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The Masters
AUGUSTA, Ga. — Ángel Cabrera was taking a long walk along the left side of the green at Augusta National’s second hole, surveying what he had to navigate with a chip shot from just in front of the bunker.
A couple hundred yards back near the fairway, two men were explaining to their significant others why it was such a curiosity to see Cabrera playing in the Masters for the first time since 2019.
“He was in jail for 2 ½ years.”
“What for?”
“Domestic abuse.”
Then there was a pause.
“He must have worked a lot on his short game.”
Get it? You can work on your chipping in the jail cell. Or something. Har har.
Though the jokes may not have been particularly funny, they were indicative of the conversations being had on every hole Thursday as Cabrera made his way around the course.
“You know who that is? That’s Cabrera, the guy who was in jail for awhile.”
“Is he fresh out?”
“He just got out of the joint? Really?”
Here’s what you didn’t hear very much: Anything about Cabrera being a former champion, which is why despite everything he’s back here at age 55.
“We certainly abhor domestic violence of any type,” Augusta National chairman Fred Ridley said Wednesday. “As it relates to Ángel, Ángel has served the sentence that was prescribed by the Argentine courts, and he is the past champion, and so he was invited.”
And that’s that.
Why did Ángel Cabrera go to jail?
It would be easy to criticize the green jacket set for welcoming back a man who was credibly accused and convicted of harassing and threatening not one, but two ex-girlfriends in his home country. Some women’s rights groups have done just that.
And perhaps Augusta deserves that criticism. Yes, the club gives a lifetime Masters exemption to past champions. But it also can do whatever it wants, which means it can disinvite whoever it wants. Back in the day, Augusta National would send letters politely letting ex-champions who were no longer competitive know that it was time to stop playing. Why not do the same with a domestic abuser, particularly at a club that took decades of criticism for being sexist until inviting its first female member in 2012?
And being at the Masters as a former winner isn’t just getting to play the tournament. It’s the champions dinner, it’s the official wearing a green jacket standing behind Jose Maria Olazabal and Craig Stadler, it’s having the use of a separate locker room. It’s part of the exclusivity of this place. It’s everything.
Augusta National didn’t have to do all that. It didn’t have to do any of it. After Cabrera couldn’t get into the country a year ago due to visa issues, they could have quietly told him not to bother. The story would have been forgotten and a whole lot of awkwardness could be avoided.
So why have him here? It’s not like it would set some huge precedent for Augusta National to say, “You know what? We’re going to draw a line here. If you go to jail for domestic abuse, you’re not going to play our tournament anymore, past champion or not.”
You never really know how the muckety-mucks around here think about this issues or why they do what they do. But allowing Cabrera to play only really results in two potential outcomes.
The first is that you end up with what happened on Thursday. Nobody around here is going to boo or demonstrably react to Cabrera’s presence because that’s just not how people behave at the Masters. But it’s also not great to have fans on every hole having hushed, private conversations about how the guy who recently got out of jail for stalking ex-girlfriends.
The second is far worse: That Cabrera, who won the event last week on the PGA Tour Champions for players 50 and older, actually contends on a course where he can still hit it a long way and has an excellent track record including six top-10s and a loss to Adam Scott in the 2013 playoff. Not only would that overwhelm the coverage of the event on Saturday and Sunday, but it would put CBS in the uncomfortable position of deciding how much to talk about an uncomfortable story for a business partner that famously has a lot of control over what’s said on the broadcast.
Fortunately for the club and the network, Cabrera shot 76 on Thursday and will probably struggle to make the cut.
Ángel Cabrera prison sentence
None of this is meant to question whether the price Cabrera paid is enough or whether the contrition he’s shown publicly since being released from jail is genuine. Taking everything at face value, it would indeed be a good story if he has emerged from this a better man.
As he told reporters here Tuesday through an interpreter, he respects the opinion of those who believe he shouldn’t be here but said he was grateful to have the chance.
“Life has given me another opportunity. I got to take advantage of that and I want to do the right things in this second opportunity,” he said. “There was a stage in my life of five years, four, five years, that they weren’t the right things I should have done. Before that I was okay, so I just have to keep doing what I know I can do right.”
That’s a compelling argument for second chances in life, and hopefully Cabrera takes advantage of what he has been given. It doesn’t mean it’s a great reason for him to play in the most prestigious golf tournament in the world, especially when he wouldn’t qualify for it by any metric other than the club’s courtesy to those who have won it.
And so he arrived at the first hole Thursday morning wearing a shirt with his “AC” logo across the left breast, bent down to place his neon yellow ball on the tee, acknowledged the polite applause and hammered a drive down the middle.
“Ángel! Woo!” said one sunburned man sitting in a chair as Cabrera made his way down the first fairway. “Welcome back!”
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