At age 92, sportswriter Ron Green reflects on life, newspapers and 60 straight Masters

This is the time of year I always think of Ron Green, when springtime, azaleas and Masters golf all blend together to form the sort of kaleidoscopic beauty he described better than anyone else.

Green just turned 92. He still lives independently in a house in Charlotte with Beth, his wife of 65 years. His mind remains sharp. But he doesn’t drive anymore, and he had to give up playing golf five years ago because his legs don’t work as well as they used to.

“I do miss playing golf,” Green said with a smile, “but it’s no great loss to the game.”

I went to go see Green a couple of days ago, partly because he was a legend at The Charlotte Observer and my predecessor in writing this sports column, but mostly because I wanted an excuse to listen to some of his Masters stories with the tournament starting again Thursday.

Green covered the event in Augusta, Ga., for an astounding 60 straight years for either The Charlotte News or The Charlotte Observer, from 1955-2014.

“I spent over a year of my life in Augusta,” Green said.

As we sat there and talked you could tell that his year at the Masters was also the very best year of his life, albeit a year divided into weeklong increments over a 60-year period.

Sixty weeks of springtime, punctuated with visits from his family, writing about the best golfers in the world during the day and relaxing with a nice meal at night while anticipating what might come next: Yes, it was quite a gig. I can attest to that firsthand. I shared a house with Green for eight straight Masters when we used to cover the event together, along with his son Ron Green Jr., also a sportswriter.

During a typical day at Augusta, what did Green Sr. — or just “Senior,” as we mostly called him around the office — like about it the most?

“I liked going out in the morning on tournament days,” Green said, “just the way it felt. And looking at all the beauty and letting it all sort of wash over me, kind of gathering you up and sending you out to work. I was in love with it. I look back now, and I was silly in love with it. Like a guy in love with a girl. But I’m glad I was. I think it showed through in what I wrote.”

An ‘Eden with flagsticks’

I started at The Observer in 1994 as the backup beat writer covering a Carolina Panthers team that didn’t technically exist yet, trying to find my place in a brand new city.

Nine days into my new job, I picked up the newspaper and saw that Green had written something about the Masters.

The excerpt below wasn’t even the lead sentence. His columns about the Masters were so filigreed with gold that these were merely a couple of throwaway lines that came after what we newspaper folks call “the jump.”

You had to turn the page to even find them. But back there in the back pages, Green was riffing just for the joy of it.

Wrote Green: “The back nine at Augusta National is Eden with flagsticks, all pine and azaleas and dogwoods and rambling creeks and little ponds and memories and promises. This is where you go to feel the embrace of the Masters before the battle starts, to see the beauty, to know the peril, to look for ghosts, to listen for echoes.”

Good Lord, I thought. If writing like that is the standard around here, I’m in trouble.

Green has all sorts of tales about the Masters. He caught a ride to the course once with Byron Nelson.

“We were staying in the same hotel, he and his wife were leaving for the course, and I just asked if I could hop in,” Green said.

He had breakfast with Arnold Palmer on Masters Sunday in 1958, just before Arnie won the tournament for the first time.

“Obviously, the right send-off,” wrote Palmer in a foreword to Green’s first book, a 1990 collection of columns called “From Tobacco Road to Amen Corner.”

FInding the Masters magic

A Ron Green column could be sad, interesting or funny. He once described golfer Miller Barber’s swing as “a caveman having lunch.”

But his stories most often reached toward the sun. He was an optimist in print, about as far from a hot-take columnist you could get.

He wrote a column on Thanksgiving Day for decades about the things he was thankful for, and that one got scissored out and taped to refrigerators around the Carolinas. The characters rotated depending on the year, but you could count on his wife, family and his favorite barbershop making annual appearances.

And his Masters columns enveloped you like a grandparent’s hug. The lyrical writing seemed like it should either be put to music or read in a whisper.

The dispatches weren’t all perfect, and he would be the first to tell you that. But when they were, the words sailed through the pine trees, describing Tiger and Nicklaus and Arnie and Hogan and everybody chasing them. For Charlotte readers, most of whom would never see Augusta themselves, reading Green was the true tradition unlike any other.

When Green grew nostalgic at the Masters, it felt truthful, not cloying, because you knew he’d actually been there for what he was rhapsodizing about. He wrote once from Augusta when an older Palmer was briefly playing well: “For a long time yesterday, the second round of the Masters belonged to a faded hero named Arnold Palmer. Just like it used to be. Words and music by Bill Haley and the Comets. Cokes a nickel apiece.”

