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A peek inside SI's bunker
Posted: Thursday April 06, 2000 10:55 AM
AUGUSTA, Ga. -- A few years ago Augusta -- the city, not the golf club -- incorporated the surrounding counties, more than doubling the town's size, to some half a million people. Don't let that number deceive you. Augusta is still a small town at heart, ill-equipped to deal with the crush of humanity that turns out every year for the Masters. The few rundown hotels in the area extort up to three bills a night during tournament week, and even they sell out six months in advance. All the players rent private houses for the Masters, as do the other stars of the week -- the SI staffers. This year we have no less than nine scribes on hand, plus five photographers, a smattering of editors, and all of the bigwigs from our publishing side, who fly in and out an endless number of back-slapping clients. They say the Masters is the toughest ticket in sports, and that is probably true. However, if you're a high-ranking executive at a multinational corporation looking to buy ad space in SI, it's probably one of the easiest.
It is this kind of bonding -- usually minus the lingerie -- that makes the Masters so fun. I rarely get to see my fellow writers. The last time I bumped into any of them was at our office holiday party in NYC. Before that it was at the Ryder Cup, way back in September. I'm used to riding into town like the Lone Ranger, with a holster full of Paper Mate pens and only the room-service waiter for conversation. Even at other majors, where we have a lot of staffers on hand, we always stay in hotels, and thus rarely see each other except for the odd meal and at the course. (A notable exception came at the '97 Ryder Cup, when the five-star resort our publishing folks had secured turned out to be a two-hour drive from the golf course. I sniffed out a wildly overpriced hotel room an hour and 45 minutes down the road, and then made the mistake of gloating to Rick Reilly, who, before I knew what hit me, was squatting in my room. On Reilly's first morning the phone mysteriously rang around dawn, and I watched in horror as he hurtled suitcases and dodged laptop cords to quiet the offending ringing, all the while buck naked. In Reilly's defense, it was a very cold morning.) While in Augusta we play a fair amount of pickup hoops, a lot of twilight golf, and often stay up deep into the night, telling the same old stories one more time. I remember fondly a late-night bull session of a couple years ago, when a half dozen of us writers sat around eating milk and cookies (I'm not making this up) and debated the myriad uses of the semicolon, among other, bawdier topics. This esprit de corps is particularly welcome on Sunday night, when all of us are grinding on deadline. Years ago four of us -- me, Jaime Diaz, John Garrity and writer-reporter Rick Lipsey -- all set up shop around the dining-room table, our faces reflecting the ghostly blue of a computer screen, the only noise the pitter-patter of bionic fingers, the shuffling of paper and the occasional odd query, such as, "Does anybody know the first name of Bobby Jones's sister's dentist's secretary's third cousin?" As the night wore on we all migrated to different parts of the house. Lipsey filed his Inside Golf notes and went to bed. Garrity retired to his room, too, where he was sketching, longhand, a detailed outline of his unfinished story. I was still at the table, while Diaz had adjourned to the living room. Way, way past midnight Jaime strolled in and said he was going to take a little snooze, his preferred way of dealing with deadline stress. He asked me to wake him in an hour, which I did. Just give me another half hour, he pleaded. Uh, Jaime, it's two in the morning -- your story's due in five hours, I nagged. Half an hour more, he begged. At the appointed time I returned, but instead of tickling his feet, I plucked Beck's Mellow Gold from the CD library of one of the house's teenagers. I cranked up the living room's system, and slowly Jaime rose, propelled by strains of "I'm a loser baby/so why don't you kill me," the unofficial soundtrack of golf writers everywhere. Sports Illustrated golf writer Alan Shipnuck's column appears each Wednesday at golfplus.cnnsi.com. He will be filing daily through Friday from the 2000 Masters in Augusta. Click here to send Alan a question or a nice, friendly comment.
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