It’s been quite a journey for my little ceramic friend.
Or rather, I should say he’s taken me on one — as meet up with him I finally did on Saturday morning at the Masters.
But let me back up. Do you know who this little guy is?
If you’re not a golf fan or even a sports fan, you can be forgiven. But if you are, then you probably know what you’re looking at: the Masters gnome, one of the rarest sports-themed collectibles to come along in a long, long time.
He stands just over 13 inches tall, sports an Augusta National quarter-zip vest and hat, and (by some miracle of engineering) even holds a miniature replica of a Masters golf umbrella that really does open up.
I didn’t even know what a garden gnome was until a couple of years ago, when an old friend of mine shared a tantalizing story with me: he and his then 17-year-old son were walking out of the gates of Augusta National, each with a gnome they’d just purchased in hand.
As they were walking, a man approached them and said to my friend’s son, “I’ll give you five hundred dollars for that gnome.”
They looked at each other, incredulous.
“Nahh, thanks,” they replied, and kept walking. But the man kept walking after them.
“I’ll give you a thousand for it,” he said.
That offer was too good to pass up. “SOLD!” my friend’s son yelled back at the man, who then walked over, counted off ten brand-new hundred-dollar bills, and placed them in his hand in exchange for the bearded garden ornament.
When I heard that, you can guess where I was the next morning: in line, before the sun was up, to see if I could buy one too.
You had to get there that early because, as my friend told me, Augusta National only sells several hundred of the gnomes each day of the tournament — and, when you arrive as early as I did, you see just how many people are after the same thing.
Fast-forward to this year, it’s Saturday morning and my wife has joined me in the early, early hours to see if we could be among the lucky few. I’m not exaggerating when I tell you we were out of the house by 5:30 a.m. and in line just outside the gates of the club at 6:00 a.m.
Those gates, by the way, don’t open until 7:00 a.m. And because Augusta National has a strict no phones policy, there’s no bringing your favorite glass rectangle with you to pass the time.
So what do you do? Well, we got to talking with the people we were waiting in line with — a line that easily stretched to two or three thousand people spilling out into the parking lot.
A woman in front of us was there with her husband; they’d purchased a gnome a few days earlier at one of the tournament practice rounds, and hoped to snag a second one.
She’d been coming to the Masters for years, she added, and always had a big order of merch to buy for friends and family members. This year was no different.
“Where are you from?” she asked; I replied that I lived in Atlanta but had grown up in Augusta, just a few miles from where we were standing. She told me she was from Thomson, Ga., a small town about twenty minutes away.
“You’re kidding,” I replied. “My first job was at a newspaper in Thomson.”
She asked me if I knew someone whose name I immediately recognized. “Of course I do! He was my boss,” I told her, adding that I remembered my days working at his newspaper like it was yesterday.
I was in my early twenties, just out of college. This was before we even knew what the internet was, so a newspaper still meant a lot back then, especially in a small community like the one I worked in.
We shared stories about our friend; I remember he always dressed a little like Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird; in fact, I knew Atticus was his hero.
At the time, I assumed from the way he dressed and the way he talked that, surely, he was more than a few years older than me. But last year, when I stumbled across his obituary, I realized he was only a year older than me.
She had seen him just a few months before he died. “He looked really bad,” she said, adding that his face was gaunt and the waist of his pants were cinched to the last notch.
“Not like himself, not like I remember him at all.”
Our mutual friend had died by suicide; I’d always wondered what happened to him and to the newspaper I loved working for. It’s my favorite job I’ve ever had, or at least the one I look back on with the most affection.
A few years after I left, he sold the paper and opened an antique shop. After that closed, I lost touch with him, still always wondering how the rest of his life had unfolded.
I wish I had good news to share; he did have a relationship later and a child, a son who’s now college age. But the years weren’t kind to him, and he experienced a lot of disappointment and heartache.
The man I remember — I use the word “man” now, but weren’t we still kinda just boys then? — gave me my first real job, believed in me and always had my back when I wrote stories about local government leaders that weren’t so flattering.
He’d hired a cast of characters that I still remember lovingly; editors and salespeople who took me under their wing and mentored me, encouraged me, and helped me learn how to spread my wings as a writer for the first time.
I’m still working on how to hold these two thoughts: being sad that he’s gone and for the pain he experienced, while also remembering the person he once was, the zest and exuberance he brought to everything.
I hope I took a little piece of that with me, and with any luck have carried it with me to the places I’ve been since.
And to think, I’m not sure I’d have shared his story with you were it not for me and my wife getting up at an ungodly hour to try to go buy a $60 ceramic gnome, for… “why are we here again?” we asked ourselves as we longed to go back to bed (!)
I hope you’ve had a great week and have gotten some great runs in — as always, keep in touch and let me know how your running/life is going.
Your friend,
— Terrell