Sorting through the best sandwiches, insects and glutes during the final round at Augusta.
1. Miguel Angel Jimenez. Not even playing and still dominating the charts.
1a. Egg Salad Sandwich. Make all the noise you like about the Pimento Cheese Sandwich. The one sandwich they cannot keep in stock at the media center is the Egg Salad Sandwich, the real lord of the Augusta Concessions leader board. Full disclosure: I do not like cheese, and think it is what desperate French monks ate when they ran out of actual food sometime in the Middle Ages. The stacks of untouched, green paper-wrapped Pimento Cheese sandwiches in the Media Room cooler do not lie. (P.S. If you disagree with this opinion, remember that a lot of journalists do not know what food is, and will often eat objects bearing no resemblance to actual food. Grantland Rice once ate the wax fruit out of a bowl at Augusta National! I may have just made this up!)
2. Jordan Spieth. He's been so unnaturally good that any believer in the natural order of things and balance and stuff would have to bet on him teeing off backwards into the gallery under the control of malign demon hands. Contra: he is 21, and may be too young, brilliant, and life-dumb to know just how doomed he might or might not be.
3. Bees. It's kind of a mystery how Augusta manages to keep the course largely bug-free, but there are guesses. One: massive, massive doses of pesticides and insect repellent. Two: Biting female mosquitoes are still female, and hence have a difficult time getting into the club in the first place. Three: They do the same kind of sorcery Disney does, and use natural predators and other entomological interventions to achieve the effect of pest control. There might be something to the third theory. The azaleas on the 6th hole are bug free, but the tree above those azaleas along the pedestrian walkway is clearly the pure uncut cocaine of the bee world. The whole freakin' tree hums.
4. Tiger's swing. Or his release point, or its precise location over the hips, or the backwing, or sub-backswing, or the counter-shift of the tibia in reaction to the internal rotation of the patella, or hell I don't know there are apparently 93 different components of a golf swing and all of them have to be in perfect working order or the golfer in question will fall apart like a cheap mannequin right there and then on the course. Greg Norman had to be put together like C-3PO after the back nine in 1986, riding in pieces in a sling on his caddie's back! Also, Tiger's glutes are "firing properly," which seems like a very personal thing to know about anyone.
4a. Tiger's glutes. Championship glutes. Gutty, gritty glutes, even. EXPLODING glutes.
5. Guy who just yells out "Phil" at Phil Mickelson. Phil Mickelson's fans are prone to just yelling out his name at him, not in a particularly encouraging way, but like someone who is not happy about seeing Phil Mickelson wandering through their garden in the early morning. Phil. PHIL. Phil, you and the squirrels have decimated my tomatoes. Please get out of there. PHIL. That's your name: Phil, and I want you to move on before I come back here with my .22.
6. Shoehorns. I could agree before coming here that there was a theoretical limit on the number of shoehorns that might be necessary for one place to have, but now I know: there is a place that has entirely too many shoehorns, and it is the locker room at Augusta National. If you need one, just ask them! They will definitely not give you one, and will summon large security people to remove you from the premises.
7. Squirrels. There is not one on this course despite squirrels ruling large swaths of Georgia. Either the Squirrel Rapture has happened over the weekend, or we all now know what John Daly's job is when he comes here: waiting in a tree with a silenced sniper rifle and a sack for his victims. He also hunts squirrels too, probably.
8. Weird cords going up trees. Some of the trees on the course have odd cords going up them for mysterious reasons. This is leading us to the idea that Alex Jones should narrate Masters footage Jim Nantz-style, all the while theorizing about how the Bilderberg Group keeps the greens dry. This is what this could sound like, in theory; it is clearly the future of sports broadcasting.
9. SEC Coaching Productivity. Dead last. Spurrier was on the course on Friday, Gus Malzahn's here on Sunday, and rival coaches take note: none of them may use their cellphones in any capacity whatsoever.