AUGUSTA, Ga. – While each Masters Monday is pregnant with anticipation and is a Golden Corral, all-you-can-eat buffet for the senses, there has never been a scene to quite match this Monday’s.

After all, how often in all the 87 previous times they’ve gathered here in the name of golf had the sun been put on a dimmer switch?

When, in all the days of the Masters, has it been as necessary to look straight up into blue sky as it was to fix on the Augusta National horizon of unnaturally perfect grass, swaying loblolly pine and blooming azalea?

The great eclipse of 2024 paid a passing visit to America’s most famous golf course, adding a cosmic footnote to the other memories they make here on a yearly basis.

“I don’t think I’ll ever forget the ‘24 eclipse happened on Monday at the Masters, my first Masters – the two will be connected,” said Peter Malnati just as the sun was three-quarters obscured by the moon, the breeze turning ever so slightly cooler and the crisp white of the Augusta National clubhouse behind him gone marginally paler.

Perhaps, someone wondered, the eclipse was some message from the golfing gods, signaling their own wonderment that Malnati actually made this Masters field.

“Who knows?” he smiled.

A grinder’s grinder, the 36-year-old Malnati had spent a career grimly hanging on to his playing privileges before winning the Valspar Championship last month to qualify for his first Masters.

He dresses the part of the everyman player, going about his days from beneath a bucket hat. His equipment is something you’d find at a muni course, too, as he rolls a yellow golf ball because his 4-year-old son likes the color.

Multiple times he turned down invitations from well-connected friends to come over from his home in Knoxville and play a friendly round at Augusta National. He wanted to earn his way on. And time was running out.

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