#(and of course most of the lore i have so far is tim related)

[jonny-b-meowborn]

girls will be struck by god's divine inspiration and come up with a mechanisms au that's so angsty and edgy

[365days365movies]

May 7, 2021: TRON (1982)

Starting to leave lo-fi sci-fi with this one.

Can I just say, I am VERY excited for this one. Mostly because it’s hard to get more ‘80s than this movie, specifically in terms of computers. I’ll explain. Y’know Jurassic Park? Yeah, the same movie I’ve brought up far, FAR too many times this month. Is...is that my favorite sci-fi movie? Shit, it might be? I’ve read the books, I’ve seen the movie COUNTLESS times...I’m pretty sure it is! Huh. Go figure. Anyway, where was I?

Oh, right! Remember the most irritating character in the movie? This is, in my opinion, older sister Lex Murphy. In the book, for the record, she’s a VERY different character. She’s the youngest sibling amongst the two, and she’s a sports nerd who hates dinosaurs. And she’s also the most annoying character in the book, so at least they kept that consistent. However, you may be saying to yourself: “Jesus, this dude really loves Jurassic Park. Even in the intro for Tron, he’s talking about it. Why the hell does he keep bringing it up?”

Well, allow me to explain. When I was 9 years old, I was super into two things: dinosaurs and reading. You may think that I wasn’t very popular in school as a result. And the truth won’t surprise you. Anyway, on January 3rd, 2001, it was a cold morning in the supermarket when

...OK, lemme get to the point. IT’S A UNIX SYSTEM!

See, this moment when Lex hacks into the computer to reactivate the locks (a task given to Tim in the book, but whatever) does two things. One, it makes Lex relevant in a film and story where she’s almost entirely unneeded. And two, it established something in the minds of movie-watchers everywhere: a completely misguided idea of what computer programming is.

And this is just one of MANY examples of Hollywood weirdly representing computers to the public. This was kind of a trend throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, as computers were beginning to become available to the public. Examples are:

WarGames (1983), dir. John Badham

Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), dir. James Cameron

Revenge of the Nerds (1984), dir. Jeff Kanew

Weird Science (1985), dir, John Hughes

Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), dir. Russo Bros

That last one isn’t a great example, and it’s not even within the right time period. I just love Arnim Zola, and he NEEDS TO RETURN to the MCU. Goddamn it, I want this guy back, complete with his full robot body! COME ON FIEGE, LOOK AT THIS GUY! That last one may or may not be my fanart for the character with my own design NEVERTHEGODDAMNLESS!

Look, all you gotta do is connect the various machinations of Arnim Zola to the foundations of AIM, which is easy given their link in the comics. Zola and his fellow Paperclip scientists helped fund Aldrich Killian’s AIM, and the project to give Zola his sick-ass robot body eventually wound up being a part of the project that would create the hovering robotic chair used by this guy.

THIS IS ALL I’VE EVER WANTED PLEASE

...Ahem.

Anyway, the weird-ass ways that Hollywood’s represented computers, hacking, and all other associated things can be traced back to 1982, when the first film to use mostly computer generated imagery for its setting was created. This was, of course, Disney’s TRON. And while I haven’t seen it before...I’ve see its sequel in theaters?

On a related note, Tron Legacy might be a mediocre film with a mediocre soundtrack, but GODDAMN DO IT LOVE THE FUCKING VISUALS. It’s genuinely my favorite aesthetic. That whole “outlined in light” thing? Goooooooh, BABY, how I love it.

Style over substance, but OH THE FUCKING STYLE

Anyway, despite that, I’m looking forward to seeing where the whole thing came from. I dig that style, too. Is there a name for those aesthetics? Let me know, so I can devote my life to it forever. Anyway, shall we get started?

SPOILERS AHEAD!!!

Recap

So, we start this movie off with a BANG, jumping into an arcade where two kids are playing none other than Lightcycle, and jumping into said Lightcycles to meet one of the drivers, Sark (David Warner). A sadistic program, he takes great pleasure in executing programs in Lightcycle races.

One of these programs, in fact, is being brought into imprisonment now, to be set against Sark in a race. The program, Crom (Peter Jurasik), speaks with fellow prisoner Ram (Dan Shor), where we get some idea of the lore of this place. Many programs believe in “the Users”, god-like figures who they believe created them and tell them what to do. However, the mysterious Master Control Program is rounding up the programs that believe in Users, taking over their functions or executing them. Diggin’ the lore so far.

In the real world, we meet Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges), a computer programmer commanding his own program, Clu (also Bridges), and...look, I’m not sure what they’re doing, but OHHH. IT’S A UNIX SYSTEM, BABY. The beautiful bullshit that this movie uses to denote computer activity and programming, it’s...MMMMMMMMMCHEF’SKISS, it’s so FUCKING GOOD!

Anyway, Clu’s apparently being sent to find some information, but he’s caught by Master Control. Jeff Bridges shows off some pretty over-the-top acting, but it’s charming as hell. Clu’s interrogated by Master Control Program (also Warner), and killed, or “derezzed”. This frustrates Flynn, but why?

Well, we get a clue from MCPs concentration with Ed Dillinger (David Warner), who arrives at his office in the COOLEST FUCKING HELICOPTER I HAVE EVER SEEN. I will never make enough money to have this helicopter, but maybe one day I can do it to a car, holy shit. Anyway, Dillinger lands and enters the ENCOM building, where he speaks with his computer table, which contains MCP.

Is this a thing with computer programmers? Do they, like, physically talk to their programs, and the programs talk back? Is this a thing that happens? Are the conversations interesting? Are IT people literally computer-whisperers? I gotta talk to my friends in computer sciences and IT about this.

Apparently, Flynn’s been snooping around their servers for a specific file, and they’re trying to stop him from getting that file. Meanwhile, in an office in the building, a man named Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner) is blocked out of the system in an attempt to flush out Flynn’s location. Bradley’s summoned to the office for what seems like a routine interview, but is actually more of an investigation. Doesn’t go anywhere.

On a side note, by the way, it would appear that MCP is somewhat in control of Dillinger. Although, how and why is unknown. In any case, he’s attempting to amass power. Additionally, the fact that he’s directly speaking to one of the Users is...interesting. And on a second side note, Bradley is preparing something, a security program called “Tron”. That might come up later.

MEANWHILE, elsewhere in the building, a group of scientists are conducting an experiment to digitize solid matter and transport it into computers. It succeeds with an orange, much to their delight and celebration. One of these scientists is Lora Baines (Cindy Morgan), Flynn’s ex-girlfriend and Alan’s current girlfriend. They go to the arcade to reconvene with Flynn, much to Alan’s irritation.

Flynn not only owns the place, he’s also a game whiz, brilliant computer programmer, and recently fired ex-employee of ENCOM. He’s also been sneaking into the ENCOM system, and he details exactly why he’s moving against them. While working for ENCOM, he had started writing programs for some very complex video games, which could’ve have made him quite a bit of money. But Dillinger stole his files, and uses it to climb up the ranks to Senior Executive of ENCOM, while Flynn lounges in relative poverty. He’s planning on getting into the system to get evidence of Dillinger’s wrongdoing.

The trio plots to take down Dillinger and get the evidence together, breaking into ENCOM that night. Meanwhile, Dillinger’s meeting with Walter Gibbs (Barnard Hughes), a co-founder of the company, and one of the other scientists who made the digitizing machine. Dillinger says YOUR TIME IS OVER OLD MAN, and brushes off his concerns about he’s handing the company.

He’s not the only one with issues, as MCP decides to take over FOR Dillinger. Apparently, Dillinger’s talents are stealing data and creating Cybernet/HAL 9000. Good job, buddy. But that may end, when Alan goes to finish and install his program, Tron, which will hopefully take MCP down. Meanwhile, Lora and Flynn go to the basement with the digitizing machine. At the computer terminal, MCP decides to stop Flynn by...well, you know where this is headed.

Yup! Flynn’s brought into the computer by Lora’s machine, and is digitized and put into the game grid. And since we’ll be spending a lot of time there, I think I need to acknowledge something: I really love how this movie looks. The CGI is rudimentary, but it’s used surprisingly well. Consider that this is also made in an era where this is the kind of imagery that computers could literally generate at the time, and you’ve got a pretty great movie in-context.

Flynn, now in those spiffy program duds, is sent by the MCP to compete in the Game Grid, under Sark’s supervision and tutelage. He’s thrown into the brig with the other imprisoned programs, where he learns more about this world. Once brought into the throes of the Game Grid, he’s told that those who believe in the Users are to be trained poorly, ensuring their inevitable death. Meanwhile, those who renounce their belief will be spared. And of all the programs who still believe in the Users, there is none quite as powerful...as Tron (Bruce Boxleitner again).

We see Tron’s badass skills in Ultimate Frisbee. And OK, it’s not Ultimate Frisbee, but you throw discs that contain all of your essence and all of the things you’ve learned in your time there. You basically pour your entire essence and being into the disc as you throw it. So, really, it is Ultimate Frisbee, according to that one dude who’s REALLY into Ultimate Frisbee.

Flynn is commanded to play one of these games, and he winds fairly easily. However, when he defeats his opponent, he’s almost about to die. However, Flynn refuses to finish him off, leading Sark to do so instead. And Sark is tempted to kill Flynn as well, but he holds off at the last moment.

Flynn finally gets to meet Tron, where he feigns being a program that knows of his User, Alan. Of course, Tron looks exactly like Alan, which is why Flynn blurts out his name. But as they’re discussing this, Flynn, Tron, and fellow prisoner Ram are sent to compete in the Lightcycles. And, yes, I’m now looking for a game like this on my phone, because GODDAMN to I love Lightcycles. Can’t WAIT for the Disney World ride, oh my GOOOOD. 

So, our guys get in the Lightcycles, and they outmaneuver Sark’s guys. They’re actually able to escape the arena and the Game Grid, making it outside the citadel. They encounter a, uh, bitstream, and soak up some energy before moving on. On the way, though, they’re nearly killed by Sark’s guys in tanks, and Tron is separated from Flynn an the unconscious Ram.

Flynn and Ram finds a place to rest and hide, and Flynn discovers that, as a User, he actually has the ability to somewhat manipulate the reality within the computer, and he makes a version of MCPs ships, the Recognizers, which resemble the villains in Flynn’s game that Dillinger stole. Now realizing that Flynn is a user, Ram asks him to help Tron, before dying and disappearing into pure code. Whoof.

Tron, meanwhile, ends up finding an input/output program named Yori (Cindy Morgan), who helps him in his escape. She takes him through the city, where we see some interesting designs for control programs, almost like a Hunger Games Panem sort of deal.

Flynn has trouble driving his ship, as he meets a “bit”, a small bit of data that only answers in yes or no. He, too, ends up in the city, and you start to notice that this film has a really heavy influence in our cyberpunk concepts and fashions today. Honestly, I really dig this whole thing. Kevin uses his programming powers to disguise himself as one of Sark’s guards, while Yori and Tron find their way through the main citadel of the guards.

They make their way through to the access tower, where they ask the program Dumont (Barnard Hughes again) to let them access the interface that will allow them to speak with the Users, specifically Alan. Reluctantly, Dumont agrees to let Tron through, where he goes to the access port. Which, for the record, looks awesome. He goes to speak with Alan, and he does that one pose. Y’know, the famous Tron pose that’s on the poster?

Yeah, that’s the good stuff. Anyway, he gets information written onto his disc that’ll allow him to kill MCP. Neat. And unfortunately, that’s exactly when Sark and his guys show up, taking Dumont away as Tron and Yori escape. Yori gets them onto a Solar Sailer, a device that will transport them to the central computer. Tron fends off some of Sark’s guys with video game noise kicks, and the Solar Sailer arrives to take them away.

Sark chases after them, but the pair manage to outrun his very cool-looking ship. MCP threatens to destroy Sark for his failure, but he promises that he’ll be able to get them. On the ship, Tron looks down at the side to see Flynn hanging on. Turns out that he was one of the guards that attacked the two. Tron pulls him up onto the ship, and Flynn reveals that he is, in fact, a user. He also reveals that Users aren’t exactly the gods that programs believe them to be.

Anyway, how’s Dumont doing?

Ah.

Well, the Recognizers find Tron, Yori, and Flynn, and chase after them on the light beam the Solar Sailer is on. However, with his User powers, Flynn manages to get the Sailer onto a different beam, while pulses on the original beam destroy the Recognizers.

Doesn’t end up mattering much, though, as Sark finally catches up and intercepts the group. The Solar Sailer is destroyed, and Yori and Flynn are thrown in the brig with Dumont, who’s still alive! Can’t say quite as much for Tron, apparently. But, again, I can only assume that Ton is still alive. We’ll see, though. Sark denies Flynn’s identity as a User for some reason (I mean, MCP told you who he was, but OK), and he sentences them all to death. Outside the ship, of course, is Tron, who’s hiding and waiting for the right time to strike. And that is when we finally see him.

Glorious. Absolutely goddamn glorious. MCP is taking the remaining programs that believe in Users, Dumont included, and incorporating them into his mass. Meanwhile, Sark has found Tron, and the two are fighting with a classic game of Ultimate Frisbee. Tron nearly defeats Sark entirely, but MCP revives him, and gives him the power to take out Tron. He grows gigantic, and it looks genuinely really convincing.

Flynn prepares to take out MCP once and for all, and kisses Yori just beforehand, which is weird as shit. He jumps into the program, and controls it just long enough for Tron to throw his disc at it and land the finishing blow. And with that, MCP is ended, and the threat of take over is gone! The I/O towers light up, and the Video Warriors have won! Don’t ask me what that means, I study birds.

And with ALL OF THAT DONE, Flynn gets the proof he needs from a print-out that, to be honest, I feel like he could’ve just typed up himself. It doesn’t look like that much. But, still, MCP is gone, Dillinger’s screwed, and Flynn now gets a cool-looking helicopter of his own, as the new CEO of ENCOM. And from there, he will become a deadbeat dad that abandons his kid to live in computers forever. Or something like that, it’s been a while since I’ve seen Tron Legacy.

And that’s Tron, a goofy movie of its time, but one that’s a lot of fun all the same. And with some effects that, to be honest...I actually really liked! But more on that...IN THE REVIEW! See you there!

[sonicfrontiers]

OOUGGH IM SO GLAD IM NOT THE ONLY ONE THINKING ABOUT SEA OF THIEVES HLVRAI AU... PLEASE !!!! PLEASE PLEASE SHARE UR IDEAS I WANNA HEAR THEM SO BAD

OHHH ANON YOU HAVE SAVED MY FUCKING LIFE WITH THIS ASK THANK YOU SO MUCH

SO !! i barely have anything yet bc i just had this fucking brain blast like an hour ago but. here are my Thoughts so far:

so the very first thing i tried to think of was like. what everyone is? i did my best w this but i am so fuckin open to ideas..... i don’t know shit! 

the easiest answer right off the bat was who the humans are (or at least the pirates who appear to be human) in this. we got the science team as the pirate crew—gordon, tommy, bubby, and coomer! they are sailing the seas and maybe they are not doing a very good job of it but it’s fine. it’s Fine

the second easiest answer was benrey’s situation. we got skeletons fuck yeah. benrey got some of that curse uh oh! however w benrey’s situation that’s more like... sometimes being a skeleton rather than just steadily turning into one, i thought maybe the curse fucked up on him? maybe it’s like. he’s only half cursed to just sometimes be a skeleton but he can also look human again too. i don’t fucking know. also OH SHIT BENREY HAS TO BE NOT HUMAN UHJHHHHHHHH fuck it guess he’s part ancient now too. i guess. shit i’ll have to spend more time on him but this is.. the gist

next we got uhh forzen babey. i’ll be honest i’m not too confident on this one. i had the vague idea that maybe he’s a mermaid? although whether he’s one of the mermaids that steals sunken pirates and turns them into mermaids or one of the mermaids who was turned into a pirate i can’t really decide. i mean the pirates-turned-mermaids are always helpful in game, and forzen. well. Isn’t, but the mermaid-mermaids live so far deep that they’re never seen? so i don’t know. but he’s out there.... in the ocean....... somewhere....... waiting for me to have more brain power to answer this

it’s darnold time! i’ll be honest i also don’t have many ideas for this guy. i thought maybe he’s got something to do with the order of souls? that’s vaguely related to potions right? sage darnold with the oos eyes curse and he reads the fuckin skull juices to help out the crew with their voyages..... i think? there are other options too but this is the one that jumped out at me the most!

