The Memorial is golf’s most authentically Midwestern experience

Perhaps Bobby Jones and Clifford Roberts built Augusta National to host the ultimate test of golf in a timeless, exclusive setting. One where rich guys could do as they choose for decades, where the grass lay perfect, where the azaleas bloom, so on, so forth. Jack Nicklaus would just like you to try the ice cream. Really. Please try the damn ice cream.

That’s the distillation. Now 40-some years in, The Memorial Tournament doesn’t have the major status of the event that so clearly, obviously inspired it no matter what the tournament’s famous founder might tell you. But whatever the event lacks and will always lack in major championship status, it’s doing just fine to make up for it. The purse is huge for a regular-season event, there’s Jack, and it is as well-run as any on the calendar. Galleries are massive, supportive, and generally well-behaved compared to, say, Boston, Scottsdale, or any U.S. Open site. Columbus and the golf-starved Midwestern footprint it supports tends to rally around the event like few home bases do on Tour.

There are also 12 flavors of that ice cream, each available in the form of a milkshake in the player’s lounge. The peanut butter one is great. They’re world famous now. It’s Jack’s own ice cream. Please try the ice cream.

Status as a major or non-major aside, it’s not all that hard to see the resemblance between The Memorial and Augusta’s event. Does it require tilting the head to the side and consuming somewhere between three and five Bud Lights to get there? Yes, yes, sure it does. But, by God, trust me, you’ll see it. You’ll notice the matching blazers worn by people of importance. There’s the translucent green deli-sandwich wrappers, which seem like Augusta overruns but hold within the best damn turkey and cheese you’ve tasted in ages. The manually operated scoreboards are just as much of a pain in the ass for observers in Columbus as they are in Augusta. There’s the relative lack of commercialization compared to other PGA Tour events, which can be more of a brand activation vehicle than golf tournament (lack of commercialization presented by Nationwide™).

But as much as they’re alike, we’re operating in different worlds. Consider the defining food item of each event. The Masters has a pimento cheese sandwich, a bourgeoisie party favor that can act more as status symbol than sustenance. The Memorial, because it is Midwestern as hell, would like you to have this damn milkshake. No matter that you won’t be able to find or procure one of these milkshakes anywhere, they’re only available to the select few who can negotiate their way into the Muirfield clubhouse — mythical to the Buckeye DRI-FIT-laden proletariat that lines the fairways. Perhaps that’s best. It is early June, and yes, at the Memorial you are walking around in a slightly muggier version of Lucifer’s own hind parts. But trust me, just get your hands on the milkshake. It’s a good milkshake, available in 12 different flavors, all made with Jack’s own ice cream. You may call having a vanilla milkshake and two Bud Lights on a 90 degree day a “bad idea.” Midwesterners would call it seventh grade summer.

Despite the extreme, uh, B1G-ness, the Memorial deserves to be an awesome event, and it deserves better than the deck of cards it drew on Sunday. It deserves better than to get a column about the ice cream, which you should try by the way. If there was ever a place for Tiger Woods to return to the winner’s circle again, it should have been right here in central Ohio. It made too much sense, perhaps for all involved. The story you file’s supposed to come easy, smacking you from out of the sky as if you’re an unsuspecting patron left of Memorial’s 15th green when you’ve got the set up we had walking into Sunday at Muirfield Village. There’s the win and redemption, the cathartic near-miss, the collapse, the back spasms, the injuries, the buzz that could’ve filled acres as Woods mounted his charge.

That didn’t happen. There was no jubilant milkshake spiking, or earth-shattering roars, or anything of that genre. A threat of afternoon storms moved up tee times and sucked a bit of energy out of the course before the day began. Out-of-sync and on-the-fly coverage scheduling for the event passed the same effect onto viewers at home. Whatever milkshake-and-Bud-Light fueled energy that remained in the crowd, Tiger’s putter managed to kill. Booted and botched four-footer after booted and botched four footer, Woods threw away his best ball-striking performance of the season with costly, uncharacteristic mistakes with that putter all throughout the weekend.

That gave rise, of course, to the animated gesticulations and drawn-out, mental permutations of Bryson DeChambeau. The Bryson win is fine — he’s a young potential star who can play the role of heel in a sport where top players seem to become friendlier and friendlier as the years go on. He’s a fine enough, if unremarkable, winner for Jack’s event.

But yeah, maybe The Memorial deserved better than that. Maybe this event deserved the story. For the way the city and region support the event, for the way fans have had to deal with rainy, early Sunday finishes two out of the last three seasons. For Ohio soon losing the other event where Woods has been dominant over the years. A skeptic might say that the Tour’s bent over backwards to appease the host in recent years, but, hell — maybe they should. The Memorial is one of the PGA Tour’s best events, with a real defined culture surrounding it that isn’t generated by some corporate brand. If the world is just, it’ll soon get some memorable Sunday performances on live TV.

So, just, in the mean time, try the damn ice cream. It’s good, we promise.