Masters still casts a spell

The Minneapolis Tribune called it a masterpiece. Thirteen-year-old me couldn’t but agree.

I’ve no idea was it bought or borrowed. It just sat there on the shelf, in between Leon Uris and Tarry Flynn, an old battered bastard of a book that at first glance did a passable impression of a seasoned copy of Soundings.

Green cover. Discoloured pages, 223 in all. Far from crying out to be read, it was a piece of sporting literature waiting to be put to stud. Something put it in my way — accident or design — but Dick Schapp’s The Masters: The Winning of a Golf Classic miraculously endured.