Even at 90, Gary Player wants to keep high-kicking on Augusta’s first tee until he is 100. He is, famously, a figure who deals in extremes, fond of hitting himself in the stomach to show off the strength of his core. He talks of playing the most golf courses, winning the most events, flying the most air miles of anybody who has ever lived. His scrupulous self-preservation was evident on his latest appearance as the Masters’ ceremonial starter: where he striped his drive down the middle, Jack Nicklaus, four years his junior, duck-hooked the ball so wildly it almost brained an unsuspecting patron.
The man in black is, inescapably, a piece of Masters furniture. When he competed in his first tournament here in 1957, Ben Hogan and Gene Sarazen were still in the field. This is his 68th visit, a longevity even more startling when you realise that journalists who attend 40 receive their own parking spaces. But with each return, Player’s contributions when he is anywhere near a microphone become increasingly wince-inducing. Invited this time to describe the dangers lurking for the unwary at the picture-perfect par-three 12th, he said: “It’s an eight-iron, and it has crippled more people than polio.”
Likening the hazard of Rae’s Creek to a horrific paralysing virus was, to put it politely, indelicate. But Player could not resist hyperbole on any subject, even describing Rory McIlroy’s ability to reduce Augusta’s par-five 15th to a drive and a seven-iron as a “tragedy”. If you craved the traditional gratuitous reference to his fitness regime, you were not left disappointed. Holding forth on Tiger Woods’ drug-driving habit, he argued, not unreasonably, that the five-time champion should copy his example by employing a chauffeur. Lest anyone deem him decrepit, he added: “My reflexes are as good as when I was 20.”
One look at Player’s limber physique in his 10th decade confirms that his fitness obsession bears fruit, with his kung fu kick on the tee flying higher than spectators a third of his age could manage. The mystery is why he is so relentlessly self-reverential about it, lecturing anybody who will listen about the need to treat your body like a holy temple. During one round of interviews in 2015, he said of a journalist who had just spoken to him: “It amazes me to see a young man like that, 50lbs overweight. Why can’t he realise that he’s going to die? He’s going to get diabetes, a heart attack or cancer. The doctors, they’re b------s. Doctors should be saying to him: ‘Look you’re going to die. You’ve got to stop eating.’”
In the United States, where the adult obesity rate is over 40 per cent, that message has a certain public service value. But Player conveys it so gratingly that he lurches into self-parody, with his certainties about his distinctions rooted less in provable fact than in colossal hubris. During his younger days in South Africa, he would claim that he did 300 crunches every morning. That claim only increased as he aged, first to 1,000 four times a week and later to 1,300 per day. No wonder he has an abdomen like a slab of granite. You just wish he could stop inviting people to touch it for proof.
Then again, Player seldom displays much of a filter. Even amid the innocuous, school-sports-day ambience of this week’s par-three contest, he began an interview with Sky Sports reporter Anna Jackson by asking the camera crew: “Why have you started working with this good-looking chick, huh?” At least it was not as cringeworthy as the episode in 2021, when Player’s son Wayne ambushed a ceremony to celebrate Lee Elder, the first black golfer to play the Masters, by holding up a sleeve of golf balls behind the head of the wheelchair-bound honouree. That spot of guerrilla marketing earned Wayne a lifetime Augusta ban.
While you hesitate to blame the sins of the son on the father, Player’s own relationship with Augusta is vexed. Having ranked the Masters bottom of the four majors, he expressed outrage earlier this year that he was not allowed to play a fourball on the course with his three grandchildren. Framing it as an unforgivable snub, he said: “They are dying to know about their grandfather’s episodes on that course. All the courses that have hosted the Open, the US Open and the PGA would oblige, but they won’t do it at Augusta. It is just this current management there, but these are the times we live in. I accept it, but I accept it with sadness.”
To observe Player in this environment is to be struck by his enduring obstinacy, by how he remains a magnet for controversy. He is a genuine all-time great, with his nine major titles and 165 worldwide wins, but his gift for sticking his foot in his mouth is unparalleled. In some ways, he has evolved, going from presenting himself as “of the South Africa of Verwoerd and apartheid” to becoming such an admirer of Nelson Mandela that he memorably kissed his feet. But in others, he is incorrigible, with his need to be venerated so boundless that he risks diminishing his own dignity.