Augusta National Quotes

To me, the mark of a truly great sporting venue has never been what it sounds like or how it feels when the stands are packed. That's easy. Even the most generic cookie-cutter stadium or arena feels electric when the game is big, the lights are on, and the crowd is amped. The real measure of a ballpark's character is how the place feels when it's empty. When the only noises to be heard are produced by the occasional breeze that slips through the concourse. It rattles the ropes on the empty center-field flagpoles. It pushes a stray plastic cup around beneath the feet of the box seats. And if you listen closely enough, that wind carries on it the whispers of the ghosts. The athletes who played between the lines, their toes in the dirt where only those who compete are allowed to roam. During my career in sports media, I've heard their voices at Indianapolis Motor Speedway and Darlington Raceway. I've heard them at Lambeau Field and the Rose Bowl. I've heard them at old Boston Garden and Augusta National. And the morning of Thursday, March 3, 1994, I heard them at McCormick Field. Cobb, Gehrig, Dizzy Dean, Hank Greenberg, Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Willie Stargell. From the Hall of Famers to a thousand minor leaguers whose names no one remembers. I swear, they were all there that morning to welcome us into the little mountain ballpark that they'd helped build.

In the last few weeks we have been provided with fresh examples of American hypocrisy. In Augusta, Georgia, six blacks were killed in racial violence that followed a protest against the inhuman conditions in the local jail. All of them were shot in the back, some as many as nine times, and possibly four were bystanders. At Jackson State College in Mississippi, highway police fired into a crowd of students, killing two and wounding nine. There is no evidence to prove the police claim that they were being fired on by snipers, but there is evidence which indicates that the police fired on the students with automatic weapons. And finally, there is the report from the Chicago grand jury that the killing of two Black Panthers last December did not result from a "shoot-out" between the Panthers and the police, as the police had claimed. All the available evidence points to a police ambush in which the Panthers were murdered. What are black Americans to think when such events are forgotten almost as soon as they happen, while the death of young white students is made into a national tragedy? The answer is obvious, and, sadly, it is one that we have known all along: that in America the life of a white person is considered to be more valuable than the life of a black person; that the killing of a white student thrusts a lance of grief through the heart of white America, while the killing of a black is condoned or rationalized on the grounds that blacks are violent and thus deserve to be killed, or that they have been persecuted for so long that somehow they have become "used to" death. My own feeling is that the word "racism" is thrown about too loosely these days, but considering what has happened in the last few weeks, I these days, but considering what has think it accurately describes much of what goes on "in white America.

Meanwhile, blacks observed how German prisoners housed at Camp Gordon were getting paid to work the grounds of the Augusta National Golf Club, and to pick peanuts, corn, and potatoes across the Savannah River. “They sing and whistle, seem to enjoy work,” enthused the Augusta Chronicle. “Farmers are delighted.” Such news stories left a bitter taste in the mouths of black Augustans, who felt the government was doing more for the enemy than it was willing to do for them.

In 1884 the editor of the Daily Picayune wrote that it would be 'more humane to punish with death all prisoners sentenced to a longer period than six years,' because the average convict lived no longer than that. At the time, the death rate of six prisons in the Midwest, where convict leasing was nonexistent, was around 1 percent. By contrast, in the deadliest year of Louisiana's lease, nearly 20 percent of convicts perished. Between 1870 and 1901, some three thousand Louisiana convicts, most of whom were black, died under James's regime. Before the war, only a handful of planters owned more than one thousand slaves, and there is no record of anyone allowing three thousand valuable human chattel to die. The pattern was consistent throughout the South, where annual convict death rates ranged from about 16 percent to 25 percent, a mortality rate that would rival the Soviet gulags to come. Some American camps were far deadlier than Stalin's: In South Carolina the death rate of convicts leased to the Greenwood and Augusta Railroad averaged 45 percent a year from 1877 to 1879. In 1870 Alabama prison officials reported that more than 40 percent of their convicts had died in their mining camps. A doctor warned that Alabama's entire convict population could be wiped out within three years. But such warnings meant little to the men getting rich off of prisoners. There was simply no incentive for lessees to avoid working people to death. In 1883, eleven years before Samuel L. James's death, one Southern man told the National Conference of Charities and Correction: 'Before the war, we owned the negroes. If a man had a good negro, he could afford to take care of him: if he was sick get a doctor. He might even put gold plugs in his teeth. But these convicts: we don't own 'em. One dies, get another.

That’s frustratingly common. “I’ve evaluated thousands of quartz samples from all over the world,” said John Schlanz, chief minerals processing engineer at the Minerals Research Laboratory in Asheville, about an hour from Spruce Pine. “Near all of them have contaminate locked in the quartz grains that you can’t get out.” Some Spruce Pine quartz is flawed in this way. Those grains, the washouts from the Delta Force of the quartz selection process, are used for high-end beach sand and golf course bunkers—most famously the salt-white traps of Augusta National Golf Club,16 site of the iconic Masters Tournament. A golf course in the oil-drunk United Arab Emirates imported 4,000 tons of this sand in 2008 to make sure its sand traps were world-class, too.

There we experienced in our own life what other people’s trust does to you. It releases new powers; new depths in your soul open, hitherto unknown to yourself. It sharpens your will and fixes it on the goal—it helps you to do the impossible. That’s the way God works with us. He always gives us another chance. Why do people use this magic wand so little? It would transform this world into a paradise. Communism would not be a threat, and United Nations would not be needed. The brotherhood of man would be lived, not just talked about.