GREGORY MAN. the man himself. SO I GOT TWO POSSIBILITIES HERE FOR THIS GUY. what i can’t decide on is how much of canon sot i want to be canon in this au... mainly, the stuff abt the pirate lord. i got two options here, one of which is that ramsey still exists as the pirate lord and he hangs out doing mostly the same shit he does in canon, and gman is like. an ancient who stuck around the sea of thieves for whatever reason? which would make tommy a descendant of the ancients too, hence why i specified earlier that all the pirates in the crew might not be human..... EITHER THAT OR gman is the pirate lord and ramsey fuckin uh doesn’t exist in the au. and i CANNOT for the life of me decide which i like better. ANY HELP APPRECIATE HERE PLS

OH ALSO I FORGOT SUNKIST HE’S A MONKEY THAT TOMMY HAS AND HE CAN DO COOL TRICKS AND EVERYONE LOVES HIM. HE’S IMMORTAL SOMEHOW. DON’T WORRY ABOUT IT

THEN. it’s tim,e for “how the fuck did everyone get past the shroud into the sot”

i think no matter who the pirate lord is in this au they’d have no problems letting pretty much anyone in honestly. ramsey just kinda says “oh you washed up unconscious on the shores of old sailor’s isle? cool let me just not ask any questions and part the shroud for you real quick ok bye” and honestly i can’t imagine gman would be much different—although he’d probably be more cryptic abt it than ramsey is

SO. GORDOS. i feel like him coming to the sot was a last resort of sorts. he feels lost in life, unsure what his goal is or where he’s going, and he hears of this mystical sea that nobody who enters ever leaves but apparently there’s adventure and treasure and wonder there so he’s like fuck it, i’ve got nothing else to do and goes there hoping to find some sort of purpose. and find it he does :)

tommy time! i feel like whatever brought him here had to be partially related to his dad? either he’s just There bc. well. his dad’s the fuckin pirate lord, or gman’s all cryptid abt being an ancient and left tommy to sort of grow up in the sot on his own while gman kept a distant eye on him, just so tommy wouldn’t find out too much abt being an ancient or whatever. uh. so he’s pretty familiar w the world of sot and all its wacky magic shit! 

(actual sot lore question here bc this is smth i don’t know—does all the magic that happens in sea of thieves happen beyond the shroud? i wonder if the rest of the world also has skeletons and giant sea monsters and magic and shit or if it’s just inside the sea of thieves...... hmmm for this au i’m gonna assume that all magic is something unique to the sea of thieves and doesn’t happen beyond the shroud) 

The Bubby. honestly i like the idea that bubby came to the sot just to like... get away from the outside world? like maybe he’s on the run from something............ this is very very vague in my mind and is extremely subject to change but i like the whole “I’M LEAVING THIS WORLD!” thing as bubby being like fuck the regular world i’m going into the flesh eating devil shroud and nobody can stop me. and then he did

coomer. the man himself. i think coomer came to the sot searching for adventure! and more to learn! he’s always looking to broaden his horizons and where else to go but to the mystical sea of thieves when looking for new experiences? coomer is just here to have a good time :)

UH i think darnold already existed in the sot... he just sorta Lives There... there are npcs who just fucking were born and raised there right. like tasha was in the sot at age 4 so it makes sense right?? darnold just live here and he helps get the crew from the outside world familiar with the sot!

FORZEN has been in the sot for ages—either he’s always been here as a mermaid or he got turned into one so long ago and he’s just been getting angrier and angrier w it every year he’s trapped here. he barely remember why he came anymore but god does he regret it. :(

gman either way just kind of Is There huh..... as the pirate lord i honestly can’t imagine his origin being much different than ramsey’s? like he just makes friends w the ancients like hey what’s up i like this sea. my sea now. or he Is an ancient and just fucking chills there. whatever

OK THAT’S MOSTLY IT FOR WHAT I HAVE FOR TECHNICAL STUFF WHEN IT COMES DOWN TO IT..... HERE ARE SOME OTHER FUN BITS I THOUGHT OF:

bubby discovers firebombs and Uh Oh. Uh Oh Everyone Watch Out Bubby’s Got Fire Powers Now. he only accidentally sets the ship on fire SOMETIMES it’s FINE. (also his favorite region is the devil’s roar. unsurprisingly. he likes the chaos it brings)

bubby and tommy + coomer as well are agents of chaos in general. they don’t follow the fuckin Rules and it makes gordon’s life a living hell. 

bubby: look gordon i dug up some grubs! gordon: cool man, put those in the barrel and we can use them to fish late- bubby: (shoving the grubs in his mouth) gordon: BUBBY NO WHAT THE FUCK DON’T EAT TH coomer: oh, what a good idea, bubby! i am feeling quite hungry myself! (also starts eating worms) gordon: I’M COOKING DINNER AT THE CAMPFIRE RIGHT NOW PLEASE DON’T tommy: oh are the worms okay to eat? i wonder what they taste like gordon: NO STOP benrey, shoving worms in gordon’s face: eat worms? eat worms now please?

coomer finds out how to launch himself out of a cannon and he becomes unstoppable. the crew is attacked by an enemy ship and everyone’s like “oh fuck everyone get to the cannons!” and they go there to find coomer fucking launching himself directly onto the enemy ship, and he kills their entire crew in seconds. by the time he mermaids back to his ship everyone is fucking stunned silent and coomer is just like “well, that takes care of that! let’s get back on course, gentlemen!” and since then they just fucking fire coomer at people like a weapon whenever they get attacked by other pirates or skeletons. It Always Works

UH AND I THINK THAT’S KIND OF WHAT I HAVE SO FAR? i might be forgetting something but this post is long enough as is...... 

IF ANYONE HAS ANYTHING TO ADD FEEL FREE!!! i love sea of thieves so fuckin much man... and i didn’t even TOUCH on anything like any of the reaper’s bones shit which i would be interested in looking at getting involved in this au somehow...... i will probably come back to this if anyone else is interested !! otherwise that’s all i got for now!!!! thank you so much for asking anon!!!!!

[simonefmp]

1. Your Final Major Project

What is the title of  your Project? What do you aim to produce? How does this relate to your work  and ideas from your programme so far and how does it extend your knowledge,  understanding and creative ability?

(guide: 150 words)

‘Exploring the self  through history of arts iconography’. I aim to produce work that explores  ‘the self’. Specifically, the attributes one wishes to project, as well as  those that one would like to conceal. I plan on achieving this through a visual  conversation, using iconography in art ranging from ancient to modern. I am  intrigued by and intend to use and play with the symbolism of these objects,  poses, and backgrounds; in order to gather a greater understanding of ‘the  self’. I will be continuing to world build which I plan to execute through  various forms of portraiture. Recommencing my exploration of narratives  through surreal and playful imagery to embody a reality. I expect this to  extend my knowledge of symbolism in the visual world, my understanding of  myself and others, and to push my creative ability by using traditional  imagery in a current, relevant, and honest way for myself and subject matter.

2. Influences, Research, Sources and Ideas

What are your  influences, starting points and contextual references and how are they  relevant to your ideas? What subject areas do you intend to research and what  are the likely sources of information (media sources, museums, specific  locations, performances, etc.) you plan to use? You do not need an extensive  list in this section, but include your bibliography in the Appendix, clearly  identifying all references including texts, periodicals, websites, etc.  

(guide: 150 words)

My initial artistic  influences are Tim Walker because of his exuberant world building using  sculpture and set, Cindy Sherman due to her creation of narratives and  character through costume and prosthetics, and William Blake owing to his  narrative work in which his own iconography was created, as I intend to also  do.

Potent symbolic imagery  such as in Hieronymus Bosch’s Garden of Earthly delights, and folkloric work  of the medieval period for example ‘the unicorn tapestries’.  Are relevant to my exploration of ‘the  self’ through symbolism and dream like world building. Through Academic  references, books, documentaries, exhibitions, films, and gallery spaces I intend  to research into visual iconography, religion, and gender. To enrich my  knowledge and in doing so be able to create works not only symbolising ‘the  self’ but having a conversation of what the subject’s self represents currently  and historically. Hopefully exploring, gender, ‘morality’, religion, myth,  and lore.

3. Techniques, Processes and Timescale

What techniques and  processes do you intend to use? Describe the range of media and materials  relevant to your project and how you may use them to explore and develop your  ideas. Include aspects of studio practice, workshop procedures, or the use of  particular equipment and software. Give an indicative timescale for your  project and how you intend to plan your time in order to investigate,  develop, produce and evaluate your project fully. This could be a daily or  weekly schedule.  (Please attach at the  end of this form.)

(guide: 150 words)

I intend to use the  studio photography room when creating film and photographic portraiture, so I  can utilise the set lighting and take clear pictures to enhance the scene created.  This will give me the freedom to explore different compositions and see how  that effects the portrayal of ‘the self’. The objects I plan on creating to build  these iconography based narratives will vary in material. I will make ceramic  glazed sculpture to enhance the attributes of the certain objects, for  example a pearl. I will use screen-printing to experiment with the images I  have created, this medium will allow for a discussion with colour and sizing.  Painting set backgrounds will allow for explorations into landscape  iconography. The use of film with allow me to create a narrative not only  through sculpture but a moving story with them. Using mud rock will enable me  to play with size and create wearable work. Perfect for my dream-like world building.

 4.  Method of Evaluation

How will you critically  review and analyse your work and determine if it is successful? How will you  identify directions for ongoing development? Do you have a method to record  the critical response to your ideas? How do you propose to assess the success  of your Final Major Project and what will be your methods of evaluation?

(guide: 100 words)

I will critically review  my work by continuously evaluating it, seeing if I have pushed it and myself  to its fullest potential, visually and conceptually. Analysing it through its  relevance, contextual, and visual strengths, realises successes and flaws and  building upon them. The direction for my ongoing development will be  identified by my interests in research and what media I find works well with  my concepts. Continually evaluating the relevance of concept, context and  material. Responses to my work and ideas will be found in tutorials and peer  evaluations, which I will seek out weekly. This important information will be  kept in my sketchbooks and blog. I plan to assess the success of my final  major project by reflecting on all my work and writing an evaluation.

5. Appendix

Include an appendix for  the bibliography and any other relevant material for your Final Major  Project.

Compile an accurate bibliography before starting your  project, that correctly acknowledges all references including texts, books,  websites, magazines, films, documentaries, museums that you will study for  initial research on your project.

 1. Gibson, W. S. (1973). Hieronymus Bosch and the Mirror of  Man: The Authorship and Iconography of the" Tabletop of the Seven Deadly  Sins". Oud Holland, 205-226.

2. Gibson, W. S. (1973). The Garden of Earthly Delights by  Hieronymus Bosch: The Iconography of the Central Panel. Netherlands  Yearbook for History of Art/Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek Online, 24(1),  1-26.

3. Marrow, J. H. (1986). Symbol and meaning in northern European  art of the late middle ages and the early Renaissance. Simiolus:  Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, 16(2/3),  150-169.

5. Bragg, B. (2019). Advertising Antiquity: The Cultural  Utility Images Of Antiquity Enjoy In The Commercial Lexicon. Plan II  Honors Theses-Openly Available.

6. Wardle, J. (1978). Blake and iconography: analogues of  Urizen and Vala. Colby Quarterly, 14(3), 4.

7. Cosgrove, D., & Daniels, S. (Eds.). (1988). The  iconography of landscape: essays on the symbolic representation, design and  use of past environments (Vol. 9). Cambridge University Press.

8. " Holland, N. N. (1959). " The Seventh  Seal": The Film as Iconography. The Hudson Review, 12(2),  266-270.

9. Straten, R. V. (1994). An Introduction to Iconography:  Symbols, Allusions and Meaning in the Visual Arts.

10. Kosmopoulou, A., & Templer, W. (2002). The  iconography of sculptured statue bases in the Archaic and Classical periods.  Univ of Wisconsin Press.

11. Easton, M. (2012). FEMINISM. Studies in  Iconography, 33, 99-112.

12 Cohen, S. (2014). Review Essay: Animal Imagery in  Renaissance Art. Renaissance Quarterly, 67(1),  164-180.

13. Cavallo, A. S. (1998). The unicorn tapestries  at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Metropolitan museum of art.

14. Janick, J. (2010). Plant Iconography and Art: Source of  Information on Horticultural Technology. Bulletin of the University  of Agricultural Sciences & Veterinary Medicine Cluj-Napoca. Horticulture, 67(1).

  Week 1  Lots of research  in order to build a foundation of knowledge. Experimental work in reaction to  research. Using sketchbook as well as blog to record every thought, experiment,  relevant conisation and piece of research.

Week 2  Continuing  research; I plan to have completed reading most of my academic references by  the end of the week. Documenting and experimenting in sketchbook and blog. I  will start to build large scale sculptures in accordance with iconography of  objects I connect to.

Week 3  Documenting and  experimenting in sketchbook and blog. I will have researched into the  iconography of poses, the body, and landscape and will make costumes and set  backgrounds in accordance with my research and experimentations.

Week 4  Documenting and  experimenting in sketchbook and blog. I will go do a workshop on ceramics and  go into the ceramic studio and experiment and create objects relevant to the  media.

Week 5  Documenting and  experimenting in sketchbook and blog.  I will use the photography studio to  experiment in creating portraits using people and my props. I will go into the  dark room to experiment with the images produced. Working towards a final  outcome. I will experiment with film.

Week 6  Documenting and  experimenting in sketchbook and blog. I will do a course in screen printing  and experiment with previous images created in the photography studio as well  as creating new work. Working towards a final outcome

Week 7  Documenting and  experimenting in sketchbook and blog. I will be finishing my final project

Week 8  finishing touches  on work, continuing to document, finishing, handing in work.

[krixwell-liveblogs]

Deltarune asks

Did you ever end up going back to do the card suite puzzle in Deltarune? Just so you know, if you didn’t you can still go back to do that since the last save in the game is before you fight King. I’d recommend checking the prison elevator again before doing that though.

I haven’t gotten around to it yet, or replaying the game in general. That’s a good point about the save, thank you!

As for the prison elevator: Since finishing the game, I’ve been hanging out in the Deltarune channel on Lore’s Discord server, where I found out about Jevil. I’ve heard he claims he “can do anything”, is based on some clown stickers, and I found out yesterday how you find him. Apparently his fight is supposed to be pretty good, making up for some of the flaws in the King fight? That’s definitely another thing I want to check out, yeah.

After reading your Deltarune post, I'm so upset that you didn't mention Kris's soul getting sent to the Birdcage at the end.

Pfft! I certainly missed an opportunity there, yeah. :p

Maybe I would’ve made that joke if I had been in less of an “I just want to finish the game and go to bed” state of mind at that point. And in more of a Worm mindset.

"Heroes of Light? I don’t know, I don’t think I’d peg either of them as having that aspect." Foreshadowing the tweest ending much? Heroes of Light have a certain, ha, 'passion' for not losing.

Hehe.

Y’know, if the theory I’ve seen going around about Kris ripping their own soul out to stop us from stealing their agency and their story is right, I could actually see that as having to do with the Light aspect. I’m not sure what class it’d be, though. Maybe that reflects more on the player than on Kris, making us Vriskas Thieves of Light.

You know what did foreshadow the ending, though, that I totally called? The character overview specifying that Kris’s body contained a human soul.

Toby Fox had some things to say about Deltarune you may or may not want to read: http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sqn3p9

Alright, let’s see what the Fox has to say:

1. "Is this a sequel? What's going on?? I'm scared..." Please don't worry too much about that. Actually, I'm worried if people worry too much about "what it is," they might not be able to properly enjoy it... (laugh) I will say that basically, what you're seeing here is not the world of UNDERTALE. UNDERTALE's world and ending are the same as however you left them. If everyone was happy in your ending, the people in the UNDERTALE world will still be happy. So, please don't worry about those characters, and that world. It will remain untouched. To rephrase that, DELTARUNE's world is a different one. With different characters, that have lived different lives. A whole new story will happen... I don't know what you call this kind of game. It's just a game you can play after you complete UNDERTALE, if you want to. That's all.

...alright, fair enough. I don’t trust that it’s not connected, especially through Sans (metanarrative timeline agent that he is) and maybe Chara, but it does seem to be an alternate world.

2. "I have questions I want to ask about the story..." There's a lot of questions I'd like to answer, too. That's why I have to make the game. Please wait until then.

A game dev’s equivalent of Robert Jordan’s “read and find out”.

3. "When will the next chapter come out?" This is a difficult question. When I made the demo of UNDERTALE, I made it to prove to myself that it was possible to make a whole game alone (with some help with the art). Because I was able to make it in a few months, I felt that I had proved that it was possible. However, making the demo of DELTARUNE... took a few years. So, given the length of the rest of the game, and how long I'd be willing to spend on a project (7 years maximum) I think the answer is that it's actually impossible to make this game.

