Spring brings the annual fairyland of golf, and pimento sandwiches cheese too

As long as there is a Masters, there will be pimento cheese. On white bread, of course. The signature sandwich, like the place, is comfort food, and never more necessary.

I think we can agree there needs to be relief from daily distress, from uncertainty, from malignant malfeasance. Well, just in time and on schedule here comes reassurance that order, peace and affordable comestibles still exist.

Augusta National may be an illusion kept safe behind hedges and guarded gates, a theater for a new season, while the actual town endures as best it can, like most of us, unseen and uncelebrated.

But we will take the deception as offered, the tinkling theme music, the dyed ponds, the strategic azaleas, the comforting shadows of the loblolly pines, the arrogance and the aloofness, because reality needs a break.

So, welcome to another Masters, created by Bobby Jones, pedigreed by Arnold Palmer, sustained by Jack Nicklaus, maintained by Tiger Woods and lately left to Scottie Scheffler.

It is a major golf title because Palmer said it was, and racial and gender insensitivity aside, it has become what it has.

The jasmine and the juniper, the dogwood and the flowering crab apple. The smells, the sounds, the tastes. Mint juleps on the clubhouse veranda under the oaks with the roar of wonder rolling back up the hills from the hollows below. Tiger Woods on a charge. You never needed a scoreboard to know it. You didn't need a robin to know it was spring.

The great scam of the Masters is to have turned snobbery into trade, creating an air of aristocratic indulgence, basking in public affection by simply allowing it. It's like being invited to look inside the mansion, or at least its garden, using the side gate and paying in advance, of course.

There is nothing quite like it anywhere in sports, except possibly at Wimbledon and in the addled egos of the International Olympic Committee. The Masters is a special place, it is a special event and anyone blessed enough to witness it is special as well.

And to win it? There is an immortality included with the tacky green wardrobe and the trophy. Just ask Mike Weir or Trevor Immelmann, or Danny Willett, if you can find them. The peculiarity of the Masters is that no one asks why they won, but demands to know why Rory McIlroy has not.

Sports does not solve problems, it masks them, sometimes exaggerates them, and golf is not the first place to look for solutions. Consider the present rift in golf, where politics, money and “sportswashing” has roiled a good walk spoiled.

The Masters remains aloof from such squabbles, finding a way to include a dozen dissenters from the Saudi Arabian tour, almost all former Masters champions who were eligible in any case.

Augusta National is the same garden wallpaper for all, whether outlier Bryson DeChambeau or 65-year-old Fred Couples, making his 40th Masters start, reassurance that opposing tribes can play together.

The Masters is the most traditional of all the traditional tournaments, honoring its champions forever. The first Masters I covered, the honorary starters were Jock Hutchison and Freddie McLeod, left over from the very first Masters, both feeble at the time and grateful for even sympathetic cheers.

Now the tournament is started by Tom Watson, Gary Player and Nicklaus. There is something mournful and desolate about this ritual, for inevitably the feeling is not nostalgia but regret. I wonder when Woods will take his turn.

The turn down Magnolia Lane to the antebellum clubhouse is restricted to competitors and members, not the same thing at all. The long lane is lined by, yes, magnolia trees, a shady path to another world, another time, where white-coated lackeys lit the cigars of gentlemen on the veranda and never let the bottom of the glass get dry.

The wisteria provides a barrier of shrubbery that hides the cyclone fence, keeping the real world out here considering uncertainty. Inside everything is a fairyland of golf, immaculate and familiar and available only to badge holders, mostly white, mostly round and mostly rich.

Munching on, one assumes, pimento cheese sandwiches, crust included.