I'm James Bullington. I'm 43, I'm a pharmacist, and I live in Augusta, Georgia, which means that once a year the whole world comes to my town to watch golf, and the other fifty-one weeks I play it badly, like everybody else.

I carry an 18 handicap. I've been as low as 15, in 1994, the year before our second boy was born, and as high as 22. I play Saturday mornings at 7:20 with George and Doyle, who are 12 and 20, at a public course south of town on sandy ground with longleaf pines down every fairway. It's called Pine Barrens, and you can guess where the tour got its name. It's flat, it's cheap, the greens are better than they have any right to be, and in August you can fry an egg on the cart path by the ninth tee.

Net even par. Exactly my handicap, which is exactly what a handicap is supposed to tell you, and exactly what never happens. Two pars on the front and none on the back. The 7 on 13 was two balls in the pond, and I'd like to say that never happens either. Doyle shot 96 and bought breakfast. George shot 83 and complained about his putting the whole way home.

People ask whether playing Links makes you better at real golf. It hasn't done a thing for my swing. My swing is what it is, God help it. But it has made me think better on the course. On the computer, a bad decision costs you the same strokes it costs you in real life, and you can't blame your back or the coffee. After a year of playing the Old Course with the wind up, I lay up a lot more than I used to, and I take my medicine out of the trees instead of trying to thread a 3-iron through them. That's worth two or three shots a round for me, easy.

And there's this: I work long days, and my two boys play everything from baseball to soccer to band, and some weeks the only golf I get is eighteen holes at the kitchen computer at ten o'clock at night. My wife Debbie says it's the only sport where I never lose a ball. That's not quite true. You can lose a ball in Links. I've done it at Entrada more times than I'd like to say.

Yes, I live in the town where the Masters is played. No, I have never played Augusta National. It's a private club, and pharmacists don't get invited. Neither does almost anybody else.

Masters week is the busiest week of the year at the pharmacy. The town fills up with visitors from everywhere, and visitors forget their blood pressure pills, get sunburned, eat too much and catch colds on the airplane, and every one of them ends up at somebody's counter, often mine. That's why the tour takes that week off. This year, by the time I got home on Sunday night, José María Olazábal had already won, and I watched the end of it on the late news.

The rest of the year, Augusta is a regular Southern town that happens to have a golf course in it that everybody's heard of. I like it here. The winters are short and you can play golf twelve months a year, even if you play it like me.