I wonder how many people he’s working with. Maybe that’s the solution to this issue, to outsource some of the work to people he trusts.

Lots of things make this game harder to make than the last time. - The graphics are much more complicated and don't play to my strengths (black and white battle graphics were easy...) - The battle system is much more complicated due to multiple characters (I'll write about this later) - The overworld and other sections are more complicated due to multiple characters - Having multiple main characters is much harder to write especially introducing everyone properly in chapter 1 - The entire town had to be created correctly on the first try to set up properly for the rest of the game And further things outside of those: - Trouble starting tasks/concentrating and general difficulty paying attention - Travelling / other responsibilities like translation/ports - Self-doubt / burnout regarding the creation of the game Essentially it's not possible to make this game as one person (and Temmie).

Oh jeez, it’s only him and Temmie Chang?

Also, “Trouble starting tasks/concentrating and general difficulty paying attention” sounds like ADHD to me. I can relate heavily to this point.

However, it MIGHT be possible to create the game if I'm able to make a team. So I'm going to try making a team. Because I really want to make this. But I may not be able to succeed because I have no experience successfully directing a team and I have no idea who I'm going to work with.

Yes, good. That sounds a lot healthier.

I’m sure he can do it. In a pinch, I know he knows people who can probably give him pointers on team leadership, too, over at What Pumpkin.

Since I haven't started assembling the team yet I have absolutely no estimation of its completion. It could take up to 999 years depending on the efficiency level. By the way, I currently plan to release all of the chapters at once after we complete them. I'm not sure how long that will take. You'll buy all of the chapters at once as one purchase. That'll be the only option. I'm not doing pre-orders because I don't like those. It just seems like the best way not to burn anybody. Price is unknown. It depends on how long the game is, and how much it costs to make... I don't know anything about what consoles, etc. it'll come out for because by the time it comes out we might be on Playstation 14 or something. So... in short, I have no idea.

That’s all very fair.

4. "Is this the game's final design? Will you change anything?" It's possible I could change things. This is basically a demo. I might even change this first chapter before release depending on how development goes. This is really an excuse to talk about the parts I think had issues. THE BATTLE SYSTEM: I think the battle system could be explained better. I had a super duper long explanation of things here but really it boils down to: 1. UT's system is incompatible with multiple party members but I wanted to do it anyway because it's cool 2. I'd like to make it so for pacifist players, characters won't have to "defend" so much Oh. The people who tested the game thought that the TP system and animations were cool so it's not all bad. By the way, did you notice that getting close to bullets makes enemy attacks end faster? It doesn't work for every attack, but...

I didn’t notice that detail, but I do appreciate the way it adds to TP without having to defend. But I found myself defending a lot anyway just because it was the only thing there was much point in doing with the characters in question sometimes.

I do feel like there wasn’t enough to use the TP for, but that seems like something that might change as the characters develop more skills over the course of the full game.

EVERYTHING ELSE: I thought everything else was OK. Actually some parts were kind of lazy, like finding the key pieces, but oh well. The UI had some things that could be changed too. When making a game, there's so much to do you have to draw the line somewhere. That's why I need other people to help me (laugh) Oh, and I have no plans to add more content to the first chapter.

5. "Will there be multiple endings?" No. No matter what you do the ending will be the same. (Honestly most games are like that, but for some reason it feels really oppressive to say here...) I think that's part of the reason why the ACT / FIGHT system feels so vestigial in this one. Oh... I'm just talking about the battle system again...

Toby sounds a lot like Napstablook in this thing.

A single ending, huh? Interesting, considering the contrasts between Deltarune and Undertale regarding whether your choices matter and whether fighting is sometimes necessary, and the fact that Ralsei explicitly asks you to do a pacifist run.

6. "I found some kind of bug, will you fix it?" Hopefully an e-mail for that exists on the website by now. Or, it would be better if you could tweet it with #deltarunebug . That would really help us and make our lives easier because tweets are easier to ignore than e-mails

Ahaha!

7. "Can I be on the team?" I'll ask you first!!! (Total silence)

The humor is picking up here. :p

8. "What's the progress on the rest of the game so far?" 0%!!! Nothing!!! I've done nothing!!! I mean, I've done some songs and written the whole story, but... Since no programming or final art has been done, it's best to just think of it at 0%. 9. "Will you do a Kickstarter?" I still haven't finished that damn Alarm Clock, are you kidding me? There's no way I'm doing a Kickstarter this time.

I assume he’s referencing a pledge reward from the Kickstarter for Undertale (that was how I first found out about Undertale, actually, though I then forgot about it until it came out) that hasn’t panned out, or something like that.

10. "The game doesn't work" / "I don't like the game" / "Will there be a version for (platform)?" Because it's a free download I'm surrounded by a forcefield that destroys all complaints and platform requests. There might be more platforms for the DEMO but I don't want to make any promises. (At the very least it'd be nice to do something for the people who bought the game on console.) By the way at the time of writing I haven't even rendered a Mac version whatsoever at all. I hope I can release it... (laugh)

I have a friend who was unable to play the game himself because (as far as I can recall) he’s on a Mac. But yeah, this is fair.

11. "Can I buy the soundtrack for Chapter 1?" Yes! You can buy it at [ http://tobyfox.bandcamp.com ] And other forms of distribution will be in the works too. I'm writing this in the past so I don't know what I just said. 12. "Any closing remarks?" (No one asks this, but...) Thanks for playing my game. I hope you liked it. For the past 3 years I've been waking up in the middle of the night unable to go back to sleep because I've been thinking about the scenes that happen in the game. Even though so many details are still hazy, I really want to show you the things I've been thinking about. That's really my only reason for making this game. If I don't show you what I'm thinking, I'll lose my mind. (It was actually a totally selfish motivation...)

...interesting. Looks like we’re in for a ride when the full game comes.

Not that I was really doubting that.

By the way, I was really worried at first about making this. The expectations for my next work would be really high, so high that I knew that no matter what I did, I felt like people would be underwhelmed. If you played "UNDERTALE," I don't think I can make anything that makes you feel "that way" again. However, it's possible I can make something else. It's just something simple but maybe you'll like it. See you in ?? years... OK? Don't forget.

My audience probably won’t believe me if I say I won’t, due to my history of bad memory, but I don’t think I will.

And yeah. Especially when you’re connecting it to Undertale and its characters, people are going to compare the two. But even if Deltarune isn’t quite the same hit as Undertale was, it’ll be worth it, I’m sure.

[cursewoodrecap]

The Hunt for the Teal Deer

Due to some changes in our player lineup, I figured our party’s newest member might want a tl;dr of the Campaign So Far without having to read the enormous bricks I put out on a highly irregular basis. HENCEFORTH, A SUMMARY. (Contains spoilers for stuff I haven’t properly recapped yet. I mean...I’m pretty sure this blog is mostly read by the players? But fair warning nonetheless.)

It’s still kind of a brick but here have a couple thousand words instead of fifty billion.

ARC 1: THE WITCH OF OVRUCH

Near the tiny Valdian trading village of Ovruch, four adventurers meet:

1. Kyr Valeria Argent, a paladin of the Order of the Rose, who is here to investigate a Beggar Knight going missing. Silver dragonborn Paladin, Oath of the Crown.

2. Sgt. Clementine Haxan, a former soldier of the Kevan empire turned soldier-of-fortune who is investigating a Beggar Knight going missing. Drow Fighter, Battlemaster.

3. Gral “Joybringer” Omokk’duu, an orc bard who serves Duke Shieldeater, here because he’s trying to recruit translators to help Orc/Valdia relations. Orc Bard, College of Whispers.

4. Shoshana bat Chaya, a local who’s been outcast from her village since a close run-in with the curse that left her with dark powers and a mildly inhuman appearance. Half-elf Sorcerer, Shadow Magic.

The three foreigners interrogate the young witch, who was interrogated yesterday by the Beggar Knight. They realize the Beggar Knight, Ser Balderich, went to investigate the place where Shoshana had her Curse accident. 

They are interrupted by the village being attacked by a group of bandits and wolves, led by a werewolf, who seem to want to capture Shoshana as some kind of Chosen One. They defeat the bandits and head into the woods to find Evil Wolf Guys HQ.

In the spooky dark ravine of Wolf Guys HQ, they find a) the imprisoned Ser Balderich, who they free; b) a shadowy nasty guy who has direwolves, who they beat up; and c) a trail of corpses and some diary fragments from a mysterious huntress who had been one of the evil-wolfguy leaders before she rebelled against them. The letters clearly indicate she had some kind of close relationship to Shoshana before Shit Went Down.

Shoshana is like, “alas, they shall believe I am forever tainted by evil magic and it’s only a matter of time until I turn evil, they’re probably going to execute me” and the rest of the party is like “wtf no we’re not gonna do that. Stop being emo.”

ARC 2: THE MISTS OF HOLZOG

The party heads to the town of Holzog to meet up with Ser Quentin Morozov, a Cursebreaker Knight who’s a friend of Ser Balderich’s. On the way, they meet Flynn and Fiona Fairgold, a dramatic, theatrical knight and his practical, mute sister. They also find out that in Holzog, strange mists come out of the lake every couple of weeks, filled with strange noises and creatures.

Gral recognizes that shit and tells his backstory: Duke Shieldeater’s son, Bullbreaker, led an expedition into the heart of the wood to try to defeat the Curse. Gral was part of Bullbreaker’s party. Strange, warped creatures seemed to appear out of nowhere and attack, and most of the orc battalion vanished into the mists, no bodies ever found. The takeaway: Gral believes that the Curse isn’t random; it’s coordinated and it has leaders and commanders.

Our investigations lead us to a former artists’ colony on an island in the lake. Turns out the artists had been tempted by some strange power to open a portal to a weird space between dimensions. The portal keeps closing and opening, causing the mists. Like idiots, we hurl ourselves into the portal, and find Weird Shit inside. Doors to other dimensions that are different story genres! Weird eyeballs everywhere!

We find out Gral’s old commander Bullbreaker has been lost in one of these other dimensions, and is trying to Samurai Jack his way home.

Most importantly we get some info: The Curse is caused by four entities, who are Prisoners. We’re unsure what imprisons them. We’ve figured out two so far: The Hunt, which is the werewolves and bandits and murder and stuff; and the Key, which is the pursuit of knowledge and the bending of reality. 

Anyway we escape and close the portal. Also we met some mad scientists from Sturmhearst University, which was fun.

ARC 3: THE DEAD OF MORNHEIM

Our Cursebreaker friend hires us to investigate why a squad of elven war veterans seemed to turn to the dark side while fighting the curse in Mornheim, a city which is experiencing a zombie apocalypse. Turns out the squad is Clem’s old unit! Drama!

Mornheim is really Tim Burtony. It used to be a place where undead could not rise, so everybody buried their dead there. And then the Curse happened, and now ALL the dead are rising. Welp, fuck.

We meet up with Lady Aubrey von Mornheim, Ser Balderich’s daughter (there’s family drama there), who gives us the inside scoop on the local lore.

We fight through the catacombs and investigate the old manor house. We find three important things: 1) Lady Aubrey’s mom, who’s haunting the shit out of the place; 2) a SECRET WIZARD LAB with a MYSTERIOUS SPELL SCROLL; and 3) some cultists.

The mysterious spell scroll, which is weirdly druid-y, seems to be a ritual for purifying a water source. The local lore implied that the undead curse began/stems from the source of the local river. HMM.

Meanwhile, there’s cultists, led by...A MEMBER OF CLEM’S OLD UNIT. One who she hates; she accuses him of getting their beloved Captain killed. He’s like “it’s cool we’re gonna bring her back from the dead!!! The Pale King says we will get eternal life if we serve him!!!” and Clem is like “okay that sounds terrible” and stabs him. We kick his wight ass and the ass of another of their squad, who “came back from the dead” but was actually possessed by a dybbuk, a malevolent spirit that takes over corpses and impersonates them.

Seems like this “Pale King” is Prisoner #3, in charge of Undead Shit.

We fight some other cultists and find an aaaancient corpse that indicates some kind of ancient collaboration between the old Aquilian Empire and the Valdians, which is a Fun Lore Mystery.

Clem’s old squad also has an assassination plot going against their former commander, who they hate.

Valeria the paladin really wants to do the spell scroll ritual to protect the town, but we need several rare plants as spell components. We decide to go to Bad Herzfeld, where we hear there’s lots of plants.

ARC 4: THE ROOTS OF BAD HERZFELD

Our concerns going into Bad Herzfeld:

1. We need spell component plants.

2. We know about this evil fungus that infects people and makes them into Evil Fungus Monsters.

3. We hear there’s about to be a huge gathering of trolls. Valdian trolls are generally peaceful, but, like. A fuckton of trolls + evil brain fungus that makes you evil = BAD.

We fight an evil circus, but that’s more of a side quest.

We get to Bad Herzfeld and it’s a jungle out there, folks. We manage to get all our spell components even though we have to fight various angry plantmonsters and hallucinogenic fungi. We also meet a very nice troll who is a Doctor for Trolls, he is one of our favorite NPCs.

We have a brief encounter with one of the reclusive druids who resides in the forest. The druids seem to be fighting the Curse as well, with sporadic guidance from the old gods of the Greatwood, but it turns out they don’t have many more answers than we do.

A former druid, however, has become the spiritual leader of the local farming community. Which is a problem because she has turned it into a cult that infects people with the Evil Fungus Spores. It’s a very “Insiders Good, Outsiders Evil” mindset. They are planning to wait until more trolls show up for the big troll gathering, then infect them all with fungus. This is Prisoner #4, The Growth.

We burn down their temple with extreme prejudice. Unfortunately, guarding the temple is a plantmonster that was once Valeria’s beloved mentor, Kyr Marius. We destroy him but it’s tragic.

The trolls are like, “oh evil fungus? Aight we’re out.” Also we met more of those mad science doctors, but botanist ones this time.

ARC 5: PENITENTS SUCK

On the way back to Mornheim we go through the crossroads trade stop of Three Oaks Junction, which has been taken over by Penitent Knights, who are very into inquisition, and self flagellation, and persecuting the hell out of anything that even blinks the wrong way. Sinners must be purged from among the faithful!!! Anyway they’re violent jerks and we free the town. Penitents suck.

ARC 6: THE TROLLSTONES

Back in Mornheim, we go to the source of the River Morn to do our fancy ritual. Turns out there’s an ancient troll-king buried there, who rose as an undead. His demigoddess mother blessed the waters there so that no undead would ever rise. That blessing is gone now, of course. Problem is, there’s ancient Aquilian ruins that indicate the blessing was later used as a Containment Zone for something super evil, and whatever evil thing was there has now escaped. Hella lore, though.

We do our fancy ritual, which doesn’t restore the No Undead blessing but does provide some protection for the citizens. Yaaay!

ARC 6: HOESKA

We jet off to Hoeska Castle, HQ of the Cursebreaker Knights, because we have hella knowledge about how the Curse works now and we should probably, like...let the experts know? Turns out Hoeska Castle is owned by an ancient vampire, who has teamed up with his longtime nemesis - the vampire hunter Ser Brigid Koenig, who is now trying to solve the dang curse and has founded the Cursebreakers. We share our information and also fight a big nasty wolfmonster who’s been eating the knights. There’s a professor from Sturmhearst the Mad Science University, who confides in us that the Dean keeps vanishing and leaving strange otherworldly gifts. Sounds like Key nonsense; we’d better go check it out!

Clem’s player decides to leave the campaign at this point; in-story, Clem has gone to prevent her former unit’s assassination plot while we confront threats closer to home.

~AND THAT’S WHAT YOU MISSED ON THE CURSEWOOD~

[synergygolfsolutions]

Augusta National chairman Billy Payne is always the most interesting person in the room

[This story originally appeared in Sports Illustrated Golf+ in April 2016.]

Some months ago my boss (or one of them) assigned me an interesting story for this issue: Jeff Knox, the amateur golfer and Augusta National member who often plays as a marker on Masters weekends. He has given interviews after some of his rounds, and my best guess was that if Knox wanted to do the story -- and if Billy Payne, the club's chairman since 2006, gave his approval -- it would happen. I wrote to Knox, and he referred my query to a media official at the club, who responded thusly:

"Mr. Knox fields many requests such as yours on an annual basis. He sends them my way because he respects the tradition of Mr. Payne being the sole voice of the Club. As you may know, our members do not give interviews on matters relative to the Club and Masters."

That day I asked my boss if I could write up Billy Payne for the issue instead. I mean, who wouldn't want to know more about the man who runs the Masters, which Tim Finchem, the PGA Tour commissioner, calls the "strongest brand" in golf? Who wouldn't want to know more about the man and the "sole voice" behind the most famous and influential golf club in America?

