Augusta is not quaint, no matter what people tell you. Yeah, maybe it's semiquaint one week a year, the 51 other weeks it's the kind of place where car steering wheels burn your hands, where slow trains stop rush-hour traffic, where the paper mill leaks the most horrible smells, where Palmetto bugs the size of Amana washer-dryers walk around, where the best Chinese restaurant is in the mall. It's a good place, a friendly place, a humid place, but it's definitely not quaint.

Don't come to Augusta during the year to see the Augusta National Golf Club. The place is better protected than the Hope Diamond. For 51 weeks a year, this place is hidden behind barbed wire and Bosworth-sized security guards ready to call the National Guard should a terrible emergency arise, such as a tourist who wants to see the putting green.

- Joe Posnanski, The Kansas City Star

The Augusta National stage belonged to the man who would forever be king, Arnold Palmer, hitching his pants as the audience parted.

``Not in this world is there a place I'd rather be,'' Palmer said later. ``It's just great to be looking down at the ground, if you know what I mean, especially here.''

The King laughed again, because only one number matters.

``Last week, 0.0,'' Palmer said. ``Had a checkup. That's how much cancer they found in my body. Birdied that hole.''

- Bob Verdi, Chicago Tribune

Masters officials admit a mistake?

Strong, cold northeast winds caught them off guard Thursday after they had placed pins in positions that would have been difficult on a calm day.

A combination of the wild breezes, pins on the edge of mounds, and fast, hard greens made par-72 at Augusta National Golf Club a very good score.

If they had it to do over again, officials would have been more generous with pin placements.

``Conditions were so much more different than they (the pin committee) thought they were going to be is why the course played like it did today,'' Masters spokesman Charles Yates said. ``I believe they would have put the pins in different spots if they knew the winds were going to be up. They weren't expecting it.''

- Denne H. Freeman, Associated Press

A wise man once said that you should never eat lunch at a restaurant with a view because the prices are inflated and the food inevitably stinks. Nonetheless, this table had just opened up on the second-floor porch of the clubhouse at Augusta National and, well, it was lunchtime. It seemed worth the gamble.

So you sit there and look out. And you try not to chew with your mouth open.

Below to the right is the first tee. Behind that is the ninth green, with its vicious back-to-front sloping. Back and to the left of that is the 18th green. The 18th at Augusta.

The reverence and the history and the aura surrounding the thing are so funny to parody because, well, sitting there on the porch, you can see how somebody could get swept up in it all. You could see it easily.

- Rich Hofmann, Philadelphia Daily News

Gene Sarazen, who is now 95 and has served as an honorary Masters starter since 1981, told Augusta National chairman Hord Hardin a few years ago that he was having trouble hitting the ball and was thinking about not coming to the tournament.

``Gene, people don't come out here to see you hit a golf ball. They come out,'' Hardin said, ``to see if you're alive.''

- Jim Litke, Associated Press

I thought maybe I was doing the wrong thing. Maybe I should have been tagging along with Tiger Woods and Nick Faldo. Maybe I should have been in the gallery following Greg Norman.

Maybe I was wasting my time walking around Augusta National Golf Club with Arnold Palmer.

Maybe no one cared about him anymore.

He is 67 and he plays like it. Instead of shooting his age for 18 holes, he shoots his waist size for nine. He hasn't won a PGA tournament since 1973. Imagine that.

For me, though, this is the golfer of my lifetime. More than Nicklaus, more then Hogan, more than Woods, more than any of them, this is the man who typifies the sport and who brought it to where it is today.

- Charlie Vincent, Detroit Free Press

``Willie Wood said it was like driving on ice,'' John Huston said about the slippery greens made all the worse by pin positions plopped perilously on knobs on nearly every green. ``All you could do was hold onto the steering wheel with both hands and hope you stop.''

- Ron Sirak, Associated Press