ATLANTA — Another Masters arrives just in time to remind us of what golf might be like if it weren’t as divided as Congress. If Saudi Arabia hadn’t gotten bored and taken up the game as a hobby. And if only all the world’s best players would have been content making merely an embarrassing amount of loot, not Bond super-villain money.

This tournament represents different things to different people.

For the romantic, it is the messenger of spring, the ideal of renewal and hope on full display for a week in the ultimate southern garden. Augusta, believe it or not, was a resort destination around the turn of the 20th century, before Florida horned in on the action. Now the luxury is pretty much confined to that golf course just down Washington Road from the Hooters. And the luxuriating is so terribly short-lived.

For the locals, from the hoteliers for whom this one week is their harvest season to the restaurateurs who find their tables suddenly filled with a hungry, thirsty, free-spending mob dressed in khakis and sundresses, it is time to give thanks to the plush demographics of golf. The Masters never has been a poor man’s diversion.

And for the weary follower of golf who has endured the cleaving of the game in two since the coming of the LIV virus in June 2021, this week is a bit of a reprieve.

The Masters represents the first field of the season that brings together most of the players anyone cares about, give or take a Talor Gooch. This is the first chance of 2024 to see the cream of both the PGA Tour and LIV together on the same manicured field of battle. You know, the kind of star-laden starting times we used to take for granted before Greg Norman and Phil Mickelson started mucking up a good thing.

The Masters defending champion, Jon Rahm, has been a non-person to the PGA Tour this season since taking up with the LIV rebels for a reported $450 million or so. But as long as there is a Masters, he’ll always be welcome back here. The lords of Augusta tend to place their champions above the petty, internecine tug-of-war for the talent (except the year they encouraged Mickelson to stay far away).

It’ll be nice to catch up with the Spaniard, see where he’s been hiding himself these past three months. He’s either been captaining the Legion XIII team in LIV or in witness protection, hard to tell.

The PGA Tour-LIV fracture was supposed to be healed by now, so they grandly announced in June. A merger between the two was meant to be complete by the start of 2024. And yet the divide drags on and on and on.

In the meantime this year, the PGA Tour has lined up new investment from something called the Strategic Sports Group, rearming itself with $3 billion to hurl at its stars in an attempt to discourage further defections.

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