My boss said yes. My colleague Gary Van Sickle took over the Knox story. Through a spokesman, Payne declined interview and photo requests. (He makes himself available to reporters three times a year, and I was out of cycle.) Fortunately others were willing to talk, including club employees, members, Tour players, caddies, Augustans and golf officials. Understandably they were skittish about being quoted. Every chairman of Augusta National has engendered some degree of awe and fear, even if the chairman is as suave as the current one. I just thought you should know the obstacles. End of preamble.

As they say on the 1st tee at the Masters, Fore please. Billy Payne now driving.

Augusta National Golf Club has never had a chairman like William Porter Payne, not even Clifford Roberts, a sui generis personality and Wall Street banker who founded the club in 1933 with Bobby Jones, the great amateur. Payne, a 68-year-old businessman and attorney from Atlanta who was the key figure in bringing the Olympics to the city in 1996, often cites the club's two patron saints as his ultimate inspiration. But their vision was distinctly inward. That is: the club, the club, the club. It is unlikely that either could have imagined what Chairman Payne—he likes when people use the title—has done in his near decade at Augusta's helm. No other chairman has thought to focus on the borders of the course, and the great, green world beyond them.

Among other things, Payne has taken on grow-the-game with evangelical verve. He once said, in the fancy-speak that typifies many of his public remarks, "What we've done is do what we're supposed to do, and that is to be a beacon in the world of golf and to do our best to influence others to want to be a part of it." And where Jones prized camaraderie and fellowship above all, Payne is trying to achieve perfection. He wants the tournament experience for players, fans and television viewers to meet his own outsized standards.

MORE MASTERS: The history of the green jacket

In public Payne is so reverent about the club that some guests are surprised to see what a regular guy he can be when the necktie comes off. He has been known to share insider stories, from long before his time at Augusta National, about Eisenhower on the course, gambling in the clubhouse and members bringing in women "over the fence" at night. His listeners are thunderstruck. Wherever he goes, Payne is the most interesting person in the room.

It's pro bono work, being the chairman of Augusta National, but it is also golf's ultimate high-status position. Payne, whose bad back in recent years has limited his golf—he can shoot in the 80s and sometimes lower—does not spend Masters week running from one party to another. Nothing like it. He is a creature of habit, and his habits are low-key. He represents the club at the champions dinner held the Tuesday before the start of the tournament. The next day he holds his annual state-of-the-Masters press conference. After that, he is seldom seen until Sunday night, when he presides over the postgame festivities. He watches the tournament's TV coverage closely in his office and keeps tabs on threatening storm systems on a computer. Yes, in a perfect world the club chairman would control the weather and who makes which putts. But there are limits to what even Billy Payne can do.

This list of Payne's achievements is limited to 10 items only by convention.

1. Payne—who inherited an all-male membership—invited three women to join the club, starting in 2012 with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and businesswoman Darla Moore. These admissions were a relief to the PGA Tour, which pays lip service to inclusiveness. They also made life easier for some club members, particularly those with large public profiles, such as Roger Goodell of the NFL, Jerry Yang of Yahoo and Bill Gates of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

2. Payne started two major amateur events, the Latin America Amateur and the Asia-Pacific Amateur, the winners of which are invited to play in the Masters. As a result, a pair of teenagers will tee it up at Augusta this year: Paul Chaplet, 16, of Costa Rica and Jin Cheng, 18, of China. (Grow-the-game I.)

3. Working with the USGA and the PGA of America, Payne in 2014 rolled out a national junior competition called Drive, Chip & Putt. Across the country, thousands of kids played in approximately 250 qualifying events, winnowing down the group to 80 boys and girls who will convene at Augusta National on the Sunday before the Masters to play in the finals. (Grow-the-game II.)

4. Payne has overseen an enormous expansion, nationally and internationally, of the tournament's coverage on broadcast and cable TV and particularly by way of the Internet. Viewers may now see far more of the Masters, including the Wednesday par-3 tournament and press conferences, and have far speedier access to more tournament information. (Grow-the-game III.)

5. Payne took over an already financially secure not-for-profit club and vastly improved its balance sheet, to the point where it plans to purchase, reportedly for $27 million and without any real hesitancy, a small strip of land from the adjacent Augusta Country Club. One goal is to give the club the option of lengthening Augusta National's iconic 510-yard, par-5 13th hole. Another is to give the club more of a buffer from its bustling neighbor. Payne is not afraid to spend the club's money. He has hired high-level executives from Disney, Ritz-Carlton and other brand-name companies to help run the business of the Masters, most particularly in marketing and merchandising. (Spend-money-to-make-money I.)

MORE MASTERS: Meet the man who declined 20 Masters invites

6. Payne has dramatically increased the dining and beverage options for some big-ticket patrons. He oversaw the construction of a sprawling entertainment complex of high-end restaurants, bars and flat-screen TVs off the 5th hole called Berckmans Place, which opened in 2013. This mall in the pines measures 90,000 square feet, not including the three putting greens that abut it. It's open one week a year, and it makes money. Guests, who typically spend about $6,000 for a badge, might see Rice or Lynn Swann, among other recognizable members, representing the club as greeters. (Spend-money-to-make-money II.)

7. Payne oversaw the building of an 18-acre driving range on a former parking lot along with a smallish caddie clubhouse at the far end, in a spot so private that some players prefer it to the actual clubhouse, where they are likely to encounter various people—family members and reporters, for instance—who seek to occupy their time.

8. Under Payne, the club arranged for the purchase of dozens of homes on a neighboring housing development, razed them and turned the 120 rolling acres into a grass-and-gravel—and free!—parking lot that for 51 weeks a year looks like a cemetery waiting for clients. Related to that, Payne arranged for the club to lend money to the city of Augusta for a rerouting of Berckmans Road, which parallels the west side of the course, a move that improves traffic flow during the tournament and gives the club more of a buffer from public incursions.

9. Payne oversaw the stately, solemn burial of the club's iconic Eisenhower Tree, a landmark of the 17th hole until an ice storm led to its demise in 2014. "The loss of the Eisenhower Tree is difficult news to accept," Payne said at the time in a statement. Funeral services, as you would expect, were private.

10. In keeping with tradition, Payne has made sure the club does not gouge its fans. The club's famous pimento cheese sandwich goes for $1.50, the same price it was when he became chairman.

Billy Payne is not a beloved figure at the club, as was one of his predecessors, Jack Stephens, an Arkansas billionaire. Payne played football at Georgia and was active in his fraternity, Phi Delta Theta, but he is nothing like a good old boy, as was another chairman, Hord Hardin. Payne is not deeply frugal, as was Cliff Roberts (who was almost comically so), and he is not steeped in the lore of golf, as was Jones.

But he developed a creative and ambitious to-do list, and he has applied himself to it with remarkable effectiveness. Payne has a group of members and employees willing to move heaven and earth to help him fulfill his vision. And yet his position comes with a hurdle that would require someone with Shakespeare's insights into power to truly explore. Anything connected to Augusta National or the Masters is loaded with cachet—overloaded, really—and every day, directly or indirectly, the chairman encounters people eager to curry favor with him. He holds all the cards, which means he faces the same problem all emperors do: Who are the people who tell him what he actually needs to hear?

Payne typically works quietly. When longtime club manager Jim Armstrong retired in 2013, Payne made him a member, and there was certainly no press release about that. (There was when Rice and Moore joined.) Under Payne's watch, the club has substantially increased its charitable giving, with millions upon millions distributed annually, but specific numbers are hard to find. To promote them would be showy and gauche, and that is not the club's way.

But Payne is no wallflower. Not at all. When Tiger Woods played in the 2010 Masters, his first tournament after his infamous sex scandal, Payne read a 284-word statement about how the golfer "disappointed all of us," concluding with the importance of "second chances." Depending on whom you ask, his remarks were either hopeful and necessary or sanctimonious and presumptuous. Few are neutral about Billy Payne.

"I like Billy," Vijay Singh said during the Florida swing, when all of golf starts thinking about the Masters, which Singh won in 2000. "Augusta has to be run with a firm hand, and Billy has it. It's part of what makes Augusta Augusta."

Given the source, it's a magnificent compliment. One thing about Singh: He would never try to curry favor with anybody, not even the chairman of the Augusta National Golf Club.

Among former champions, Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer, who are dues-paying members of the club, broadly share Singh's view. But Nicklaus has a different relationship with Payne than he did with any of Payne's five predecessors. Beginning in the early 1970s, Nicklaus, a prominent architect and a six-time Masters winner, was regularly consulted about proposed changes to the course. Under Payne, who has made little more than tweaks to various holes, nothing like that has happened. Nicklaus has good company. Other former winners have also found Payne unreceptive to suggestions.

Payne, like Palmer, venerates the club's distinctive green jacket, worn by members and Masters winners when they are at the club, but never off-campus, except by the reigning champion. When a green jacket once belonging to Art Wall, the 1959 winner, was bought by a private collector in 2012 for nearly $62,000, the club arranged to get the jacket back and return it to Augusta National. Payne, by special dispensation, allows members who attend the two new amateur events to wear their club coats overseas. He once observed, "The green jacket doesn't need a lot of interpretation anywhere in the world."

Appearance is important to Payne. For instance, members have learned that the chairman does not like the loafers-no-socks look. During one members' weekend Payne instructed pro-shop staffers to distribute hosiery to any sockless person. Members and guests are still required to wear long pants while playing. On one pre-Masters visit, Woods, unaware of the dress code, arrived in shorts and ended up playing in rain pants.

Payne keeps track of every aspect of the club and measures virtually anything that can be measured. There have been members who have been told they are playing the course too much, and at least one member, race car legend Roger Penske, was informed by letter he was not coming around enough. The letter to Penske, who lives outside of Detroit, was ultimately about Payne's goal of increasing member participation in the club. (Penske declined an interview request.) One of Payne's objectives is to make the club, with members from all over the country—and to a degree, the world—feel more like a club.

He wants life at Augusta National to unfold in a genteel and time-honored way, and he will use modern means to get it. Club members and employees say that Payne has installed video cameras in trees on the course. How else, they ask, could Payne know immediately after a round that a member had permitted a caddie to drive a cart on the course, or violate any other Payne edict? For decades Frank Broyles, the retired Arkansas football coach and longtime member, would play 36 holes a day on his Augusta visits, getting lunch from the clubhouse in takeout containers between rounds. Payne put an end to that practice, telling the coach to have a proper lunch in the clubhouse, which is what he now does. "It's very convenient," Broyles said the other day of his new custom. There was not even a hint of complaint in his voice, and he said he is still—at 91!—able to go around twice in a day at Augusta. Broyles joined the club nearly a half-century ago, when Roberts was chairman. "Mr. Payne runs the club just like Mr. Roberts did," Broyles said, which he meant as a compliment. Both chairmen, to get it down to a word, were particular.

One day Knox, the club's best player, was hitting balls. Payne approached him, and their conversation, in club lore, supposedly went like this:

"Jeff, who you playing with today?""Oh, I'm not playing today, Mr. Payne. I'm just hitting balls.""Jeff, why don't we say you go over to the country club and hit your balls there?" That is, the Augusta Country Club.

Now, is a man of Payne's sophistication actually going to say that to a fellow and distinguished member? Not likely. What is far more realistic is that Payne told Knox that the range he was using was meant as a warmup area, not for long practice sessions. But the exchange, regardless of what was actually said, is all part of a piece: Payne has a vision for every aspect of the club, and he is determined to see it fulfilled. It's as if he has taken a solemn oath to protect tradition. He holds himself up as the club's ultimate role model, and he does what he needs to do to maintain authority. He didn't take the job to win popularity contests.

During the dessert course of a recent champions dinner, Bernhard Langer, a two-time Masters winner, talked about a hole he thinks could be improved, the bunker-free 14th. Visually he doesn't like the tee shot, he told his fellow champions and the chairman. The green, he said, is too severe.

Payne cut him off.

"This is not the time or place for this kind of discussion," Payne said, as the conversation has been recounted.“Then when is a good time?" Langer asked."Write a letter," Payne replied, banging the dinner table and announcing, "This dinner is adjourned!"

Some of the champions responded with nervous laughter. Others sat in stunned silence. Langer was steaming.

Let’s not end on that discordant note. After all, what have Augusta National and the Masters done for any of us except enrich our lives? If you visit the club as a guest, the experience of being there and playing the course is pretty much the same as it ever was. Payne's efforts have made attending the Masters more convenient than ever, even if it there are shades of Disneyland to the place now. His grow-the-game initiatives will introduce millions of people to golf. It's all good.

William (Hootie) Johnson, Payne's predecessor, served as chairman for about eight years, and Johnson's predecessor, Jack Stephens, served for seven. Before that, Hardin was in the position for about 11 years. Payne's 10-year anniversary comes in early May, and there has been plenty of talk at Augusta about who could possibly succeed him. Various names are offered in these discussions, but all of the potential candidates have one serious flaw.

They are not William Porter Payne.

[hamiltongolfcourses]

Augusta National chairman Billy Payne is always the most interesting person in the room

[This story originally appeared in Sports Illustrated Golf+ in April 2016.]

Some months ago my boss (or one of them) assigned me an interesting story for this issue: Jeff Knox, the amateur golfer and Augusta National member who often plays as a marker on Masters weekends. He has given interviews after some of his rounds, and my best guess was that if Knox wanted to do the story -- and if Billy Payne, the club's chairman since 2006, gave his approval -- it would happen. I wrote to Knox, and he referred my query to a media official at the club, who responded thusly:

"Mr. Knox fields many requests such as yours on an annual basis. He sends them my way because he respects the tradition of Mr. Payne being the sole voice of the Club. As you may know, our members do not give interviews on matters relative to the Club and Masters."

That day I asked my boss if I could write up Billy Payne for the issue instead. I mean, who wouldn't want to know more about the man who runs the Masters, which Tim Finchem, the PGA Tour commissioner, calls the "strongest brand" in golf? Who wouldn't want to know more about the man and the "sole voice" behind the most famous and influential golf club in America?

My boss said yes. My colleague Gary Van Sickle took over the Knox story. Through a spokesman, Payne declined interview and photo requests. (He makes himself available to reporters three times a year, and I was out of cycle.) Fortunately others were willing to talk, including club employees, members, Tour players, caddies, Augustans and golf officials. Understandably they were skittish about being quoted. Every chairman of Augusta National has engendered some degree of awe and fear, even if the chairman is as suave as the current one. I just thought you should know the obstacles. End of preamble.

As they say on the 1st tee at the Masters, Fore please. Billy Payne now driving.

Augusta National Golf Club has never had a chairman like William Porter Payne, not even Clifford Roberts, a sui generis personality and Wall Street banker who founded the club in 1933 with Bobby Jones, the great amateur. Payne, a 68-year-old businessman and attorney from Atlanta who was the key figure in bringing the Olympics to the city in 1996, often cites the club's two patron saints as his ultimate inspiration. But their vision was distinctly inward. That is: the club, the club, the club. It is unlikely that either could have imagined what Chairman Payne—he likes when people use the title—has done in his near decade at Augusta's helm. No other chairman has thought to focus on the borders of the course, and the great, green world beyond them.

Among other things, Payne has taken on grow-the-game with evangelical verve. He once said, in the fancy-speak that typifies many of his public remarks, "What we've done is do what we're supposed to do, and that is to be a beacon in the world of golf and to do our best to influence others to want to be a part of it." And where Jones prized camaraderie and fellowship above all, Payne is trying to achieve perfection. He wants the tournament experience for players, fans and television viewers to meet his own outsized standards.

MORE MASTERS: The history of the green jacket

In public Payne is so reverent about the club that some guests are surprised to see what a regular guy he can be when the necktie comes off. He has been known to share insider stories, from long before his time at Augusta National, about Eisenhower on the course, gambling in the clubhouse and members bringing in women "over the fence" at night. His listeners are thunderstruck. Wherever he goes, Payne is the most interesting person in the room.

It's pro bono work, being the chairman of Augusta National, but it is also golf's ultimate high-status position. Payne, whose bad back in recent years has limited his golf—he can shoot in the 80s and sometimes lower—does not spend Masters week running from one party to another. Nothing like it. He is a creature of habit, and his habits are low-key. He represents the club at the champions dinner held the Tuesday before the start of the tournament. The next day he holds his annual state-of-the-Masters press conference. After that, he is seldom seen until Sunday night, when he presides over the postgame festivities. He watches the tournament's TV coverage closely in his office and keeps tabs on threatening storm systems on a computer. Yes, in a perfect world the club chairman would control the weather and who makes which putts. But there are limits to what even Billy Payne can do.

