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The coronavirus pandemic has silenced the Masters Tournament’s resonant roars. It has erased the par-3 contest, drained the color from the wintering azaleas and brought brisk north winds into play for the first time. This week’s tournament, rescheduled from the first major of the year to the last and stripped down to better safeguard the participants from the virus, is happening in one kind of bubble.
But Augusta National has always existed in a bubble, a byproduct of a famously private club consolidating its influence and then enforcing it over the decades while maintaining practices that, throughout most of its storied history, were exclusionary and racist.