AUGUSTA, Ga. — Sometime around 8 Sunday night, tens of millions of television viewers will watch the Masters winner have the coveted green jacket slipped over his shoulders by the defending champion.
The annual ritual will take place in the lower floor of a white house located just off the main clubhouse at Augusta National Golf Club called Butler Cabin.
Only the privileged ever have entered the cabin. Even fewer actually have spent the night there.
The overwhelming majority of players who have competed in the Masters — even those who have played more than a decade in the tournament — never have been inside Butler Cabin. Not unless they have won a green jacket.
Some players don’t even know exactly where it is located.
This is the 21st Masters I have covered for The Post, and I not only never had been inside Butler Cabin, I was not even sure which of the 10 cabins on the property it was … until Jim Nantz from CBS Sports — the voice of the Masters and Butler Cabin — invited me for a visit this week.
Feeling like I was off the see the Wizard, I finally got a chance witness the goings-on behind the green curtain.
My curiosity was piqued during a recent conversation I had with Adam Scott, the defending champion, before the Masters. When I asked what the most memorable moment was in the immediate aftermath of his breakthrough victory last year, the first thing he referenced was Butler Cabin.
“I have a lot of memories — some are a blur — but standing in Butler Cabin was most memorable, because I’d been going to the Masters for 11 years and I’d never even been there before,’’ Scott said. “So when I was standing in that room under the portrait of Bobby Jones with the chairman of the club and Jim Nantz, it was that spot that we always watch on TV. It was something I’d never seen live before, only on TV.’’
Scott’s description of the Butler Cabin sounded like someone describing a trip to a back lot of studios in Hollywood and seeing the façade of the house from “The Munsters” or the “Addams Family.”
“The room is pretty much a back drop,’’ Scott said. “I just remember a lot television cameras and production people on other side of the room. The whole thing is very staged.’’
What the other 51 weeks of the year is a living room with a big flat screen TV on the wall for club members and their guests, is transformed into a high-tech TV studio, with TV monitors and sound equipment everywhere and multiple cameras pointed toward those wooden chairs in front of a fireplace with a portrait of club founder Bobby Jones above it.
Nantz, who has been the voice of the Masters since 1988, has been a part of and witnessed so many memorable moments inside that cabin. Lives have changed inside that room. Dreams have become reality.
Nantz looked down at floor next to those wooden chairs we sat in — the ones you will see Nantz and the newest Masters champion sit in Sunday night at the end of the CBS telecast — and he said, “I often look down at the carpet right here and think about the people who have actually stood on this very spot through history — Jack [Nicklaus], Arnie [Palmer], Gary Player, Tiger [Woods], Phil [Mickelson’s] coronation — it all happened right here.’’
When Nantz was a college student — and roommate of Fred Couples — at the University of Houston, he used to rehearse the Butler Cabin ceremony, pretending he was the host.
So, when Couples won the green jacket in 1992, it presented Nantz with one of the most challenging dilemmas of his career. How was he possibly going to hold it together emotionally on the air when he and Couples were realizing their dreams together on national television?
“It was the hardest single thing I’ve ever had to do in broadcasting, because I was so personally tied to the moment and I knew I had a professional responsibility to conduct an interview as if he was just another player,’’ Nantz recalled. “But he wasn’t just another player. He was a guy I lived with in college and one of my closest friends.
“Who could ever top that moment unless the presenter was the father and the champion was the son? He always wanted to be the Masters champion and I always wanted to broadcast the Masters for CBS. The fact that the two of us had aspirations that would bring us to this one room … what are the odds?’’
Most of the time, it is the Masters winner holding back the tears. On that occasion, it was Nantz and Couples.
“I could barely get the words out,’’ Nantz said. “My voice was quivering.’’
One of the greatest gifts associated with his position as the Butler Cabin host for those green jacket ceremonies is Nantz always can feel the weight of the moment for the winner.
“It’s a big moment in their lifetimes,’’ Nantz said. “For a lot of them, it’s a coronation being in that room.’’
Earlier this week, Nantz taped a Masters special with past champions Nick Faldo, Bernhard Langer and Jose Maria Olazabal, and they did it inside Butler Cabin in those wooden chairs — something that, because of where they sat, carried emotional significance.
“They all waxed about the gravity of that moment in this room,’’ he said. “They had not been back in the room since they presented the jacket as defending champion.’’
Until he began working for CBS in 2008, Faldo had not been back to the cabin since the night when, as the defending 1996 champion, he slipped the green jacket over the shoulders of Tiger Woods in 1997.
“The first time he came into the cabin for CBS, he sat down in the chair across from me and he had tears in his eyes,’’ Nantz said.
“I get emotional every time I walk in there now, because I realize that very simple path between those two doors — the front door and the one to the actual room — is one of the shortest, most significant walks in sport,’’
Faldo said. “It’s only about five paces and you’re in, and that means you’re the champion, which is amazing.’’
Nantz said, when he comes across people curious about Butler Cabin, “people are very thrown off by what it is. They think it might be the butler’s cabin, where people who work for the club live.’’
It is actually a cabin that once belonged to Thomas Baldwin Butler of Baltimore, who was a member of Augusta National and played golf with his friend, Dwight Eisenhower, the former president of the U.S., who also had a cabin named after him.
“There is not a day that goes by that I don’t get asked about Augusta and the Butler Cabin — by athletes, coaches, walking through airports,’’ Nantz said. “It comes up in my life every day.’’