This list of Payne's achievements is limited to 10 items only by convention.

1. Payne—who inherited an all-male membership—invited three women to join the club, starting in 2012 with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and businesswoman Darla Moore. These admissions were a relief to the PGA Tour, which pays lip service to inclusiveness. They also made life easier for some club members, particularly those with large public profiles, such as Roger Goodell of the NFL, Jerry Yang of Yahoo and Bill Gates of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

2. Payne started two major amateur events, the Latin America Amateur and the Asia-Pacific Amateur, the winners of which are invited to play in the Masters. As a result, a pair of teenagers will tee it up at Augusta this year: Paul Chaplet, 16, of Costa Rica and Jin Cheng, 18, of China. (Grow-the-game I.)

3. Working with the USGA and the PGA of America, Payne in 2014 rolled out a national junior competition called Drive, Chip & Putt. Across the country, thousands of kids played in approximately 250 qualifying events, winnowing down the group to 80 boys and girls who will convene at Augusta National on the Sunday before the Masters to play in the finals. (Grow-the-game II.)

4. Payne has overseen an enormous expansion, nationally and internationally, of the tournament's coverage on broadcast and cable TV and particularly by way of the Internet. Viewers may now see far more of the Masters, including the Wednesday par-3 tournament and press conferences, and have far speedier access to more tournament information. (Grow-the-game III.)

5. Payne took over an already financially secure not-for-profit club and vastly improved its balance sheet, to the point where it plans to purchase, reportedly for $27 million and without any real hesitancy, a small strip of land from the adjacent Augusta Country Club. One goal is to give the club the option of lengthening Augusta National's iconic 510-yard, par-5 13th hole. Another is to give the club more of a buffer from its bustling neighbor. Payne is not afraid to spend the club's money. He has hired high-level executives from Disney, Ritz-Carlton and other brand-name companies to help run the business of the Masters, most particularly in marketing and merchandising. (Spend-money-to-make-money I.)

MORE MASTERS: Meet the man who declined 20 Masters invites

6. Payne has dramatically increased the dining and beverage options for some big-ticket patrons. He oversaw the construction of a sprawling entertainment complex of high-end restaurants, bars and flat-screen TVs off the 5th hole called Berckmans Place, which opened in 2013. This mall in the pines measures 90,000 square feet, not including the three putting greens that abut it. It's open one week a year, and it makes money. Guests, who typically spend about $6,000 for a badge, might see Rice or Lynn Swann, among other recognizable members, representing the club as greeters. (Spend-money-to-make-money II.)

7. Payne oversaw the building of an 18-acre driving range on a former parking lot along with a smallish caddie clubhouse at the far end, in a spot so private that some players prefer it to the actual clubhouse, where they are likely to encounter various people—family members and reporters, for instance—who seek to occupy their time.

8. Under Payne, the club arranged for the purchase of dozens of homes on a neighboring housing development, razed them and turned the 120 rolling acres into a grass-and-gravel—and free!—parking lot that for 51 weeks a year looks like a cemetery waiting for clients. Related to that, Payne arranged for the club to lend money to the city of Augusta for a rerouting of Berckmans Road, which parallels the west side of the course, a move that improves traffic flow during the tournament and gives the club more of a buffer from public incursions.

9. Payne oversaw the stately, solemn burial of the club's iconic Eisenhower Tree, a landmark of the 17th hole until an ice storm led to its demise in 2014. "The loss of the Eisenhower Tree is difficult news to accept," Payne said at the time in a statement. Funeral services, as you would expect, were private.

10. In keeping with tradition, Payne has made sure the club does not gouge its fans. The club's famous pimento cheese sandwich goes for $1.50, the same price it was when he became chairman.

Billy Payne is not a beloved figure at the club, as was one of his predecessors, Jack Stephens, an Arkansas billionaire. Payne played football at Georgia and was active in his fraternity, Phi Delta Theta, but he is nothing like a good old boy, as was another chairman, Hord Hardin. Payne is not deeply frugal, as was Cliff Roberts (who was almost comically so), and he is not steeped in the lore of golf, as was Jones.

But he developed a creative and ambitious to-do list, and he has applied himself to it with remarkable effectiveness. Payne has a group of members and employees willing to move heaven and earth to help him fulfill his vision. And yet his position comes with a hurdle that would require someone with Shakespeare's insights into power to truly explore. Anything connected to Augusta National or the Masters is loaded with cachet—overloaded, really—and every day, directly or indirectly, the chairman encounters people eager to curry favor with him. He holds all the cards, which means he faces the same problem all emperors do: Who are the people who tell him what he actually needs to hear?

Payne typically works quietly. When longtime club manager Jim Armstrong retired in 2013, Payne made him a member, and there was certainly no press release about that. (There was when Rice and Moore joined.) Under Payne's watch, the club has substantially increased its charitable giving, with millions upon millions distributed annually, but specific numbers are hard to find. To promote them would be showy and gauche, and that is not the club's way.

But Payne is no wallflower. Not at all. When Tiger Woods played in the 2010 Masters, his first tournament after his infamous sex scandal, Payne read a 284-word statement about how the golfer "disappointed all of us," concluding with the importance of "second chances." Depending on whom you ask, his remarks were either hopeful and necessary or sanctimonious and presumptuous. Few are neutral about Billy Payne.

"I like Billy," Vijay Singh said during the Florida swing, when all of golf starts thinking about the Masters, which Singh won in 2000. "Augusta has to be run with a firm hand, and Billy has it. It's part of what makes Augusta Augusta."

Given the source, it's a magnificent compliment. One thing about Singh: He would never try to curry favor with anybody, not even the chairman of the Augusta National Golf Club.

Among former champions, Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer, who are dues-paying members of the club, broadly share Singh's view. But Nicklaus has a different relationship with Payne than he did with any of Payne's five predecessors. Beginning in the early 1970s, Nicklaus, a prominent architect and a six-time Masters winner, was regularly consulted about proposed changes to the course. Under Payne, who has made little more than tweaks to various holes, nothing like that has happened. Nicklaus has good company. Other former winners have also found Payne unreceptive to suggestions.

Payne, like Palmer, venerates the club's distinctive green jacket, worn by members and Masters winners when they are at the club, but never off-campus, except by the reigning champion. When a green jacket once belonging to Art Wall, the 1959 winner, was bought by a private collector in 2012 for nearly $62,000, the club arranged to get the jacket back and return it to Augusta National. Payne, by special dispensation, allows members who attend the two new amateur events to wear their club coats overseas. He once observed, "The green jacket doesn't need a lot of interpretation anywhere in the world."

Appearance is important to Payne. For instance, members have learned that the chairman does not like the loafers-no-socks look. During one members' weekend Payne instructed pro-shop staffers to distribute hosiery to any sockless person. Members and guests are still required to wear long pants while playing. On one pre-Masters visit, Woods, unaware of the dress code, arrived in shorts and ended up playing in rain pants.

Payne keeps track of every aspect of the club and measures virtually anything that can be measured. There have been members who have been told they are playing the course too much, and at least one member, race car legend Roger Penske, was informed by letter he was not coming around enough. The letter to Penske, who lives outside of Detroit, was ultimately about Payne's goal of increasing member participation in the club. (Penske declined an interview request.) One of Payne's objectives is to make the club, with members from all over the country—and to a degree, the world—feel more like a club.

He wants life at Augusta National to unfold in a genteel and time-honored way, and he will use modern means to get it. Club members and employees say that Payne has installed video cameras in trees on the course. How else, they ask, could Payne know immediately after a round that a member had permitted a caddie to drive a cart on the course, or violate any other Payne edict? For decades Frank Broyles, the retired Arkansas football coach and longtime member, would play 36 holes a day on his Augusta visits, getting lunch from the clubhouse in takeout containers between rounds. Payne put an end to that practice, telling the coach to have a proper lunch in the clubhouse, which is what he now does. "It's very convenient," Broyles said the other day of his new custom. There was not even a hint of complaint in his voice, and he said he is still—at 91!—able to go around twice in a day at Augusta. Broyles joined the club nearly a half-century ago, when Roberts was chairman. "Mr. Payne runs the club just like Mr. Roberts did," Broyles said, which he meant as a compliment. Both chairmen, to get it down to a word, were particular.

One day Knox, the club's best player, was hitting balls. Payne approached him, and their conversation, in club lore, supposedly went like this:

"Jeff, who you playing with today?""Oh, I'm not playing today, Mr. Payne. I'm just hitting balls.""Jeff, why don't we say you go over to the country club and hit your balls there?" That is, the Augusta Country Club.

Now, is a man of Payne's sophistication actually going to say that to a fellow and distinguished member? Not likely. What is far more realistic is that Payne told Knox that the range he was using was meant as a warmup area, not for long practice sessions. But the exchange, regardless of what was actually said, is all part of a piece: Payne has a vision for every aspect of the club, and he is determined to see it fulfilled. It's as if he has taken a solemn oath to protect tradition. He holds himself up as the club's ultimate role model, and he does what he needs to do to maintain authority. He didn't take the job to win popularity contests.

During the dessert course of a recent champions dinner, Bernhard Langer, a two-time Masters winner, talked about a hole he thinks could be improved, the bunker-free 14th. Visually he doesn't like the tee shot, he told his fellow champions and the chairman. The green, he said, is too severe.

Payne cut him off.

"This is not the time or place for this kind of discussion," Payne said, as the conversation has been recounted.“Then when is a good time?" Langer asked."Write a letter," Payne replied, banging the dinner table and announcing, "This dinner is adjourned!"

Some of the champions responded with nervous laughter. Others sat in stunned silence. Langer was steaming.

Let’s not end on that discordant note. After all, what have Augusta National and the Masters done for any of us except enrich our lives? If you visit the club as a guest, the experience of being there and playing the course is pretty much the same as it ever was. Payne's efforts have made attending the Masters more convenient than ever, even if it there are shades of Disneyland to the place now. His grow-the-game initiatives will introduce millions of people to golf. It's all good.

William (Hootie) Johnson, Payne's predecessor, served as chairman for about eight years, and Johnson's predecessor, Jack Stephens, served for seven. Before that, Hardin was in the position for about 11 years. Payne's 10-year anniversary comes in early May, and there has been plenty of talk at Augusta about who could possibly succeed him. Various names are offered in these discussions, but all of the potential candidates have one serious flaw.

They are not William Porter Payne.

Brought to you bySouthern Pines Golf & CC

[ottawagolfcourses-blog]

Augusta National chairman Billy Payne is always the most interesting person in the room

[This story originally appeared in Sports Illustrated Golf+ in April 2016.]

Some months ago my boss (or one of them) assigned me an interesting story for this issue: Jeff Knox, the amateur golfer and Augusta National member who often plays as a marker on Masters weekends. He has given interviews after some of his rounds, and my best guess was that if Knox wanted to do the story -- and if Billy Payne, the club's chairman since 2006, gave his approval -- it would happen. I wrote to Knox, and he referred my query to a media official at the club, who responded thusly:

"Mr. Knox fields many requests such as yours on an annual basis. He sends them my way because he respects the tradition of Mr. Payne being the sole voice of the Club. As you may know, our members do not give interviews on matters relative to the Club and Masters."

That day I asked my boss if I could write up Billy Payne for the issue instead. I mean, who wouldn't want to know more about the man who runs the Masters, which Tim Finchem, the PGA Tour commissioner, calls the "strongest brand" in golf? Who wouldn't want to know more about the man and the "sole voice" behind the most famous and influential golf club in America?

My boss said yes. My colleague Gary Van Sickle took over the Knox story. Through a spokesman, Payne declined interview and photo requests. (He makes himself available to reporters three times a year, and I was out of cycle.) Fortunately others were willing to talk, including club employees, members, Tour players, caddies, Augustans and golf officials. Understandably they were skittish about being quoted. Every chairman of Augusta National has engendered some degree of awe and fear, even if the chairman is as suave as the current one. I just thought you should know the obstacles. End of preamble.

As they say on the 1st tee at the Masters, Fore please. Billy Payne now driving.

Augusta National Golf Club has never had a chairman like William Porter Payne, not even Clifford Roberts, a sui generis personality and Wall Street banker who founded the club in 1933 with Bobby Jones, the great amateur. Payne, a 68-year-old businessman and attorney from Atlanta who was the key figure in bringing the Olympics to the city in 1996, often cites the club's two patron saints as his ultimate inspiration. But their vision was distinctly inward. That is: the club, the club, the club. It is unlikely that either could have imagined what Chairman Payne—he likes when people use the title—has done in his near decade at Augusta's helm. No other chairman has thought to focus on the borders of the course, and the great, green world beyond them.

Among other things, Payne has taken on grow-the-game with evangelical verve. He once said, in the fancy-speak that typifies many of his public remarks, "What we've done is do what we're supposed to do, and that is to be a beacon in the world of golf and to do our best to influence others to want to be a part of it." And where Jones prized camaraderie and fellowship above all, Payne is trying to achieve perfection. He wants the tournament experience for players, fans and television viewers to meet his own outsized standards.

MORE MASTERS: The history of the green jacket

In public Payne is so reverent about the club that some guests are surprised to see what a regular guy he can be when the necktie comes off. He has been known to share insider stories, from long before his time at Augusta National, about Eisenhower on the course, gambling in the clubhouse and members bringing in women "over the fence" at night. His listeners are thunderstruck. Wherever he goes, Payne is the most interesting person in the room.

It's pro bono work, being the chairman of Augusta National, but it is also golf's ultimate high-status position. Payne, whose bad back in recent years has limited his golf—he can shoot in the 80s and sometimes lower—does not spend Masters week running from one party to another. Nothing like it. He is a creature of habit, and his habits are low-key. He represents the club at the champions dinner held the Tuesday before the start of the tournament. The next day he holds his annual state-of-the-Masters press conference. After that, he is seldom seen until Sunday night, when he presides over the postgame festivities. He watches the tournament's TV coverage closely in his office and keeps tabs on threatening storm systems on a computer. Yes, in a perfect world the club chairman would control the weather and who makes which putts. But there are limits to what even Billy Payne can do.

This list of Payne's achievements is limited to 10 items only by convention.

1. Payne—who inherited an all-male membership—invited three women to join the club, starting in 2012 with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and businesswoman Darla Moore. These admissions were a relief to the PGA Tour, which pays lip service to inclusiveness. They also made life easier for some club members, particularly those with large public profiles, such as Roger Goodell of the NFL, Jerry Yang of Yahoo and Bill Gates of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

2. Payne started two major amateur events, the Latin America Amateur and the Asia-Pacific Amateur, the winners of which are invited to play in the Masters. As a result, a pair of teenagers will tee it up at Augusta this year: Paul Chaplet, 16, of Costa Rica and Jin Cheng, 18, of China. (Grow-the-game I.)

3. Working with the USGA and the PGA of America, Payne in 2014 rolled out a national junior competition called Drive, Chip & Putt. Across the country, thousands of kids played in approximately 250 qualifying events, winnowing down the group to 80 boys and girls who will convene at Augusta National on the Sunday before the Masters to play in the finals. (Grow-the-game II.)

4. Payne has overseen an enormous expansion, nationally and internationally, of the tournament's coverage on broadcast and cable TV and particularly by way of the Internet. Viewers may now see far more of the Masters, including the Wednesday par-3 tournament and press conferences, and have far speedier access to more tournament information. (Grow-the-game III.)

5. Payne took over an already financially secure not-for-profit club and vastly improved its balance sheet, to the point where it plans to purchase, reportedly for $27 million and without any real hesitancy, a small strip of land from the adjacent Augusta Country Club. One goal is to give the club the option of lengthening Augusta National's iconic 510-yard, par-5 13th hole. Another is to give the club more of a buffer from its bustling neighbor. Payne is not afraid to spend the club's money. He has hired high-level executives from Disney, Ritz-Carlton and other brand-name companies to help run the business of the Masters, most particularly in marketing and merchandising. (Spend-money-to-make-money I.)

MORE MASTERS: Meet the man who declined 20 Masters invites

6. Payne has dramatically increased the dining and beverage options for some big-ticket patrons. He oversaw the construction of a sprawling entertainment complex of high-end restaurants, bars and flat-screen TVs off the 5th hole called Berckmans Place, which opened in 2013. This mall in the pines measures 90,000 square feet, not including the three putting greens that abut it. It's open one week a year, and it makes money. Guests, who typically spend about $6,000 for a badge, might see Rice or Lynn Swann, among other recognizable members, representing the club as greeters. (Spend-money-to-make-money II.)

