"Cinderella story, out of nowhere, former greenskeeper, now about to become the Masters champion"

 I make it a habit to try to watch the very end of the Masters Golf Tournament every April, because it's a Festival Of Clichés every time. The donning of the Holy Green Jacket, which brings to our Sunday evening television screens a formal ceremony that is rivaled only by a papal investiture for pomp-ish circumstance, always brings me back to a couple of lines from Bob Dylan's 1965 liner notes for "Highway 61 Revisited":  "...the subject matter -- though meaningless as it is -- has something to do with the beautiful strangers . . . . the beautiful strangers, Vivaldi's green jacket & the holy slow train." 

Augusta National Golf Club is just full of beautiful strangers. The crème de la crème of the entire Southern beau monde are all there, and one can almost smell the aroma of microfiber polo shirts through the screen. The winner gets to wear his green spring jacket, and it's a shame that golf has not seen fit to create wardrobe choices for the other Three Seasons.  

And heaven knows golf matches move with the speed of a holy slow train. But with all the players trooping around with their caddies dressed in jumpsuits, playing a game as boring as an entire afternoon can be. But it was Dorothy Parker who said, "The cure for boredom is curiosity, and there is no cure for curiosity."  So I tried on Sunday to find something to be curious about, and I found it when Jim Nantz, the voice of CBS Sports, said that the winner, Hideki Matsuyama, a man from Japan, had "fans from halfway around the world watching him compete."

Well, now. Augusta is 6,945 miles from Tokyo, which is really all the way around the world. You can see the antipodes (the direct geographical opposite) of any address on https://www.antipodesmap.com/ and that site shows us that the antipode to Augusta - where you would wind up if you started drilling down at the 18th hole, all the way through Earth - is just west of Perth, Australia, south of the Indochinese Peninsula.

And by the time I figured that out, Matsuyama had his green jacket and I had a delicious pan of barbecued chicken to chow down on, so until next year, so long, Augusta!