We Need to Protect the Masters At All Costs

But when asked about my weekend exploits, I kept replaying the splunk! in my head, over and over again. There was something about it I couldn’t shake. About what it said about this tournament, the state of sports, our collective phone addiction, and McIlroy himself—who, at that very moment on the thirteenth hole, was losing the mammoth lead he had built earlier in the weekend.

McIlroy directs traffic in the third round of the Masters.Hector Vivas - Getty Images

If you’re doing the Masters right, you can stay blissfully unplugged with a well-placed detour on the way to eastern Georgia. For the weekend, Mercedes gave us a speedy 2026 Mercedes-AMG GT 63 S E Performance. While going at a somewhat responsible speed down I-20*,* we spotted a sign for Historic Crawfordville, whatever that was, pulled into its single street with storefronts, and picked the first restaurant we saw: Nick's Place.

A few elderly patrons dotted the joint, which has a dark wooden interior with ceiling-high shelves on either end. A soft piano melody drifted through the place, even though Nick's has a couple dozen old vinyls on display. If you want to know about the past lives of Nick’s Place—because it has clearly returned from the dead, unlike the ice cream parlor next door—you have to inspect the old photographs wedged between the albums and knick-knacks. Just like we don’t need the veteran ushers at Augusta to tell us to leave devices at the door, Nick’s is another spot where airplane mode is a way of life. When we finished lunch, left, and, sigh, pulled out our phones, we learned the finer details of Crawfordville: population of about 500, named after an 1824 presidential candidate, a filming location for Sweet Home Alabama.

I’m certainly not the first guy to wax poetic about a life before Elon and chatbots and This Slopified American Life, but wouldn’t life be just a little bit better if the Masters wasn’t the only sporting event of its kind? Or if someone gave that ice cream parlor a second life? Or, dare I say, if we bricked our phones every once in a while? Research is beginning to show that merely blocking Internet capabilities on your phone can improve your attention span and overall well-being.

I left Nick’s and Augusta feeling pretty damn good. I told my host for the weekend, Michael Minielly—director of communications and brand experience for Mercedes-Benz USA—that what you’re reading was my angle: That we need to protect this at all costs. He agreed wholeheartedly—and wrote this about how Mercedes fits into it all.

“As a proud Champion Partner of the Masters for nearly two decades, Mercedes-Benz has found a truly exceptional partner in Augusta National Golf Club that shares an unmatched legacy and tradition of excellence. It is crucial to find a balance of respecting what endures while elevating what’s next with an unwavering focus on precision and innovation to continuously set new standards for the future.”

Turns out, scanning a towering, analog scoreboard is a heck of a lot more fulfilling than following along on the ESPN app.Augusta National - Getty Images

Before his next shot on the thirteenth hole, McIlroy turned around, held up his arms, and gently gestured for the crowd to move back. They did.

He squared to the ball and drew back his iron. He needed their silence. They obliged.

Whish!

They cheered, nearly as much as they would when he drained his last putt on Sunday to win the whole damn thing—for the second time in a row. And not a single person, including me, needed their phone to enjoy it.

“To all the patrons, the support that I feel out there and the atmosphere that you all provide for the players to play in, it truly is a one-of-a-kind golf tournament,” McIlroy would later say in the Green Jacket Ceremony. “I said this last year but everyone is so present, so engaged in what’s going on. As a player, it’s a real privilege to play in that, so thank you so much for that.”

Amidst the sports world's never-ending controversies, the rise of gambling, and dwindling press access to athletes, it’s easy to listen to a platitude like this and shrug it off as a cliché. But when McIlroy thanked us, I believed him.

When I interviewed him back in 2021, McIlroy was caught in a sort of golf purgatory. His last major championship win was the 2014 PGA Championship. Fans and pundits never missed a chance to let him hear about it, and he seemed to be finally making peace with life as perennial great who couldn’t dominate on the biggest stage. What did he change?

Well, he gave up social media in the late-2010s.

“You can have all the success and money in the world—it’s not going to make you intrinsically happy,” he told me. “There’s other things that fulfill people other than that, and maybe that’s hard for people on the outside looking in to understand.”

At the Green Jacket Ceremony, as the sun dipped below the azaleas and dogwoods, McIlroy dutifully and warmly made his way through his speech. We were all on the outside looking in, but it felt like we finally understood.

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