7. Payne oversaw the building of an 18-acre driving range on a former parking lot along with a smallish caddie clubhouse at the far end, in a spot so private that some players prefer it to the actual clubhouse, where they are likely to encounter various people—family members and reporters, for instance—who seek to occupy their time.

8. Under Payne, the club arranged for the purchase of dozens of homes on a neighboring housing development, razed them and turned the 120 rolling acres into a grass-and-gravel—and free!—parking lot that for 51 weeks a year looks like a cemetery waiting for clients. Related to that, Payne arranged for the club to lend money to the city of Augusta for a rerouting of Berckmans Road, which parallels the west side of the course, a move that improves traffic flow during the tournament and gives the club more of a buffer from public incursions.

9. Payne oversaw the stately, solemn burial of the club's iconic Eisenhower Tree, a landmark of the 17th hole until an ice storm led to its demise in 2014. "The loss of the Eisenhower Tree is difficult news to accept," Payne said at the time in a statement. Funeral services, as you would expect, were private.

10. In keeping with tradition, Payne has made sure the club does not gouge its fans. The club's famous pimento cheese sandwich goes for $1.50, the same price it was when he became chairman.

Billy Payne is not a beloved figure at the club, as was one of his predecessors, Jack Stephens, an Arkansas billionaire. Payne played football at Georgia and was active in his fraternity, Phi Delta Theta, but he is nothing like a good old boy, as was another chairman, Hord Hardin. Payne is not deeply frugal, as was Cliff Roberts (who was almost comically so), and he is not steeped in the lore of golf, as was Jones.

But he developed a creative and ambitious to-do list, and he has applied himself to it with remarkable effectiveness. Payne has a group of members and employees willing to move heaven and earth to help him fulfill his vision. And yet his position comes with a hurdle that would require someone with Shakespeare's insights into power to truly explore. Anything connected to Augusta National or the Masters is loaded with cachet—overloaded, really—and every day, directly or indirectly, the chairman encounters people eager to curry favor with him. He holds all the cards, which means he faces the same problem all emperors do: Who are the people who tell him what he actually needs to hear?

Payne typically works quietly. When longtime club manager Jim Armstrong retired in 2013, Payne made him a member, and there was certainly no press release about that. (There was when Rice and Moore joined.) Under Payne's watch, the club has substantially increased its charitable giving, with millions upon millions distributed annually, but specific numbers are hard to find. To promote them would be showy and gauche, and that is not the club's way.

But Payne is no wallflower. Not at all. When Tiger Woods played in the 2010 Masters, his first tournament after his infamous sex scandal, Payne read a 284-word statement about how the golfer "disappointed all of us," concluding with the importance of "second chances." Depending on whom you ask, his remarks were either hopeful and necessary or sanctimonious and presumptuous. Few are neutral about Billy Payne.

"I like Billy," Vijay Singh said during the Florida swing, when all of golf starts thinking about the Masters, which Singh won in 2000. "Augusta has to be run with a firm hand, and Billy has it. It's part of what makes Augusta Augusta."

Given the source, it's a magnificent compliment. One thing about Singh: He would never try to curry favor with anybody, not even the chairman of the Augusta National Golf Club.

Among former champions, Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer, who are dues-paying members of the club, broadly share Singh's view. But Nicklaus has a different relationship with Payne than he did with any of Payne's five predecessors. Beginning in the early 1970s, Nicklaus, a prominent architect and a six-time Masters winner, was regularly consulted about proposed changes to the course. Under Payne, who has made little more than tweaks to various holes, nothing like that has happened. Nicklaus has good company. Other former winners have also found Payne unreceptive to suggestions.

Payne, like Palmer, venerates the club's distinctive green jacket, worn by members and Masters winners when they are at the club, but never off-campus, except by the reigning champion. When a green jacket once belonging to Art Wall, the 1959 winner, was bought by a private collector in 2012 for nearly $62,000, the club arranged to get the jacket back and return it to Augusta National. Payne, by special dispensation, allows members who attend the two new amateur events to wear their club coats overseas. He once observed, "The green jacket doesn't need a lot of interpretation anywhere in the world."

Appearance is important to Payne. For instance, members have learned that the chairman does not like the loafers-no-socks look. During one members' weekend Payne instructed pro-shop staffers to distribute hosiery to any sockless person. Members and guests are still required to wear long pants while playing. On one pre-Masters visit, Woods, unaware of the dress code, arrived in shorts and ended up playing in rain pants.

Payne keeps track of every aspect of the club and measures virtually anything that can be measured. There have been members who have been told they are playing the course too much, and at least one member, race car legend Roger Penske, was informed by letter he was not coming around enough. The letter to Penske, who lives outside of Detroit, was ultimately about Payne's goal of increasing member participation in the club. (Penske declined an interview request.) One of Payne's objectives is to make the club, with members from all over the country—and to a degree, the world—feel more like a club.

He wants life at Augusta National to unfold in a genteel and time-honored way, and he will use modern means to get it. Club members and employees say that Payne has installed video cameras in trees on the course. How else, they ask, could Payne know immediately after a round that a member had permitted a caddie to drive a cart on the course, or violate any other Payne edict? For decades Frank Broyles, the retired Arkansas football coach and longtime member, would play 36 holes a day on his Augusta visits, getting lunch from the clubhouse in takeout containers between rounds. Payne put an end to that practice, telling the coach to have a proper lunch in the clubhouse, which is what he now does. "It's very convenient," Broyles said the other day of his new custom. There was not even a hint of complaint in his voice, and he said he is still—at 91!—able to go around twice in a day at Augusta. Broyles joined the club nearly a half-century ago, when Roberts was chairman. "Mr. Payne runs the club just like Mr. Roberts did," Broyles said, which he meant as a compliment. Both chairmen, to get it down to a word, were particular.

One day Knox, the club's best player, was hitting balls. Payne approached him, and their conversation, in club lore, supposedly went like this:

"Jeff, who you playing with today?""Oh, I'm not playing today, Mr. Payne. I'm just hitting balls.""Jeff, why don't we say you go over to the country club and hit your balls there?" That is, the Augusta Country Club.

Now, is a man of Payne's sophistication actually going to say that to a fellow and distinguished member? Not likely. What is far more realistic is that Payne told Knox that the range he was using was meant as a warmup area, not for long practice sessions. But the exchange, regardless of what was actually said, is all part of a piece: Payne has a vision for every aspect of the club, and he is determined to see it fulfilled. It's as if he has taken a solemn oath to protect tradition. He holds himself up as the club's ultimate role model, and he does what he needs to do to maintain authority. He didn't take the job to win popularity contests.

During the dessert course of a recent champions dinner, Bernhard Langer, a two-time Masters winner, talked about a hole he thinks could be improved, the bunker-free 14th. Visually he doesn't like the tee shot, he told his fellow champions and the chairman. The green, he said, is too severe.

Payne cut him off.

"This is not the time or place for this kind of discussion," Payne said, as the conversation has been recounted.“Then when is a good time?" Langer asked."Write a letter," Payne replied, banging the dinner table and announcing, "This dinner is adjourned!"

Some of the champions responded with nervous laughter. Others sat in stunned silence. Langer was steaming.

Let’s not end on that discordant note. After all, what have Augusta National and the Masters done for any of us except enrich our lives? If you visit the club as a guest, the experience of being there and playing the course is pretty much the same as it ever was. Payne's efforts have made attending the Masters more convenient than ever, even if it there are shades of Disneyland to the place now. His grow-the-game initiatives will introduce millions of people to golf. It's all good.

William (Hootie) Johnson, Payne's predecessor, served as chairman for about eight years, and Johnson's predecessor, Jack Stephens, served for seven. Before that, Hardin was in the position for about 11 years. Payne's 10-year anniversary comes in early May, and there has been plenty of talk at Augusta about who could possibly succeed him. Various names are offered in these discussions, but all of the potential candidates have one serious flaw.

They are not William Porter Payne.

from nationgolf http://ift.tt/2nYp2RR via IFTTT

[4seasonscountryclub]

Augusta National chairman Billy Payne is always the most interesting person in the room

[This story originally appeared in Sports Illustrated Golf+ in April 2016.]

Some months ago my boss (or one of them) assigned me an interesting story for this issue: Jeff Knox, the amateur golfer and Augusta National member who often plays as a marker on Masters weekends. He has given interviews after some of his rounds, and my best guess was that if Knox wanted to do the story -- and if Billy Payne, the club's chairman since 2006, gave his approval -- it would happen. I wrote to Knox, and he referred my query to a media official at the club, who responded thusly:

"Mr. Knox fields many requests such as yours on an annual basis. He sends them my way because he respects the tradition of Mr. Payne being the sole voice of the Club. As you may know, our members do not give interviews on matters relative to the Club and Masters."

That day I asked my boss if I could write up Billy Payne for the issue instead. I mean, who wouldn't want to know more about the man who runs the Masters, which Tim Finchem, the PGA Tour commissioner, calls the "strongest brand" in golf? Who wouldn't want to know more about the man and the "sole voice" behind the most famous and influential golf club in America?

My boss said yes. My colleague Gary Van Sickle took over the Knox story. Through a spokesman, Payne declined interview and photo requests. (He makes himself available to reporters three times a year, and I was out of cycle.) Fortunately others were willing to talk, including club employees, members, Tour players, caddies, Augustans and golf officials. Understandably they were skittish about being quoted. Every chairman of Augusta National has engendered some degree of awe and fear, even if the chairman is as suave as the current one. I just thought you should know the obstacles. End of preamble.

As they say on the 1st tee at the Masters, Fore please. Billy Payne now driving.

Augusta National Golf Club has never had a chairman like William Porter Payne, not even Clifford Roberts, a sui generis personality and Wall Street banker who founded the club in 1933 with Bobby Jones, the great amateur. Payne, a 68-year-old businessman and attorney from Atlanta who was the key figure in bringing the Olympics to the city in 1996, often cites the club's two patron saints as his ultimate inspiration. But their vision was distinctly inward. That is: the club, the club, the club. It is unlikely that either could have imagined what Chairman Payne—he likes when people use the title—has done in his near decade at Augusta's helm. No other chairman has thought to focus on the borders of the course, and the great, green world beyond them.

Among other things, Payne has taken on grow-the-game with evangelical verve. He once said, in the fancy-speak that typifies many of his public remarks, "What we've done is do what we're supposed to do, and that is to be a beacon in the world of golf and to do our best to influence others to want to be a part of it." And where Jones prized camaraderie and fellowship above all, Payne is trying to achieve perfection. He wants the tournament experience for players, fans and television viewers to meet his own outsized standards.

MORE MASTERS: The history of the green jacket

In public Payne is so reverent about the club that some guests are surprised to see what a regular guy he can be when the necktie comes off. He has been known to share insider stories, from long before his time at Augusta National, about Eisenhower on the course, gambling in the clubhouse and members bringing in women "over the fence" at night. His listeners are thunderstruck. Wherever he goes, Payne is the most interesting person in the room.

It's pro bono work, being the chairman of Augusta National, but it is also golf's ultimate high-status position. Payne, whose bad back in recent years has limited his golf—he can shoot in the 80s and sometimes lower—does not spend Masters week running from one party to another. Nothing like it. He is a creature of habit, and his habits are low-key. He represents the club at the champions dinner held the Tuesday before the start of the tournament. The next day he holds his annual state-of-the-Masters press conference. After that, he is seldom seen until Sunday night, when he presides over the postgame festivities. He watches the tournament's TV coverage closely in his office and keeps tabs on threatening storm systems on a computer. Yes, in a perfect world the club chairman would control the weather and who makes which putts. But there are limits to what even Billy Payne can do.

This list of Payne's achievements is limited to 10 items only by convention.

1. Payne—who inherited an all-male membership—invited three women to join the club, starting in 2012 with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and businesswoman Darla Moore. These admissions were a relief to the PGA Tour, which pays lip service to inclusiveness. They also made life easier for some club members, particularly those with large public profiles, such as Roger Goodell of the NFL, Jerry Yang of Yahoo and Bill Gates of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

2. Payne started two major amateur events, the Latin America Amateur and the Asia-Pacific Amateur, the winners of which are invited to play in the Masters. As a result, a pair of teenagers will tee it up at Augusta this year: Paul Chaplet, 16, of Costa Rica and Jin Cheng, 18, of China. (Grow-the-game I.)

3. Working with the USGA and the PGA of America, Payne in 2014 rolled out a national junior competition called Drive, Chip & Putt. Across the country, thousands of kids played in approximately 250 qualifying events, winnowing down the group to 80 boys and girls who will convene at Augusta National on the Sunday before the Masters to play in the finals. (Grow-the-game II.)

4. Payne has overseen an enormous expansion, nationally and internationally, of the tournament's coverage on broadcast and cable TV and particularly by way of the Internet. Viewers may now see far more of the Masters, including the Wednesday par-3 tournament and press conferences, and have far speedier access to more tournament information. (Grow-the-game III.)

5. Payne took over an already financially secure not-for-profit club and vastly improved its balance sheet, to the point where it plans to purchase, reportedly for $27 million and without any real hesitancy, a small strip of land from the adjacent Augusta Country Club. One goal is to give the club the option of lengthening Augusta National's iconic 510-yard, par-5 13th hole. Another is to give the club more of a buffer from its bustling neighbor. Payne is not afraid to spend the club's money. He has hired high-level executives from Disney, Ritz-Carlton and other brand-name companies to help run the business of the Masters, most particularly in marketing and merchandising. (Spend-money-to-make-money I.)

MORE MASTERS: Meet the man who declined 20 Masters invites

6. Payne has dramatically increased the dining and beverage options for some big-ticket patrons. He oversaw the construction of a sprawling entertainment complex of high-end restaurants, bars and flat-screen TVs off the 5th hole called Berckmans Place, which opened in 2013. This mall in the pines measures 90,000 square feet, not including the three putting greens that abut it. It's open one week a year, and it makes money. Guests, who typically spend about $6,000 for a badge, might see Rice or Lynn Swann, among other recognizable members, representing the club as greeters. (Spend-money-to-make-money II.)

7. Payne oversaw the building of an 18-acre driving range on a former parking lot along with a smallish caddie clubhouse at the far end, in a spot so private that some players prefer it to the actual clubhouse, where they are likely to encounter various people—family members and reporters, for instance—who seek to occupy their time.

8. Under Payne, the club arranged for the purchase of dozens of homes on a neighboring housing development, razed them and turned the 120 rolling acres into a grass-and-gravel—and free!—parking lot that for 51 weeks a year looks like a cemetery waiting for clients. Related to that, Payne arranged for the club to lend money to the city of Augusta for a rerouting of Berckmans Road, which parallels the west side of the course, a move that improves traffic flow during the tournament and gives the club more of a buffer from public incursions.

9. Payne oversaw the stately, solemn burial of the club's iconic Eisenhower Tree, a landmark of the 17th hole until an ice storm led to its demise in 2014. "The loss of the Eisenhower Tree is difficult news to accept," Payne said at the time in a statement. Funeral services, as you would expect, were private.

10. In keeping with tradition, Payne has made sure the club does not gouge its fans. The club's famous pimento cheese sandwich goes for $1.50, the same price it was when he became chairman.

Billy Payne is not a beloved figure at the club, as was one of his predecessors, Jack Stephens, an Arkansas billionaire. Payne played football at Georgia and was active in his fraternity, Phi Delta Theta, but he is nothing like a good old boy, as was another chairman, Hord Hardin. Payne is not deeply frugal, as was Cliff Roberts (who was almost comically so), and he is not steeped in the lore of golf, as was Jones.

But he developed a creative and ambitious to-do list, and he has applied himself to it with remarkable effectiveness. Payne has a group of members and employees willing to move heaven and earth to help him fulfill his vision. And yet his position comes with a hurdle that would require someone with Shakespeare's insights into power to truly explore. Anything connected to Augusta National or the Masters is loaded with cachet—overloaded, really—and every day, directly or indirectly, the chairman encounters people eager to curry favor with him. He holds all the cards, which means he faces the same problem all emperors do: Who are the people who tell him what he actually needs to hear?

Payne typically works quietly. When longtime club manager Jim Armstrong retired in 2013, Payne made him a member, and there was certainly no press release about that. (There was when Rice and Moore joined.) Under Payne's watch, the club has substantially increased its charitable giving, with millions upon millions distributed annually, but specific numbers are hard to find. To promote them would be showy and gauche, and that is not the club's way.

But Payne is no wallflower. Not at all. When Tiger Woods played in the 2010 Masters, his first tournament after his infamous sex scandal, Payne read a 284-word statement about how the golfer "disappointed all of us," concluding with the importance of "second chances." Depending on whom you ask, his remarks were either hopeful and necessary or sanctimonious and presumptuous. Few are neutral about Billy Payne.