As for Augusta National’s faults and the tournament’s various controversies — and there have been a number of them, including the club membership’s severe lack of diversity — Green wasn’t particularly interested in those. He routinely skipped the annual press conference given by the golf club’s chairman.

As he wrote once: “I’m passionately in love with this place and this event. I think that’s because I’ve never looked under the carpet to see if there was dust there. I don’t want to know what makes the Masters tick.”

Others could call Augusta National to task for its flaws and push it grudgingly toward the 21st century. For Green — and could there have been a better surname for a writer who would for 60 years chronicle a golf tournament that awarded its winner a green jacket? — the place existed as his personal Oz, and that was enough.

We all probably have a place like that somewhere in our lives; somewhere we don’t want to know the magician’s secrets. We just want the magic.

‘Are you Mr. Green?’

Gary Schwab served as The Observer’s executive sports editor for much of Green’s time there, editing him for 15 years.

“Ron writes with grace under pressure,” Schwab said. “Often, with only minutes to file his column after a game that was not decided until the final play, Ron sent in a polished masterpiece.”

Schwab made a trip to Augusta 25 years ago and walked the course during a practice round, with Green as his guide.

“It was one of my best days as sports editor,” Schwab said. “As we strolled the fairways, people who Ron had never met would say hello. I remember one man looking at Ron, looking again and then timidly walking over, asking, ‘Are you Mr. Green? I have been reading you for years and I just want to thank you.’ ”

Green never went to college. He got a job at The Charlotte News in 1948, straight out of high school. Shortly afterward he was drafted into the Army, served in Korea and Japan, came back to the same newspaper job and never really left.

For a while, Green would cover Charlotte’s minor-league baseball team for The Charlotte News and also announce the games over the public-address system, because he was there anyway and that meant he could make an extra $10 per game.

Green switched from The Charlotte News to The Charlotte Observer in 1984, bringing a lot of readers with him. He retired from full-time column writing in 1999 after the U.S. Open in Pinehurst, although he still contributed occasional columns for years afterward and covered the Masters for 15 more years.

“I loved newspapers,” he said. “I still remember the first day I walked into a newspaper office — how it smelled. The ink and the paper. Still remember it. Never got over it. I loved being a newspaperman. I loved the rush, and the crush, of a deadline. And I just never got over feeling good when I saw my byline in the paper.”

A quieter life

Did Green ever think he was great at his job, even 40 or 50 years into it?

He did not. He was insecure. He fretted. He worried if what he was writing would be good enough, if it would match the moment of, for instance, the great three-way Masters Sunday duel in 1975 between Jack Nicklaus, Johnny Miller and Tom Weiskopf (still, for Green’s money, the best Masters ever, even trumping Nicklaus’ victory at age 46 in 1986). He sometimes liked the feeling of “having written” better than the feeling of actually writing.

“That insecurity, though — I think it was a good thing,” Green said. “It made me work harder. Pay more attention to what I was doing.”

Green’s last Masters came in 2014. It was hard for him to get up and down the course by then. Augusta National gave him a special lifetime parking pass that year, but he hasn’t used it since. Instead, he framed it and stuck it on a wall in his house.

His life has become smaller. Green reads every day. The novelist James Lee Burke is his all-time favorite, and he also adored Delia Owens’ “Where the Crawdads Sing.” He watches reruns of the TV show “Blue Bloods.” He talks with Beth. He dotes on his grandkids. He sees his three kids — Ron Jr., his son, will cover his 40th Masters next week, giving the pair an even 100 Masters tournaments as father and son.

Still, as Green said: “I get a little bored sometimes.”

But he’s not complaining. Green knows he’s lucky to have made it to age 92, to have dodged COVID-19 long enough to get the vaccination, to have the chance to be a little bored sometimes. He has lived a life surrounded by a family he loves and all those millions of words he sailed through the college gyms of the ACC, the boxing ring at the old Charlotte armory, and most of all through those graceful Georgia pines.

“I wouldn’t change much of anything,” Green said. “If somebody said, ‘I’ll give you your life all over again,’ I’d say, ‘Oh, I’ll take it.’ It’s been about as good as it can get, if you ask me.”