I started writing this on Monday night, April 14, the day after, because I couldn't sleep and I needed to put it somewhere. It took me the rest of the week. My name is Milton Bowden. I am 54 years old, I am a guidance counselor at a public high school here in Atlanta, and I have loved this game for more than forty years, a good many of them from the outside of it looking in.

I don't believe I will see another Sunday like the one I saw this week. I want to write it down while it's still fresh, and I want to put it next to the history it came out of, because the young people I work with don't know that history, and I am finding that a good many grown people don't either.

On this page: Sunday with my father · The four rounds · The records · The long road · Tiger's first months · Monday at school · Next

Sunday with my father

My father, Lester Bowden, is 80 years old. He carried golf bags at a private club on the north side of Atlanta in the 1930s, when a caddie was the only way a Black man got onto a course like that, and he carried them there for years. When I was eleven he walked me over to the same caddie yard and I started carrying too. So when I tell you I watched this Masters with my father, I want you to understand that the two of us between us carried other men's clubs for the better part of thirty years before either of us ever stood on a first tee as a paying customer.

I went over to Daddy's house after church. My wife Sandra brought a pound cake, which nobody touched until it was over. Daddy sat in his chair the whole afternoon with his hat on his knee. He doesn't talk during golf. He never did, not even in the caddie yard; he said you watch a man's swing, you don't discuss it.

By the time Tiger came to the 18th he had the tournament won by a mile, and still neither one of us could breathe right. He made his last putt, a short one for par that was trickier than it looked, and the crowd made a sound I have never heard come out of a golf gallery. Then he walked off the green and found his father, Earl, and they held on to each other for a long, long time. I looked over and my father had put his hat over his face.

We didn't say anything for a while. Then Daddy got up, cut the pound cake, and handed me a piece, and that was the end of it. That was enough.

The four rounds

Thursday. People forget this already, but he started badly. He went out in 40, four over par on the front nine, and I said to Sandra that the young man was finding out what Augusta is. Then he came home in 30, six under on the back nine, for a 70. I take back what I said.

Friday. A 66, and he had the lead by three strokes over Colin Montgomerie.

Saturday. A 65. The lead went to nine, over Costantino Rocca. The other players were talking to the reporters like the tournament was already over, and it was.

Sunday. Paired with Rocca, he shot 69 and won by twelve over Tom Kite. He was hitting wedges and short irons into greens where the rest of the field needed long irons and woods. And on those greens, which have made fools of the best players in the world for sixty years, he putted like a man who had been on them all his life.

Afterward Nick Faldo, last year's champion, helped him into the green jacket, the way it's done at Augusta every year. I have watched that ceremony on television since I was a young man, and I never once imagined I would see it done for a young man who looked like my own son.

The records

• 270, eighteen under par. The lowest score in the history of the Masters. Jack Nicklaus in 1965 and Raymond Floyd in 1976 had shared the old mark at 271.
• Twelve strokes. The widest winning margin in Masters history. The old record was Nicklaus's nine, also in 1965.
• Twenty-one years old. The youngest man ever to win the Masters. Seve Ballesteros had been the youngest, at 23, in 1980.
• The first Black man to win the Masters, and the first to win any of the four major championships of men's golf. His mother is from Thailand, and he is proud of both sides of his family, as he should be. I write "Black" here because it's my page and that is the part of it I can speak to.

The long road from Lee Elder to Tiger

Some of this is in books, and some of it I lived. I have tried to keep to what I know.

The caddies. From the first Masters in 1934, every player in the tournament had to use an Augusta National caddie, and for all those years the caddies were Black men. The whole world watched Black men carry the bags at Augusta for half a century. Players weren't allowed to bring their own caddies until 1983. I tell my students that, and they don't believe me.

Our own courses. When I was a boy, the city golf courses in Atlanta were for white people. A family named Holmes took the city to court over it, all the way to the Supreme Court, and won, and in December of 1955 Black golfers teed off on the city courses for the first time. I was twelve. I didn't play that Christmas, but I remember Daddy reading the paper at the kitchen table and reading it again. Within a few years I was playing the city courses with cut-down clubs and a bag I had sewn up myself, and I have been playing public courses ever since.

The tour. Until 1961 the Professional Golfers' Association had a rule in its constitution that its members had to be Caucasian. Charlie Sifford fought that rule for years, played anyway wherever they would let him, and kept fighting until it was gone. He won the Greater Hartford Open in 1967, when he was already in his forties, and the Los Angeles Open in 1969. Pete Brown won the Waco Turner Open in 1964, the first Black man to win a tour event. Neither of them was ever invited to the Masters. In those years, winning a tour event didn't get you in.

Lee Elder. Then Augusta changed its rules so that a win on the tour earned an invitation, and in April 1974 Lee Elder won the Monsanto Open in Pensacola in a playoff. In April 1975, he became the first Black man to play in the Masters. I was 32 years old and I remember exactly where I was. He missed the cut that week. It didn't matter one bit.

The members. Augusta National did not have a Black member until 1990. That's seven years ago.

And now. Twenty-two years after Lee Elder walked to the first tee, a Black man walked up the 18th with a twelve-stroke lead and the whole world watching. I have been trying all week to say what that means and I can't do better than this: the door was shut, and good men put their shoulders to it for fifty years, and on Sunday a young man walked straight through it like it had never been shut at all. He walked through it because they pushed.

Tiger's first months

I have followed him since his amateur days, when he won the U.S. Junior Amateur three years running and then did something nobody had ever done, winning the U.S. Amateur three straight years, 1994, 1995 and 1996. He played the Masters as an amateur in 1995, made the cut and was the low amateur. After the third Amateur, at the end of August last year, he turned professional. Here is what he has done since:

• October 1996, Las Vegas. His first win as a professional, in a playoff with Davis Love III. That was only his fifth start.
• October 1996, Walt Disney World. Won again, by one stroke over Payne Stewart. Two wins in his first two months.
• January 1997, the Mercedes Championships. Beat Tom Lehman in a playoff to open the new year.
• April 1997, the Masters. See above. I don't believe I need to say any more.

He is 21. My students at that age are deciding whether to take the SAT a second time.

Monday at school

On Monday morning I had a line outside my office before first bell, and not one of them wanted to talk about a schedule change. Boys who have never held a golf club in their lives wanted to know how far he hits it and how you get to play at a place like Augusta. One young man asked me, very seriously, whether there was a team at our school. There isn't. I told him there are public courses in this city with junior rates, and that I have a set of clubs in my trunk, and that if he wants to learn, I will meet him at the range on a Saturday. Three of them have taken me up on it so far. That is the best thing to come out of this week, as far as I'm concerned, and I'll report on how they're doing.

Next: the U.S. Open at Congressional in June

The U.S. Open is at Congressional Country Club, outside Washington, June 12 through 15. A U.S. Open course is a different test from Augusta, with the rough grown up high and the fairways narrow, and everybody is going to want to see whether his game travels. Daddy says he'll watch it, and I'll be right there next to him. I'll write it up here when it's over.

My Saturday partners, Sheldon Hoehn and Gene Hendrickson, have asked me to note for the record that I have not broken 80 since this page went up, and that I talk about the Masters on every hole. Both are true.