"I like Billy," Vijay Singh said during the Florida swing, when all of golf starts thinking about the Masters, which Singh won in 2000. "Augusta has to be run with a firm hand, and Billy has it. It's part of what makes Augusta Augusta."

Given the source, it's a magnificent compliment. One thing about Singh: He would never try to curry favor with anybody, not even the chairman of the Augusta National Golf Club.

Among former champions, Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer, who are dues-paying members of the club, broadly share Singh's view. But Nicklaus has a different relationship with Payne than he did with any of Payne's five predecessors. Beginning in the early 1970s, Nicklaus, a prominent architect and a six-time Masters winner, was regularly consulted about proposed changes to the course. Under Payne, who has made little more than tweaks to various holes, nothing like that has happened. Nicklaus has good company. Other former winners have also found Payne unreceptive to suggestions.

Payne, like Palmer, venerates the club's distinctive green jacket, worn by members and Masters winners when they are at the club, but never off-campus, except by the reigning champion. When a green jacket once belonging to Art Wall, the 1959 winner, was bought by a private collector in 2012 for nearly $62,000, the club arranged to get the jacket back and return it to Augusta National. Payne, by special dispensation, allows members who attend the two new amateur events to wear their club coats overseas. He once observed, "The green jacket doesn't need a lot of interpretation anywhere in the world."

Appearance is important to Payne. For instance, members have learned that the chairman does not like the loafers-no-socks look. During one members' weekend Payne instructed pro-shop staffers to distribute hosiery to any sockless person. Members and guests are still required to wear long pants while playing. On one pre-Masters visit, Woods, unaware of the dress code, arrived in shorts and ended up playing in rain pants.

Payne keeps track of every aspect of the club and measures virtually anything that can be measured. There have been members who have been told they are playing the course too much, and at least one member, race car legend Roger Penske, was informed by letter he was not coming around enough. The letter to Penske, who lives outside of Detroit, was ultimately about Payne's goal of increasing member participation in the club. (Penske declined an interview request.) One of Payne's objectives is to make the club, with members from all over the country—and to a degree, the world—feel more like a club.

He wants life at Augusta National to unfold in a genteel and time-honored way, and he will use modern means to get it. Club members and employees say that Payne has installed video cameras in trees on the course. How else, they ask, could Payne know immediately after a round that a member had permitted a caddie to drive a cart on the course, or violate any other Payne edict? For decades Frank Broyles, the retired Arkansas football coach and longtime member, would play 36 holes a day on his Augusta visits, getting lunch from the clubhouse in takeout containers between rounds. Payne put an end to that practice, telling the coach to have a proper lunch in the clubhouse, which is what he now does. "It's very convenient," Broyles said the other day of his new custom. There was not even a hint of complaint in his voice, and he said he is still—at 91!—able to go around twice in a day at Augusta. Broyles joined the club nearly a half-century ago, when Roberts was chairman. "Mr. Payne runs the club just like Mr. Roberts did," Broyles said, which he meant as a compliment. Both chairmen, to get it down to a word, were particular.

One day Knox, the club's best player, was hitting balls. Payne approached him, and their conversation, in club lore, supposedly went like this:

"Jeff, who you playing with today?""Oh, I'm not playing today, Mr. Payne. I'm just hitting balls.""Jeff, why don't we say you go over to the country club and hit your balls there?" That is, the Augusta Country Club.

Now, is a man of Payne's sophistication actually going to say that to a fellow and distinguished member? Not likely. What is far more realistic is that Payne told Knox that the range he was using was meant as a warmup area, not for long practice sessions. But the exchange, regardless of what was actually said, is all part of a piece: Payne has a vision for every aspect of the club, and he is determined to see it fulfilled. It's as if he has taken a solemn oath to protect tradition. He holds himself up as the club's ultimate role model, and he does what he needs to do to maintain authority. He didn't take the job to win popularity contests.

During the dessert course of a recent champions dinner, Bernhard Langer, a two-time Masters winner, talked about a hole he thinks could be improved, the bunker-free 14th. Visually he doesn't like the tee shot, he told his fellow champions and the chairman. The green, he said, is too severe.

Payne cut him off.

"This is not the time or place for this kind of discussion," Payne said, as the conversation has been recounted.“Then when is a good time?" Langer asked."Write a letter," Payne replied, banging the dinner table and announcing, "This dinner is adjourned!"

Some of the champions responded with nervous laughter. Others sat in stunned silence. Langer was steaming.

Let’s not end on that discordant note. After all, what have Augusta National and the Masters done for any of us except enrich our lives? If you visit the club as a guest, the experience of being there and playing the course is pretty much the same as it ever was. Payne's efforts have made attending the Masters more convenient than ever, even if it there are shades of Disneyland to the place now. His grow-the-game initiatives will introduce millions of people to golf. It's all good.

William (Hootie) Johnson, Payne's predecessor, served as chairman for about eight years, and Johnson's predecessor, Jack Stephens, served for seven. Before that, Hardin was in the position for about 11 years. Payne's 10-year anniversary comes in early May, and there has been plenty of talk at Augusta about who could possibly succeed him. Various names are offered in these discussions, but all of the potential candidates have one serious flaw.

They are not William Porter Payne.

Brought to you by4 Seasons Country Club

[elmiragc]

Augusta National chairman Billy Payne is always the most interesting person in the room

[This story originally appeared in Sports Illustrated Golf+ in April 2016.]

Some months ago my boss (or one of them) assigned me an interesting story for this issue: Jeff Knox, the amateur golfer and Augusta National member who often plays as a marker on Masters weekends. He has given interviews after some of his rounds, and my best guess was that if Knox wanted to do the story -- and if Billy Payne, the club's chairman since 2006, gave his approval -- it would happen. I wrote to Knox, and he referred my query to a media official at the club, who responded thusly:

"Mr. Knox fields many requests such as yours on an annual basis. He sends them my way because he respects the tradition of Mr. Payne being the sole voice of the Club. As you may know, our members do not give interviews on matters relative to the Club and Masters."

That day I asked my boss if I could write up Billy Payne for the issue instead. I mean, who wouldn't want to know more about the man who runs the Masters, which Tim Finchem, the PGA Tour commissioner, calls the "strongest brand" in golf? Who wouldn't want to know more about the man and the "sole voice" behind the most famous and influential golf club in America?

My boss said yes. My colleague Gary Van Sickle took over the Knox story. Through a spokesman, Payne declined interview and photo requests. (He makes himself available to reporters three times a year, and I was out of cycle.) Fortunately others were willing to talk, including club employees, members, Tour players, caddies, Augustans and golf officials. Understandably they were skittish about being quoted. Every chairman of Augusta National has engendered some degree of awe and fear, even if the chairman is as suave as the current one. I just thought you should know the obstacles. End of preamble.

As they say on the 1st tee at the Masters, Fore please. Billy Payne now driving.

Augusta National Golf Club has never had a chairman like William Porter Payne, not even Clifford Roberts, a sui generis personality and Wall Street banker who founded the club in 1933 with Bobby Jones, the great amateur. Payne, a 68-year-old businessman and attorney from Atlanta who was the key figure in bringing the Olympics to the city in 1996, often cites the club's two patron saints as his ultimate inspiration. But their vision was distinctly inward. That is: the club, the club, the club. It is unlikely that either could have imagined what Chairman Payne—he likes when people use the title—has done in his near decade at Augusta's helm. No other chairman has thought to focus on the borders of the course, and the great, green world beyond them.

Among other things, Payne has taken on grow-the-game with evangelical verve. He once said, in the fancy-speak that typifies many of his public remarks, "What we've done is do what we're supposed to do, and that is to be a beacon in the world of golf and to do our best to influence others to want to be a part of it." And where Jones prized camaraderie and fellowship above all, Payne is trying to achieve perfection. He wants the tournament experience for players, fans and television viewers to meet his own outsized standards.

MORE MASTERS: The history of the green jacket

In public Payne is so reverent about the club that some guests are surprised to see what a regular guy he can be when the necktie comes off. He has been known to share insider stories, from long before his time at Augusta National, about Eisenhower on the course, gambling in the clubhouse and members bringing in women "over the fence" at night. His listeners are thunderstruck. Wherever he goes, Payne is the most interesting person in the room.

It's pro bono work, being the chairman of Augusta National, but it is also golf's ultimate high-status position. Payne, whose bad back in recent years has limited his golf—he can shoot in the 80s and sometimes lower—does not spend Masters week running from one party to another. Nothing like it. He is a creature of habit, and his habits are low-key. He represents the club at the champions dinner held the Tuesday before the start of the tournament. The next day he holds his annual state-of-the-Masters press conference. After that, he is seldom seen until Sunday night, when he presides over the postgame festivities. He watches the tournament's TV coverage closely in his office and keeps tabs on threatening storm systems on a computer. Yes, in a perfect world the club chairman would control the weather and who makes which putts. But there are limits to what even Billy Payne can do.

This list of Payne's achievements is limited to 10 items only by convention.

1. Payne—who inherited an all-male membership—invited three women to join the club, starting in 2012 with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and businesswoman Darla Moore. These admissions were a relief to the PGA Tour, which pays lip service to inclusiveness. They also made life easier for some club members, particularly those with large public profiles, such as Roger Goodell of the NFL, Jerry Yang of Yahoo and Bill Gates of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

2. Payne started two major amateur events, the Latin America Amateur and the Asia-Pacific Amateur, the winners of which are invited to play in the Masters. As a result, a pair of teenagers will tee it up at Augusta this year: Paul Chaplet, 16, of Costa Rica and Jin Cheng, 18, of China. (Grow-the-game I.)

3. Working with the USGA and the PGA of America, Payne in 2014 rolled out a national junior competition called Drive, Chip & Putt. Across the country, thousands of kids played in approximately 250 qualifying events, winnowing down the group to 80 boys and girls who will convene at Augusta National on the Sunday before the Masters to play in the finals. (Grow-the-game II.)

4. Payne has overseen an enormous expansion, nationally and internationally, of the tournament's coverage on broadcast and cable TV and particularly by way of the Internet. Viewers may now see far more of the Masters, including the Wednesday par-3 tournament and press conferences, and have far speedier access to more tournament information. (Grow-the-game III.)

5. Payne took over an already financially secure not-for-profit club and vastly improved its balance sheet, to the point where it plans to purchase, reportedly for $27 million and without any real hesitancy, a small strip of land from the adjacent Augusta Country Club. One goal is to give the club the option of lengthening Augusta National's iconic 510-yard, par-5 13th hole. Another is to give the club more of a buffer from its bustling neighbor. Payne is not afraid to spend the club's money. He has hired high-level executives from Disney, Ritz-Carlton and other brand-name companies to help run the business of the Masters, most particularly in marketing and merchandising. (Spend-money-to-make-money I.)

MORE MASTERS: Meet the man who declined 20 Masters invites

6. Payne has dramatically increased the dining and beverage options for some big-ticket patrons. He oversaw the construction of a sprawling entertainment complex of high-end restaurants, bars and flat-screen TVs off the 5th hole called Berckmans Place, which opened in 2013. This mall in the pines measures 90,000 square feet, not including the three putting greens that abut it. It's open one week a year, and it makes money. Guests, who typically spend about $6,000 for a badge, might see Rice or Lynn Swann, among other recognizable members, representing the club as greeters. (Spend-money-to-make-money II.)

7. Payne oversaw the building of an 18-acre driving range on a former parking lot along with a smallish caddie clubhouse at the far end, in a spot so private that some players prefer it to the actual clubhouse, where they are likely to encounter various people—family members and reporters, for instance—who seek to occupy their time.

8. Under Payne, the club arranged for the purchase of dozens of homes on a neighboring housing development, razed them and turned the 120 rolling acres into a grass-and-gravel—and free!—parking lot that for 51 weeks a year looks like a cemetery waiting for clients. Related to that, Payne arranged for the club to lend money to the city of Augusta for a rerouting of Berckmans Road, which parallels the west side of the course, a move that improves traffic flow during the tournament and gives the club more of a buffer from public incursions.

9. Payne oversaw the stately, solemn burial of the club's iconic Eisenhower Tree, a landmark of the 17th hole until an ice storm led to its demise in 2014. "The loss of the Eisenhower Tree is difficult news to accept," Payne said at the time in a statement. Funeral services, as you would expect, were private.

10. In keeping with tradition, Payne has made sure the club does not gouge its fans. The club's famous pimento cheese sandwich goes for $1.50, the same price it was when he became chairman.

Billy Payne is not a beloved figure at the club, as was one of his predecessors, Jack Stephens, an Arkansas billionaire. Payne played football at Georgia and was active in his fraternity, Phi Delta Theta, but he is nothing like a good old boy, as was another chairman, Hord Hardin. Payne is not deeply frugal, as was Cliff Roberts (who was almost comically so), and he is not steeped in the lore of golf, as was Jones.

But he developed a creative and ambitious to-do list, and he has applied himself to it with remarkable effectiveness. Payne has a group of members and employees willing to move heaven and earth to help him fulfill his vision. And yet his position comes with a hurdle that would require someone with Shakespeare's insights into power to truly explore. Anything connected to Augusta National or the Masters is loaded with cachet—overloaded, really—and every day, directly or indirectly, the chairman encounters people eager to curry favor with him. He holds all the cards, which means he faces the same problem all emperors do: Who are the people who tell him what he actually needs to hear?

Payne typically works quietly. When longtime club manager Jim Armstrong retired in 2013, Payne made him a member, and there was certainly no press release about that. (There was when Rice and Moore joined.) Under Payne's watch, the club has substantially increased its charitable giving, with millions upon millions distributed annually, but specific numbers are hard to find. To promote them would be showy and gauche, and that is not the club's way.

But Payne is no wallflower. Not at all. When Tiger Woods played in the 2010 Masters, his first tournament after his infamous sex scandal, Payne read a 284-word statement about how the golfer "disappointed all of us," concluding with the importance of "second chances." Depending on whom you ask, his remarks were either hopeful and necessary or sanctimonious and presumptuous. Few are neutral about Billy Payne.

"I like Billy," Vijay Singh said during the Florida swing, when all of golf starts thinking about the Masters, which Singh won in 2000. "Augusta has to be run with a firm hand, and Billy has it. It's part of what makes Augusta Augusta."

Given the source, it's a magnificent compliment. One thing about Singh: He would never try to curry favor with anybody, not even the chairman of the Augusta National Golf Club.

Among former champions, Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer, who are dues-paying members of the club, broadly share Singh's view. But Nicklaus has a different relationship with Payne than he did with any of Payne's five predecessors. Beginning in the early 1970s, Nicklaus, a prominent architect and a six-time Masters winner, was regularly consulted about proposed changes to the course. Under Payne, who has made little more than tweaks to various holes, nothing like that has happened. Nicklaus has good company. Other former winners have also found Payne unreceptive to suggestions.

Payne, like Palmer, venerates the club's distinctive green jacket, worn by members and Masters winners when they are at the club, but never off-campus, except by the reigning champion. When a green jacket once belonging to Art Wall, the 1959 winner, was bought by a private collector in 2012 for nearly $62,000, the club arranged to get the jacket back and return it to Augusta National. Payne, by special dispensation, allows members who attend the two new amateur events to wear their club coats overseas. He once observed, "The green jacket doesn't need a lot of interpretation anywhere in the world."

Appearance is important to Payne. For instance, members have learned that the chairman does not like the loafers-no-socks look. During one members' weekend Payne instructed pro-shop staffers to distribute hosiery to any sockless person. Members and guests are still required to wear long pants while playing. On one pre-Masters visit, Woods, unaware of the dress code, arrived in shorts and ended up playing in rain pants.

Payne keeps track of every aspect of the club and measures virtually anything that can be measured. There have been members who have been told they are playing the course too much, and at least one member, race car legend Roger Penske, was informed by letter he was not coming around enough. The letter to Penske, who lives outside of Detroit, was ultimately about Payne's goal of increasing member participation in the club. (Penske declined an interview request.) One of Payne's objectives is to make the club, with members from all over the country—and to a degree, the world—feel more like a club.

He wants life at Augusta National to unfold in a genteel and time-honored way, and he will use modern means to get it. Club members and employees say that Payne has installed video cameras in trees on the course. How else, they ask, could Payne know immediately after a round that a member had permitted a caddie to drive a cart on the course, or violate any other Payne edict? For decades Frank Broyles, the retired Arkansas football coach and longtime member, would play 36 holes a day on his Augusta visits, getting lunch from the clubhouse in takeout containers between rounds. Payne put an end to that practice, telling the coach to have a proper lunch in the clubhouse, which is what he now does. "It's very convenient," Broyles said the other day of his new custom. There was not even a hint of complaint in his voice, and he said he is still—at 91!—able to go around twice in a day at Augusta. Broyles joined the club nearly a half-century ago, when Roberts was chairman. "Mr. Payne runs the club just like Mr. Roberts did," Broyles said, which he meant as a compliment. Both chairmen, to get it down to a word, were particular.

