There is one week on the sporting calendar that stands apart from all others. Not louder. Not larger. Not more watched. But more felt.
The Super Bowl is a spectacle, a party that happens to have a football game attached to it. It builds for two weeks and arrives on a Sunday night, loud and crowded and over by midnight. The Masters is something else entirely. It is a week. It breathes. It builds slowly, quietly, the way Augusta National itself seems to exist slightly outside of ordinary time.
For forty years, I have planned my life around it.
It begins, for me, with the Par 3 Contest on Wednesday. Nine short holes. Players walking with their families, their children lining up putts, caddies doubled over laughing. It is the only day Augusta National exhales. I was fortunate enough to be there once, standing greenside, close enough to speak with players and their families as they read the break and chose their lines. They would ask which way putts were breaking, and I would tell them, because I had been watching all afternoon, green after green, putt after putt. In that moment, Augusta felt both enormous and intimate at the same time.
I have also walked the grounds on a Friday round. The grass at Augusta is one of the most disorienting things I have ever experienced. It looks synthetic, almost too perfect to be real. But pull at it and you will discover quickly that it is very much real. It does not give. Not a blade. The place simply does not permit that kind of casualness.
If you handed me a ticket to any round at Augusta National, I would take Sunday. But if Sunday were off the table, I would take Wednesday every single time, and I would not hesitate.
Most people will never walk those grounds. Most people will experience the Masters the way I experience it the other 51 weeks of the year: through a screen. And even then, it is extraordinary.
Full coverage begins at 10 in the morning. It does not end until 8 at night. Ten hours, and not a minute of it feels wasted. The camera finds Amen Corner and stays there. The azaleas bloom in the background. The roars travel across the property before the pictures do.
Those roars. There is nothing like them in sports.
A player standing in the fairway hears one and steps back from his ball. He does not know what happened. He cannot see around the dogleg or over the hill. But he knows, with complete certainty, that a competitor just did something. Something significant. Something that changed the leaderboard or shifted the moment. The roar tells him everything and nothing at the same time, and he has to step back into his own shot carrying the weight of that sound.
My first Masters memory is 1986. I was at the Wellsville Country Club, just off the course, clubs still in my bag, when I walked into the clubhouse and found every single person in the room staring at one television. The volume was low. Nobody was sitting. They were whispering, then suddenly not whispering.
Jack Nicklaus was making a run.
Jack was 46 years old. He had not won a major in six years. Nobody believed it was possible, and yet there he was, birdie after birdie down the back nine, a golden bear roaming Augusta one more time. People in that clubhouse could not believe what they were seeing. Neither could the people at Augusta. Neither could the world.
I grabbed my clubs and ran home as fast as I could. I watched the end of the round from my living room, breathless, the way you are breathless when history does not announce itself but simply arrives.
Forty years later, CBS is airing a new documentary simply titled 1986, airing at noon ET on Sunday, April 12, 2026, right before the final round begins. I will be in my seat for that too.
My wife once asked me whether I would choose the Super Bowl or the Masters.
No hesitation. The Masters.
With one exception. If my Buffalo Bills ever make it back to the Super Bowl, I would choose that, without question. But here is the thing: I will never have to choose. Not because the Bills won’t make the Super Bowl. They will. But because the Masters and the Super Bowl will never, ever share a Sunday. The calendar does not allow it.
So the answer is simple, and it will always be simple.
Go Bills. And welcome, Masters Sunday.
