The winner of the Masters Match will get a inexperienced jacket, an elegantly engraved trophy and a lifetime invitation to play one of the crucial revered occasions in skilled golf.
He additionally has the prospect to plan a dinner the following spring for different Masters winners (and to choose up the test for one of the crucial unique evenings in sports activities).
“How uncommon is it to get all people like that in a room the place it’s simply us?” Scottie Scheffler mentioned hours earlier than his dinner final yr with 32 fellow Masters champions and Fred S. Ridley, the chairman of Augusta Nationwide Golf Membership, the positioning of the match.
“There’s no one else,” Scheffler continued. “There’s the chairman after which there’s us.”
And at a match the place the concessions are legendary, the stress is endlessly on the brand new champion to choose a menu that befits the second. Tiger Woods provided up cheeseburgers and milkshakes after his debut Masters victory in 1997, however through the years constructed menus that included sushi, porterhouse steaks and chocolate truffle cake. Sandy Lyle went with haggis after his 1988 win. Vijay Singh’s number of Thai meals thrilled some gamers and flabbergasted others.
When Jon Rahm, the 2023 winner, seems for his dinner on Tuesday night time, he’ll sit all the way down to a meal that begins with six tapas and pintxos, together with “Mama Rahm’s traditional lentil stew,” a recipe from Rahm’s grandmother. Afterward, there will likely be a Basque crab salad, a alternative of rib-eye steak or turbot and a dessert of milhojas de crema y nata — a puff pastry cake with Chantilly cream and custard that was primarily Rahm’s wedding ceremony cake.
The Spanish-born chef José Andrés helped the Spanish-born golfer develop the menu.
“He referred to as my grandma for the recipe” to the lentil stew, Rahm mentioned final month. “If any individual doesn’t prefer it, please simply don’t inform me. Don’t inform anybody, truly. It means a little bit bit an excessive amount of to me to listen to it.”
“I wished to place a little bit little bit of my heritage and my household into this dinner, which goes to make it much more particular,” he added. “Hopefully I get to do it once more, however I wished to ensure the Basque heritage was there.”
The night was not all the time so personalized. For years, the menu included little greater than a steak, a baked potato and free-flowing wine, choices that mirrored the habits, homogeneity and not-very-daredevil nature of {many professional} golfers. After Tommy Aaron gained the match in 1973, he recalled in an interview in 2020, he telephoned an Augusta Nationwide official to inquire concerning the menu and discovered that the unfold was somewhat predictable. He selected to supply a beef dish, lobster bisque and a crabmeat salad.
“After the dinner, a few guys mentioned, ‘Properly, we’re glad we bought one thing completely different than a strip steak,’” remembered Aaron, who forevermore ordered regardless of the champion deliberate as an alternative of a cop-out entree.
Scheffler recalled that he had brainstormed his menu together with his spouse and his agent. They began with a fundamental premise — Scheffler’s favourite meals — and began to slender the listing from there. After consulting with an Augusta Nationwide chef, they settled on a menu that, because the golfer put it, was “positively not going to be on any nutritionist’s plan.”
When Augusta Nationwide allowed The New York Occasions into its kitchen final April, a crew of cooks was making ready what would maybe be its most scrutinized meal of the yr, with dozens of dishes that wanted to be customized, timed and warmed simply so.
There have been starters of cheeseburger sliders, ready with a precision that eludes most residence cooks, firecracker shrimp and bowls of tortilla soup. Texas rib-eye steaks, reflecting Scheffler’s a long time within the state, or blackened redfish got here subsequent, with macaroni and cheese, jalapeño creamed corn, deep fried brussels sprouts and French fries. For these with room for dessert, there was a heat skillet chocolate chip cookie with milk-and-cookies ice cream.
“I had the soup and needed to form of swab the highest of my head as a result of it was perspiring,” Lyle mentioned proper earlier than he mocked the apparently delicate style buds of Fred {Couples}, the 1992 winner.
“I like scorching meals — I’m used to curries and issues like that, so I’m not too unhealthy,” Lyle mentioned. “However I believe {Couples} was, like, holding his throat — ‘Oh, my God.’ So it caught a couple of folks unexpectedly.”
Scheffler didn’t appear bothered. His menu, his guidelines.
“Everybody,” he reported the following day, “loved the meals.”