By Amy Nutt
Sports Illustrated

"Did you say badges? We don't need no stinkin' badges." But if you have a couple, well...

It was one o'clock Tuesday morning as I pulled out of the Waffle House parking lot in Augusta, Georgia. I'd just arrived from New York and had stopped for a bite to eat, having opted against the hard roll and neon orange slab of cheese the US Air flight attendant had offered earlier in the evening. I'd left behind New York City gridlock and flown hundreds of miles to this sleepy southern hamlet only to discover...traffic? At one in the morning? Yep. The joint was jumping, and Washington Road, which runs past the Augusta National Golf Club, home of the Masters, might as well have been Broadway.

Which was sort of the idea. Need a camera at midnight in New York? Try Times Square. Need a pair of tickets to the Masters practice round at 1 a.m. in Augusta? Try Washington Road. You won't be alone. In fact, David Hamilton, a recent graduate of the Mississippi College School of Law in Jackson, will probably be there again tonight, trying to score a badge for Wednesday. Hamilton's spot is under a bright street lamp between a Texaco gas station and the Krispy Kreme doughnut shop ("Discounts Given to Churches, Schools, Clubs") and on Monday he only had to wait from 5 a.m. until 1 in the afternoon to get a practice round ticket for the day. His impressions of Augusta National on seeing it for the first time? "It's like a whole other country inside of this town," he said.

I stood with David until about 1:30 a.m. to see if he'd get lucky for Tuesday's practice round. Holding a "Need Ticket" sign attached to the back of a Fed Ex envelope, David attracted a couple of cars whose drivers slowed as if looking to make a drug buy, only to learn that David wasn't selling tickets--just trying to buy, too. A third car pulled up with a friend of David's inside. He'd seen us talking and was hoping David had found a seller. No such luck. When I left him, his baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, David still seemed sure he'd get a ticket by dawn.

In the light of day there are actually fewer people cruising Washington Road--because Washington Road is two miles of brake lights and very little else. Instead, ticket sellers and buyers, the scalpers and scalpees, walk the sides of the road with about as much hope as Rich Kotite walking the sideline of a Jets game. Well, actually, with a lot more hope. Only today, the last practice day before the par-3 contest tomorrow and the start of actual play on Thursday, tickets are becoming more expensive to come by. Since last year, the Masters has sold lottery chances for practice rounds through the mail. In years past, it was simply first-come, first-served, Monday through Wednesday. Tournament badges themselves are virtually impossible to get. There is a 20-25 year waiting list and about the only way to get in is if someone checks out--literally. Even then, former Masters patrons have been known to will their badges to other family members. All of which means commerce for tickets at the Masters is brisk, and the laws of supply and demand are fully operative.

Robert Williams, a chemical engineer from North Augusta, doesn't even play golf and has never been to the tournament, but he stands patiently across the street from Augusta's gates, aviator sunglasses shielding his eyes from the morning sun, hoping to find two tickets for today's practice round, two fingers held aloft in the unofficial Masters salute. What about work this week, I ask him? Isn't his boss wondering what he's doing? "No, not really," he answers. "During the Masters this is kind of a normal thing around here. If you're out, it's just considered a vacation day."

There is very definitely an art to this Masters salute (the search, it seems, is always for two tickets). It's much too tiring to hold your arm aloft for very long, so one has to find the right degree of bend in the elbow so as not to overtax it. The fingers, too, shouldn't be too stiff, and a general slouch in the shoulders is to be preferred. The look is casual, but serious.

One man, Terry Hatton from Lexington, Kentucky, is not making use of either the Masters salute or the other preferred method, a cardboard sign. He's wearing his request: a gray sweatshirt upon which is printed in paisley-designed letters, "I need tickets."

"My arms used to cramp up holding a sign," he says, "so the sweatshirt saves energy." Then he adds: "I used it last year, too. Haven't washed it yet."

One sign nearby has been abandoned, or is waiting for its owner to return. "Will work for badges," it reads. I wonder what he was willing to do.

Three teenagers (barely) are working a side street really hard and I begin to wonder what their ardent interest is in the rather middle-aged sport of golf. Two of them, brothers--they are all from Augusta--are wearing University of Connecticut baseball caps and I can barely understand their southern accents. Their desire for tickets, I quickly learn, is an entrepreneurial one. They're in the buying-and-selling business. As in buy low, sell high. In this case, they are buying single practice tickets at their face-value of 16 bucks and then turning around and scalping them for twice the price. Two brothers, 15 and 13-years-old, are turning a profit of about $200 a day. They also tell me they know someone selling four-day tournament badges for $5,000. When I ask the older one what he's socking the money away for, either my naivete or my bad ear for a southern twang hears him answer, "college." Actually, what he's said is "car," which he quickly amends to "truck."

Down from where the young men of Augusta are working hard for their money, on Berckman Road, is Gate 6 into the golf club. And across the street is Clyde Pilcher's ranch house. For the past 19 years, Pilcher has opened up his 3/4 acre plot of land for use as a parking lot during Masters week. He makes anywhere from $300 to $1,000 a day and squeezes about 100 cars onto his property. At $10 a pop a day, Pilcher expects to turn a tidy profit of more than $5,000 for the week, which isn't bad when you consider he's selling nothing more than lawn space. Not that Pilcher isn't a southern gentleman of the highest order. On Sunday he provides coolers of beer and Coke, sets up four or five TV's in the front yard and barbecues 400 pounds of ribs for his "guests." It occurs to me that on Sunday, for $10 and a spot outside Gate 6, a quarter-mile from the course, heck, I may skip the free press parking. Those ribs sure sound better than the hard roll and neon cheese that await me on my journey home.