AUGUSTA, Ga. — The caddie William Lanier was standing behind Augusta National’s 13th hole on Monday, scribbling in a notebook roughly the size of a king-size candy bar, when he overheard a patron ask her husband, “What’s inside those books?”
Lanier walked over to the couple and flashed an open page of his standard-issue Masters yardage book, which contained notes about the hole that he would use to advise his player, Wesley Bryan, during the tournament. The pair were less than impressed. “What good does a book do?” the woman asked.
It is a great question, one that golf’s governing bodies have been hotly debating since the emergence in the past decade of books crammed with dizzyingly intricate high-tech data for each hole on a course.