They say bats come out during a solar eclipse, and owls too. Hippos have been seen to move towards their nighttime feeding grounds, bees to fly back to their hives and refuse to emerge until the sun comes back out, crickets begin to chirrup, mosquitoes come out for the evening, spiders take down their webs to protect them from the nighttime dew. Last time they had a solar eclipse one around these parts, scientists working at Riverbanks zoo over in South Carolina noticed that the gibbons started barking and a pair of Galapagos tortoises immediately began mating with each other.
During this one, the fauna around and about Augusta National was acting unusually, too. Novel behaviours included patrons gathering together away from the shade and craning their necks to stare up into the blue spring sky. There were also sudden, and repeated, oaths, sighs, and other unusual utterances. “OH MY GOD! IT’S HAPPENING!” cried a man in the grandstand down at Amen Corner when the moon took its first little nibble out of the sun’s bottom corner.
“Ninety minutes till the end of the world,” said someone else, who was sitting a couple of rows behind him. “Well,” his deadpan friend said, “I can think of worse ways to spend it.”
There had been dire warnings. The Republican crank Marjorie Taylor-Greene, who represents Georgia’s 14th district, over the other side of the state, had warned on X: “God is sending America strong signs to repent. Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come.” Outside the golf course, a pick-up truck was circling the carpark with a sign strapped to the roof warning: “God sends national calamities to punish national sins.” Well, the end times turned out to be a good time at Augusta National. “I timed it pretty good, right?” said Brian Harman, who was just coming around the turn when the eclipse started, “to get to watch the end of the world at Augusta National.”
The club had provided everyone attending with their own pair of solar glasses. They were coloured green, naturally, branded with the familiar yellow logo, and had “Created exclusively for the Masters Tournament” written on the inside. It turned Monday’s practice session into one of the larger viewing parties in the USA. By midday, the club seemed to be one of the few places left in the city that had any protective eyewear left available. Messages were circulating on social media asking if anyone knew a shop that had any left in stock. There were rumours that the Circle K over in the west of the city still had some available.
By the afternoon, even Augusta National was running short. Camillo Villegas, Vijay Singh, and Emiliano Grillo, who were all watching together from the oak tree out front of the club house, and had to borrow their glasses from some spectators, who made sure to ask for them back afterwards. “I’ll be keeping my pair for absolutely the rest of my life,” said Will Zalatoris, “these will be some collectibles that will be in my office forever.”
The only disappointment was that the club hadn’t been able to arrange things so that the centreline of the eclipse passed directly overhead. Given the way they do things around here, you wondered whether the chairman, Fred Ridley, mightn’t just have fixed it for the sun to take a brief detour to the south. As it was, Augusta lay 400 miles away from the totality. At the zenith, at 3.08pm, just over three quarters of the sun was covered. The air fell chill, and the light became hazy enough that the club decided to flick the switch on the floodlights at the driving range although there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
Sahith Theegala, who was watching from the green at 18, said it was so hazy that it hurt his eyes to play in the light: “It was pretty wild.” And for those few moments, everyone stopped, the patrons, the stewards, the security guards, the officials, the players, the caddies, the journalists, cameramen, photographers, and TV presenters. It was, whisper it, a beautiful moment.
No one here was old enough to remember the last time there was a solar eclipse in Masters week. That was back in 1940 when it fell at 5pm on Sunday, just as Jimmy Demaret was coming around the second nine. It made for a rough day’s play, no one broke 70, but Demaret covered his last round in one under par, with a solitary birdie on 15, and won by four from Lloyd Mangrum.
And no one here was young enough to be alive next time there’s anything close to a total eclipse here during Masters week, either.