The Bloods, Crips, and eh, Augusta National

Just under a mile from storied Magnolia Lane, a joint task force from the US Secret Service and the Columbia County Sheriff’s Office burst into a house on Ponderosa Drive in Augusta the other week. The heavy artillery had been brought along because the local police knew they were busting a meth lab and a counterfeit money-making operation. Thirty-year old James Barrow and 19 year old Dana Bryant were arrested and charged with meth manufacturing and trafficking. A three year old child and an 88 year old woman found in the house were not taken into custody. That this story barely caused a ripple in the city tells its own story.

 

Last summer, the sports world was agog when Augusta National, the most exclusive and painfully backward golf club in the world, finally invited two women to join their ranks. If the news that former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and banking executive Darla Moore were finally breaking through the gender barrier made headlines around the planet, it meant very little to the residents of the Georgia town that is synonymous with the world’s most famous golf tournament. They were too busy coming to terms with reports that more and more of Augusta’s young hoodlums were affiliating with infamous national gangs like the Bloods and the Crips.

“The issue of gangs in Augusta resurfaced after six people were wounded in a July 6 shooting on Broad Street that happened after the First Friday festival,” went a report in the Augusta Chronicle last July. “No one has been arrested, but authorities say witness accounts lead them to believe gangs were involved. A number of high-ranking gang members were taken off the street in a 2007 undercover sting operation in which the sheriff’s office teamed up with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Operation Augusta Ink, which operated out of a Tobacco Road tattoo parlor, netted 100 arrests, many of whom were gang members, authorities said, and confiscated more than 400 firearms.”

As golf nuts turn their attention to their favourite corner of south-east Georgia next Thursday then,  and get all excited about Amen Corner, it’s well to remember the city which hosts the Masters is nicknamed Disgusta (partly because of the industrial stench hanging over it on hot days), and is a place far removed from the rural idyll portrayed on television for four days each April.

As you watch the cameras linger too long on the loblolly pines, the blushing azaleas and the stately magnolias (what other event inspires such fawning over foliage by journalists?), and as you listen to commentators, in hushed, almost religious tones, bandy about words like pilgrimage and hallowed, think on this. Just a Tiger Woods five-iron the other side of the imposing walls surrounding the venue, three pawn shops do brisk business. As well they might in a beaten-up, broken-down city where one in four residents live in abject poverty,

In one part of Augusta, fittingly on top of the hill, they spend ludicrous sums of money dyeing the water in Rae’s Creek (named for Irish settler John Rae) so it looks better on television. And they invest so much in their flowers that they actually ice them in early spring so they don’t bloom properly until the television cameras arrive for the tournament. In the rest of town, it’s estimated four out of ten children go to bed hungry each night.

This rather unfortunate juxtaposition was best summed up by a journalist who reckoned the presence of the most immaculately-kept real estate in America in such a struggling town was the equivalent of the French locating “the Eiffel Tower in the middle of a trailer park”. While the tournament allows Augusta’s tiny upper middle-class to rent out their homes for the week at lucrative rates (the best can go for $25,000), it means very little to most of the people who live there. After all none of them are members of a club that belongs exclusively to the nation’s richest and most well-to-do.

Some of the locals do pick up work there for the week that’s in it, filling whatever menial roles are available. Many do so because, aside from needing the money, they figure to watch some golf once their shift ends. Their first mistake. By order of those in charge, all casual employees must leave the premises the moment their workday is over and must, under no circumstances, ever, wander onto the course to see how Tiger is doing. They can’t even look never mind touch.

From time to time, enterprising Augustans will try to cash in on the seven days of golf tourism by flogging paraphernalia to the visitors. This is immediately cracked down upon. Augusta National doesn’t take kindly to anybody piggybacking on their brand or the event.

There are other ways of illustrating the gulf between the club and the city too. Whatever else they wax lyrical about over the four days of the tournament, the commentators are expressly prohibited from mentioning the $8m or so prize money on offer or that the winner will trouser around $1.4m. Maybe just as well in a place where the average household income is around $25,000 per year and where just the other week, police had to hold back more than 300 people in what local media described as “a food riot”.

Several hundred people had gathered outside Laney Supermarket, a grocery store whose owners were being evicted, in the hope of picking up some of the items that were being discarded. However, the foreclosing bank insisted the merchandise had to be dumped at the landfill so the local constabulary then stepped into prevent the crowd, many of whom became agitated, from reaching the piles of perfectly-good food which was going to go to waste.

"For them to do this is a low blow,” said Jennifer Santiago, one of those who had hoped to pick up some free dinners. “A lot of people are sad, a lot of people aren't going to have food to put on their table; this is ridiculous.”

This is Augusta. Home of the Masters.