One day Knox, the club's best player, was hitting balls. Payne approached him, and their conversation, in club lore, supposedly went like this:

"Jeff, who you playing with today?""Oh, I'm not playing today, Mr. Payne. I'm just hitting balls.""Jeff, why don't we say you go over to the country club and hit your balls there?" That is, the Augusta Country Club.

Now, is a man of Payne's sophistication actually going to say that to a fellow and distinguished member? Not likely. What is far more realistic is that Payne told Knox that the range he was using was meant as a warmup area, not for long practice sessions. But the exchange, regardless of what was actually said, is all part of a piece: Payne has a vision for every aspect of the club, and he is determined to see it fulfilled. It's as if he has taken a solemn oath to protect tradition. He holds himself up as the club's ultimate role model, and he does what he needs to do to maintain authority. He didn't take the job to win popularity contests.

During the dessert course of a recent champions dinner, Bernhard Langer, a two-time Masters winner, talked about a hole he thinks could be improved, the bunker-free 14th. Visually he doesn't like the tee shot, he told his fellow champions and the chairman. The green, he said, is too severe.

Payne cut him off.

"This is not the time or place for this kind of discussion," Payne said, as the conversation has been recounted.“Then when is a good time?" Langer asked."Write a letter," Payne replied, banging the dinner table and announcing, "This dinner is adjourned!"

Some of the champions responded with nervous laughter. Others sat in stunned silence. Langer was steaming.

Let’s not end on that discordant note. After all, what have Augusta National and the Masters done for any of us except enrich our lives? If you visit the club as a guest, the experience of being there and playing the course is pretty much the same as it ever was. Payne's efforts have made attending the Masters more convenient than ever, even if it there are shades of Disneyland to the place now. His grow-the-game initiatives will introduce millions of people to golf. It's all good.

William (Hootie) Johnson, Payne's predecessor, served as chairman for about eight years, and Johnson's predecessor, Jack Stephens, served for seven. Before that, Hardin was in the position for about 11 years. Payne's 10-year anniversary comes in early May, and there has been plenty of talk at Augusta about who could possibly succeed him. Various names are offered in these discussions, but all of the potential candidates have one serious flaw.

They are not William Porter Payne.

Brought to you byElmira Golf Club

[lowvillegolfclub]

Augusta National chairman Billy Payne is always the most interesting person in the room

[This story originally appeared in Sports Illustrated Golf+ in April 2016.]

Some months ago my boss (or one of them) assigned me an interesting story for this issue: Jeff Knox, the amateur golfer and Augusta National member who often plays as a marker on Masters weekends. He has given interviews after some of his rounds, and my best guess was that if Knox wanted to do the story -- and if Billy Payne, the club's chairman since 2006, gave his approval -- it would happen. I wrote to Knox, and he referred my query to a media official at the club, who responded thusly:

"Mr. Knox fields many requests such as yours on an annual basis. He sends them my way because he respects the tradition of Mr. Payne being the sole voice of the Club. As you may know, our members do not give interviews on matters relative to the Club and Masters."

That day I asked my boss if I could write up Billy Payne for the issue instead. I mean, who wouldn't want to know more about the man who runs the Masters, which Tim Finchem, the PGA Tour commissioner, calls the "strongest brand" in golf? Who wouldn't want to know more about the man and the "sole voice" behind the most famous and influential golf club in America?

My boss said yes. My colleague Gary Van Sickle took over the Knox story. Through a spokesman, Payne declined interview and photo requests. (He makes himself available to reporters three times a year, and I was out of cycle.) Fortunately others were willing to talk, including club employees, members, Tour players, caddies, Augustans and golf officials. Understandably they were skittish about being quoted. Every chairman of Augusta National has engendered some degree of awe and fear, even if the chairman is as suave as the current one. I just thought you should know the obstacles. End of preamble.

As they say on the 1st tee at the Masters, Fore please. Billy Payne now driving.

Augusta National Golf Club has never had a chairman like William Porter Payne, not even Clifford Roberts, a sui generis personality and Wall Street banker who founded the club in 1933 with Bobby Jones, the great amateur. Payne, a 68-year-old businessman and attorney from Atlanta who was the key figure in bringing the Olympics to the city in 1996, often cites the club's two patron saints as his ultimate inspiration. But their vision was distinctly inward. That is: the club, the club, the club. It is unlikely that either could have imagined what Chairman Payne—he likes when people use the title—has done in his near decade at Augusta's helm. No other chairman has thought to focus on the borders of the course, and the great, green world beyond them.

Among other things, Payne has taken on grow-the-game with evangelical verve. He once said, in the fancy-speak that typifies many of his public remarks, "What we've done is do what we're supposed to do, and that is to be a beacon in the world of golf and to do our best to influence others to want to be a part of it." And where Jones prized camaraderie and fellowship above all, Payne is trying to achieve perfection. He wants the tournament experience for players, fans and television viewers to meet his own outsized standards.

MORE MASTERS: The history of the green jacket

In public Payne is so reverent about the club that some guests are surprised to see what a regular guy he can be when the necktie comes off. He has been known to share insider stories, from long before his time at Augusta National, about Eisenhower on the course, gambling in the clubhouse and members bringing in women "over the fence" at night. His listeners are thunderstruck. Wherever he goes, Payne is the most interesting person in the room.

It's pro bono work, being the chairman of Augusta National, but it is also golf's ultimate high-status position. Payne, whose bad back in recent years has limited his golf—he can shoot in the 80s and sometimes lower—does not spend Masters week running from one party to another. Nothing like it. He is a creature of habit, and his habits are low-key. He represents the club at the champions dinner held the Tuesday before the start of the tournament. The next day he holds his annual state-of-the-Masters press conference. After that, he is seldom seen until Sunday night, when he presides over the postgame festivities. He watches the tournament's TV coverage closely in his office and keeps tabs on threatening storm systems on a computer. Yes, in a perfect world the club chairman would control the weather and who makes which putts. But there are limits to what even Billy Payne can do.

This list of Payne's achievements is limited to 10 items only by convention.

1. Payne—who inherited an all-male membership—invited three women to join the club, starting in 2012 with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and businesswoman Darla Moore. These admissions were a relief to the PGA Tour, which pays lip service to inclusiveness. They also made life easier for some club members, particularly those with large public profiles, such as Roger Goodell of the NFL, Jerry Yang of Yahoo and Bill Gates of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

2. Payne started two major amateur events, the Latin America Amateur and the Asia-Pacific Amateur, the winners of which are invited to play in the Masters. As a result, a pair of teenagers will tee it up at Augusta this year: Paul Chaplet, 16, of Costa Rica and Jin Cheng, 18, of China. (Grow-the-game I.)

3. Working with the USGA and the PGA of America, Payne in 2014 rolled out a national junior competition called Drive, Chip & Putt. Across the country, thousands of kids played in approximately 250 qualifying events, winnowing down the group to 80 boys and girls who will convene at Augusta National on the Sunday before the Masters to play in the finals. (Grow-the-game II.)

4. Payne has overseen an enormous expansion, nationally and internationally, of the tournament's coverage on broadcast and cable TV and particularly by way of the Internet. Viewers may now see far more of the Masters, including the Wednesday par-3 tournament and press conferences, and have far speedier access to more tournament information. (Grow-the-game III.)

5. Payne took over an already financially secure not-for-profit club and vastly improved its balance sheet, to the point where it plans to purchase, reportedly for $27 million and without any real hesitancy, a small strip of land from the adjacent Augusta Country Club. One goal is to give the club the option of lengthening Augusta National's iconic 510-yard, par-5 13th hole. Another is to give the club more of a buffer from its bustling neighbor. Payne is not afraid to spend the club's money. He has hired high-level executives from Disney, Ritz-Carlton and other brand-name companies to help run the business of the Masters, most particularly in marketing and merchandising. (Spend-money-to-make-money I.)

MORE MASTERS: Meet the man who declined 20 Masters invites

6. Payne has dramatically increased the dining and beverage options for some big-ticket patrons. He oversaw the construction of a sprawling entertainment complex of high-end restaurants, bars and flat-screen TVs off the 5th hole called Berckmans Place, which opened in 2013. This mall in the pines measures 90,000 square feet, not including the three putting greens that abut it. It's open one week a year, and it makes money. Guests, who typically spend about $6,000 for a badge, might see Rice or Lynn Swann, among other recognizable members, representing the club as greeters. (Spend-money-to-make-money II.)

7. Payne oversaw the building of an 18-acre driving range on a former parking lot along with a smallish caddie clubhouse at the far end, in a spot so private that some players prefer it to the actual clubhouse, where they are likely to encounter various people—family members and reporters, for instance—who seek to occupy their time.

8. Under Payne, the club arranged for the purchase of dozens of homes on a neighboring housing development, razed them and turned the 120 rolling acres into a grass-and-gravel—and free!—parking lot that for 51 weeks a year looks like a cemetery waiting for clients. Related to that, Payne arranged for the club to lend money to the city of Augusta for a rerouting of Berckmans Road, which parallels the west side of the course, a move that improves traffic flow during the tournament and gives the club more of a buffer from public incursions.

9. Payne oversaw the stately, solemn burial of the club's iconic Eisenhower Tree, a landmark of the 17th hole until an ice storm led to its demise in 2014. "The loss of the Eisenhower Tree is difficult news to accept," Payne said at the time in a statement. Funeral services, as you would expect, were private.

10. In keeping with tradition, Payne has made sure the club does not gouge its fans. The club's famous pimento cheese sandwich goes for $1.50, the same price it was when he became chairman.

Billy Payne is not a beloved figure at the club, as was one of his predecessors, Jack Stephens, an Arkansas billionaire. Payne played football at Georgia and was active in his fraternity, Phi Delta Theta, but he is nothing like a good old boy, as was another chairman, Hord Hardin. Payne is not deeply frugal, as was Cliff Roberts (who was almost comically so), and he is not steeped in the lore of golf, as was Jones.

But he developed a creative and ambitious to-do list, and he has applied himself to it with remarkable effectiveness. Payne has a group of members and employees willing to move heaven and earth to help him fulfill his vision. And yet his position comes with a hurdle that would require someone with Shakespeare's insights into power to truly explore. Anything connected to Augusta National or the Masters is loaded with cachet—overloaded, really—and every day, directly or indirectly, the chairman encounters people eager to curry favor with him. He holds all the cards, which means he faces the same problem all emperors do: Who are the people who tell him what he actually needs to hear?

Payne typically works quietly. When longtime club manager Jim Armstrong retired in 2013, Payne made him a member, and there was certainly no press release about that. (There was when Rice and Moore joined.) Under Payne's watch, the club has substantially increased its charitable giving, with millions upon millions distributed annually, but specific numbers are hard to find. To promote them would be showy and gauche, and that is not the club's way.

But Payne is no wallflower. Not at all. When Tiger Woods played in the 2010 Masters, his first tournament after his infamous sex scandal, Payne read a 284-word statement about how the golfer "disappointed all of us," concluding with the importance of "second chances." Depending on whom you ask, his remarks were either hopeful and necessary or sanctimonious and presumptuous. Few are neutral about Billy Payne.

"I like Billy," Vijay Singh said during the Florida swing, when all of golf starts thinking about the Masters, which Singh won in 2000. "Augusta has to be run with a firm hand, and Billy has it. It's part of what makes Augusta Augusta."

Given the source, it's a magnificent compliment. One thing about Singh: He would never try to curry favor with anybody, not even the chairman of the Augusta National Golf Club.

Among former champions, Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer, who are dues-paying members of the club, broadly share Singh's view. But Nicklaus has a different relationship with Payne than he did with any of Payne's five predecessors. Beginning in the early 1970s, Nicklaus, a prominent architect and a six-time Masters winner, was regularly consulted about proposed changes to the course. Under Payne, who has made little more than tweaks to various holes, nothing like that has happened. Nicklaus has good company. Other former winners have also found Payne unreceptive to suggestions.

Payne, like Palmer, venerates the club's distinctive green jacket, worn by members and Masters winners when they are at the club, but never off-campus, except by the reigning champion. When a green jacket once belonging to Art Wall, the 1959 winner, was bought by a private collector in 2012 for nearly $62,000, the club arranged to get the jacket back and return it to Augusta National. Payne, by special dispensation, allows members who attend the two new amateur events to wear their club coats overseas. He once observed, "The green jacket doesn't need a lot of interpretation anywhere in the world."

Appearance is important to Payne. For instance, members have learned that the chairman does not like the loafers-no-socks look. During one members' weekend Payne instructed pro-shop staffers to distribute hosiery to any sockless person. Members and guests are still required to wear long pants while playing. On one pre-Masters visit, Woods, unaware of the dress code, arrived in shorts and ended up playing in rain pants.

Payne keeps track of every aspect of the club and measures virtually anything that can be measured. There have been members who have been told they are playing the course too much, and at least one member, race car legend Roger Penske, was informed by letter he was not coming around enough. The letter to Penske, who lives outside of Detroit, was ultimately about Payne's goal of increasing member participation in the club. (Penske declined an interview request.) One of Payne's objectives is to make the club, with members from all over the country—and to a degree, the world—feel more like a club.

He wants life at Augusta National to unfold in a genteel and time-honored way, and he will use modern means to get it. Club members and employees say that Payne has installed video cameras in trees on the course. How else, they ask, could Payne know immediately after a round that a member had permitted a caddie to drive a cart on the course, or violate any other Payne edict? For decades Frank Broyles, the retired Arkansas football coach and longtime member, would play 36 holes a day on his Augusta visits, getting lunch from the clubhouse in takeout containers between rounds. Payne put an end to that practice, telling the coach to have a proper lunch in the clubhouse, which is what he now does. "It's very convenient," Broyles said the other day of his new custom. There was not even a hint of complaint in his voice, and he said he is still—at 91!—able to go around twice in a day at Augusta. Broyles joined the club nearly a half-century ago, when Roberts was chairman. "Mr. Payne runs the club just like Mr. Roberts did," Broyles said, which he meant as a compliment. Both chairmen, to get it down to a word, were particular.

One day Knox, the club's best player, was hitting balls. Payne approached him, and their conversation, in club lore, supposedly went like this:

"Jeff, who you playing with today?""Oh, I'm not playing today, Mr. Payne. I'm just hitting balls.""Jeff, why don't we say you go over to the country club and hit your balls there?" That is, the Augusta Country Club.

Now, is a man of Payne's sophistication actually going to say that to a fellow and distinguished member? Not likely. What is far more realistic is that Payne told Knox that the range he was using was meant as a warmup area, not for long practice sessions. But the exchange, regardless of what was actually said, is all part of a piece: Payne has a vision for every aspect of the club, and he is determined to see it fulfilled. It's as if he has taken a solemn oath to protect tradition. He holds himself up as the club's ultimate role model, and he does what he needs to do to maintain authority. He didn't take the job to win popularity contests.

During the dessert course of a recent champions dinner, Bernhard Langer, a two-time Masters winner, talked about a hole he thinks could be improved, the bunker-free 14th. Visually he doesn't like the tee shot, he told his fellow champions and the chairman. The green, he said, is too severe.

Payne cut him off.

"This is not the time or place for this kind of discussion," Payne said, as the conversation has been recounted.“Then when is a good time?" Langer asked."Write a letter," Payne replied, banging the dinner table and announcing, "This dinner is adjourned!"

Some of the champions responded with nervous laughter. Others sat in stunned silence. Langer was steaming.

Let’s not end on that discordant note. After all, what have Augusta National and the Masters done for any of us except enrich our lives? If you visit the club as a guest, the experience of being there and playing the course is pretty much the same as it ever was. Payne's efforts have made attending the Masters more convenient than ever, even if it there are shades of Disneyland to the place now. His grow-the-game initiatives will introduce millions of people to golf. It's all good.

William (Hootie) Johnson, Payne's predecessor, served as chairman for about eight years, and Johnson's predecessor, Jack Stephens, served for seven. Before that, Hardin was in the position for about 11 years. Payne's 10-year anniversary comes in early May, and there has been plenty of talk at Augusta about who could possibly succeed him. Various names are offered in these discussions, but all of the potential candidates have one serious flaw.

They are not William Porter Payne.

Brought to you byLowville Golf Club