We all want to go where we're appreciated.

It's just getting harder to find those places in this line of work.

The media can seem like more of a target these days, blamed for most of the current problems in sports. And most of the time that's not entirely off base, considering there are more of us overreacting to and overcovering events than ever.

But somehow, the most scrutinized place in sports has remained off to the side in the media bashing.

Augusta National has always valued the press, probably because the Masters Tournament was helped to become what it is today by the coverage it received in its early years. Right from the beginning, when writers from Northern papers would stop in Augusta on their way home from spring training, this tournament got a greater share of national attention than would normally fall on such a small town.

And those of us who get to come here every year and pretend to be working still benefit from the membership's continued gratitude.

Oh, they're as good with a "no comment'' as anyone. They just make it as easy as possible for you to write what they don't say with comforts such as choice parking for the media and a press building that's bigger than the clubhouse.

They found a new way Wednesday by giving out the first Masters Major Achievement Award to a small group of writers who had covered at least 40 Masters each.

The honorees were presented with plaques carved from a tree that once stood next to Augusta's No. 2 tee. And their names were put on a wall in the press building, where everybody was doing math to see how far away they were from 40 Masters.

The reaction of all 14 men - with a combined 600 Augusta trips - revealed the appreciation that anyone who has come here even once has for the Masters.

"It is we, the writers and the announcers, who should be thanking Augusta,'' said Art Spander, who has covered 41 Masters for the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner and the Oakland Tribune. "One, for the tournament ... and for making the writers always feel wanted here.''

That's a sentiment expressed anywhere on the property every Masters Week.

But it was the stories of those who have been telling them the longest that made Wednesday unique.

Edwin Pope remembered hitchhiking from Athens to Augusta for his first of 51 Masters in 1947, getting a ride in a Model-T only under the condition that he do the five hours of driving it took then. That experience was topped, he said, when he arrived at Augusta's front gate with nothing more than a letter saying he was the sports editor of the Athens Banner-Herald and was told to proceed right to the press tent, where he found 16 typewriters and 16 bottles of whiskey.

John Derr, who worked the second Masters in 1935, retold an anecdote from 1936, when Horton Smith's caddie caught a live rabbit out on the fifth hole and secretly carried it with him the rest of the round.

"Mr. Smith, I know you're going to win,'' Derr, who wrote for several North Carolina papers, recalled the caddie saying. "If one rabbit's foot is good luck, you've got four rabbit's feet in your bag.''

Ron Green Sr. marveled that he had spent a year of his life at the Masters. Hubert Mizell estimated the group had eaten "3,604 pimento cheese sandwiches.'' And each of the 14 called this week the best of the year and this event the best they'd been to anywhere in the world.

That said a lot coming from a group so well-traveled.

It just said a little more that the other side noticed too, and returned the appreciation.

Tim Guidera can be reached at (912) 652-0352.