $2,500 a bottle and is one of four wines he has paired with the meal. As host, he will pick up the five-figure tab.
‘It gets very expensive,’ says Willett, the 2016 champion. When Woods missed the 2021 engagement after one of his car crashes, he light-heartedly rued that he wouldn’t get a chance to run up Dustin Johnson’s bill. His latest road collision will keep him from doing likewise to McIlroy.
Snead, Bobby Jones and Ben Hogan at the 1954 tournament
Rory McIlroy’s menu for this year’s dinner – which he will have to pick up the entire tab for
Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus – second and first in most major wins with a combined 33, including 11 at Augusta – always sit together with Tom Watson, a two-time winner here
Time will tell how Rory’s selections go down. The most maligned menus to date belonged to Bubba Watson in both 2013 and 2015 – Caesar salad, grilled chicken, mashed potatoes, corn, macaroni and cheese, and vanilla ice cream. Faldo compared it to a Happy Meal.
By his own admission, Watson, a picky eater from a hamlet of 4,000 people called Bagdad in Florida, usually has a burrito before he arrives, just in case the offering isn’t to his liking. ‘He can leave a bit behind,’ says Willett, who is well placed to know – he usually sits next to Watson and Patrick Reed.
Of itself, choosing a seat can be as fraught as choosing the menu. ‘There is no defined rule on where you sit and that can make you nervous,’ Willett adds.
‘The first year is easy – you’re at the head of the table when you host, you choose the food and say your speech. But after that you kind of have to figure out what feels right for where you sit.’
That situation has become a labyrinth of unspoken hierarchies. To the left of the head, Woods always sits with Jack Nicklaus and Tom Watson, and Scheffler disclosed recently that no one dares crash their space. Player, with nine majors to his name, is curiously set apart from them as a man who marches to his own drum.
Faldo is often in Player’s vicinity, while Zach Johnson and Jordan Spieth pair together, as do Spaniards Jon Rahm and Sergio Garcia. Often the decisions are made in advance like a schoolyard pact – you don’t want to go in without a plan.
‘I sit on the side opposite Tiger and Mr Nicklaus, and it’s the one that changes about the most,’ Willett says.
Naturally, the further you travel from the head, the rowdier it becomes. Charles Coody, the 1971 winner, told Golf Digest that the far end is where the ‘reprobates’ have always gone. It’s where Keiser, the 1946 champion, favoured and occasionally referenced his irritations against the establishment, whom he had accused of dirty tricks in the year he won, with elements of the membership having allegedly wagered on a Hogan victory.
Gary Player (left) won three Green Jackets, but keeps himself to himself rather than gatecrash the likes fo Nicklaus (right)
Bernhard Langer signs an autograph for Fred Couples before the 2002 dinner
He was said to have enjoyed ‘rubbing their noses in it’ by attending the dinner each year, though his enthusiasm for the occasion extended too far one April – he was found snoozing in the bathroom by his mate Fuzzy Zoeller. Needless to say, prior to his passing in 2002, Snead chose to sit at their end of the table.
Aside from the tone of the jokes, not much has changed at the dinner over the years. It was in 1959 that it switched from after the second round to the Tuesday and it was the 80s when the champions chose the food. Beyond those details, the structure holds. Like so much else at Augusta, it is deliberately timeless.
‘Today, there are many more nationalities at the table, which adds a very interesting dynamic to the evening,’ says Player, the Johannesburg native who became the first non-American to win the career grand slam. ‘But the spirit of the dinner has remained remarkably consistent. It is still an evening of camaraderie and storytelling.’
Player is the longest-standing attendee, having had his seat since 1962. At his first Champions Dinner, Player told me, he sat next to the co-founder Bobby Jones, a 13-time major winner, and chewed his ear off on the secrets of the course. It helped him win the Masters a further two times.
Other conversations have had less desirable consequences. Langer illustrated as much in a chat we had last year, when he brought up an observation the great Arnold Palmer had made at dinner in the late Eighties.
‘The chairman always comes in with us and at the time it was Hord Hardin,’ Langer said. ‘At the end, he asked, “If we can do anything better, let us know”. Well, Arnold got up and raised a point about the grass. Back then, half of the fairway was mowed away from us, and the other half was into us, so if you landed your tee shot where the grass was running away, the ball would run an extra 40 yards. On the other, the ball would dig in.
‘And so Arnold said, “You know, Mr Chairman, we’re good, but we’re not that good – we can’t always hit the down-grain”. The next day, all the mowers lined up at the green and mowed toward us and that’s been the case ever since. Lesson learned – be careful what you ask for!’
The players could laugh about that. But it was trickier to predict how the room would react in 2023, at the height of the LIV-based civil war in golf – there were six rebels present at the dinner and much relief when the evening passed cordially.
Fuzzy Zoeller (centre) found Herman Keiser (right) asleep in the toilet after a particularly heavy dinner one year
Arnold Palmer (left) won four Green Jackets, bettered only by Nicklaus (centre, six) and Woods (five) – but one request at a champions dinner put him in Langer’s bad books
Last year’s champions dinner photo, hosted by Scottie Scheffler (centre)
If there has been a conspicuous change to the occasion since that storm entered the tee cup, it has been around Phil Mickelson. Along with Fred Couples and Player, he was always the most gregarious talker in the room, but not so much lately.
‘He has become a bit quieter in there, which is a shame,’ says Willett. ‘Great storyteller. But it’s a really special evening. And a privilege to be there.
‘It’s getting shorter, I think, you are usually in and out within an hour and a half, because plenty of us have to be up and practising the next morning, but it will never get old. I hope it never changes.’
Not much chance of that at Augusta National.
