The best way to watch sport? Without a phone, says the Masters

AUGUSTA – Rock ’n’ roll is loud, wild, its beat heavy, and its philosophy suggests rules are meant to be broken. Golf’s Masters is its polite antithesis, a place formal, quiet, rule-bound, where the instruments at best speak a precise, clicking music. But both have something intriguing in common.

They don’t always care for phones.

In Manila in 2024, Coldplay’s Chris Martin, a gentle rocker if ever there was one, beseeches the crowd. For a single song, he says, put your raised phones away. “Use your body,” he says, mimicking a dance. We’re all never going to be here together again, he says, so let’s for one moment be “one human family”.

No filming for a brief while, the rocker was asking. No filming at all, declares the blazered tribe of the Masters. In possibly the most civilised rule known to sporting humankind, fans can’t bring their phones onto the Augusta National course. Journalists can but their use is restricted to the press building. Here, only the brain is allowed to film and remember.

When football superstar Cristiano Ronaldo came to prance on Singapore’s lawns in 2019, I remember a photo of the crowd. Almost every single arm was raised in a digital salute, as if filming their hero on their phones was the new worship. Ronaldo stood before them, yet they were looking at him through a screen.

The Masters embraces technology, but it’s never been enamoured with phones. On the last four tournament days, even cameras are forbidden. Masters winner Nick Faldo told me recently that everything is designed for good golf at the Masters and this is an example. No ring, no click, no whirr is allowed here. The only thing allowed to disturb athletes without permission is the wind.

The no-phone rule is a splendid one, unique within Major golf and possibly in all of sport. No one has to say “excuse me” to blithely posing folks who are blocking foot traffic. No phones rise in thick crowds like rude, obstructing periscopes. On these premises, people actually do what sports events are supposed to provoke: They talk sport. Mimic swings. Soak in the scenery. To have no phone is to see each other.

The Masters is making us consider how we should watch sport. We have become such hostages to the phone that we don’t even think any more. Like old gunfighters, our reflex is to draw and shoot. Everything has to be recorded, but for what we are not entirely sure.

To show off to a friend? But do they care?

To watch uneven home-made videos later at home? But can’t we find everything on YouTube?

We can record a feat on film but never a feeling. That happens “live”, in the moment, the heart rate surging, adrenaline rushing, the body bounding from the seat. If you have a phone in hand, the improbable might occur: you might film a moment and yet actually miss it entirely.

We’re so intent on preserving memories that we forget what truly makes a memory. The mind’s eye, after all, is more powerful than any phone’s camera lens. The experience of sport is to inhale it all. The smell of sweat, of freshly mown grass, of hot dogs frying. None of this can be found in a picture on your phone.

The Masters is a legal intoxicant. Remember Tiger Woods’ chip-in on the 16th in 2005. Or Bubba Watson’s curving wedge from the trees on the 10th in 2012. These moments sink into the bones but to truly feel them is to give yourself wholly to sport. Sometimes when you’re filming an athlete, you’re looking at a narrow picture of sport. You’re seeing the player, but not the game itself.

The Masters’ no-phone rule probably pre-dates Instagram and Twitter, but it works wonderfully in their favour. No silly selfies on the course are posted by sporting drunks. No preening videos are seen on Instagram just to tell the world “see, I am here”. Whatever is pictorially understood of this place, the Masters mostly curates itself. Sometimes to be seen less only heightens an event’s exclusivity.

It is argued occasionally that sport has become too precious, that the paying customer should be indulged and the sacred stripped away. In tennis, fans at the US Open do not need to wait for changeovers to enter and exit. If players see it as distracting, they are shrugged off. The well-paid cannot complain too much.

And yet like all cultures, each sport owns a distinctive etiquette. The bawdy song in football is fine. The mid-match yell in tennis is not. Golf’s hush offers it drama and creates an environment which recognises the value of concentration.

The wait for the shot – as long as players don’t linger too long – is its own quiet drama that deserves no interruption. And in all this the phone has no place. Even if, in a delicious irony, the Bell Bay Golf Course in Nova Scotia, Canada proudly announces on its website that a mansion not far from their premises housed a most remarkable genius. Alexander Graham Bell.