For Members and Winners Only

It’s the most famous haberdashery in sports, a jacket identified with Augusta National, the color of its course and its surrounding pines.

Green, like the money it represents in the exclusive membership at Augusta National, and like the loot the winner of the Masters takes home from the tournament and resultant endorsements.

The jacket is as much a part of the tournament as the azaleas and dogwoods, and it has taken on an aura, perhaps because it’s so difficult to earn, perhaps because it stays where it’s won.

Masters winners aren’t actually given the jackets; they get them on loan. Once a winner’s reign is over, the jacket must be returned to the club.

The club’s members began to wear them in 1937, perhaps to set them apart from the riffraff who bought tickets for the tournament. The first jackets were crafted at Brooks Brothers in New York, largely because Cliff Roberts, a New Yorker when he wasn’t running Augusta National, shopped there.

Two years later, an Augusta tailor, John Alfieri, took the business, and since 1949, Henry Cullom, a club member and Augusta haberdasher, has supplied the jackets.

The first winner to get one was Sam Snead, in 1949.

By then, the Masters was 16 years old, and to give the green jacket instant tradition, it was awarded to the winners of the previous 12 tournaments.

Roberts ruled that order could be maintained only if the jackets were worn only at Augusta National, though the winner was allowed to don the green at golf functions for the year of his reign.

After that, into the closet in Augusta it would go.

Unless you were Gary Player.

Or Nick Faldo.

The story is that Player took his home to South Africa after winning his third and final Masters title in 1978, whereupon Roberts made a call to retrieve it.

“Mr. Roberts,” Player said, “if you want it, you’ll have to come here and get it.”

They both reportedly laughed, though it’s likely the curmudgeonly Roberts’ reaction was more of a forced chuckle.

But Faldo’s faux pas was more blatant. Augusta National members cringed when he appeared on a television talk show wearing the green.

Isn’t done, old man.

The winner gets the jacket in a ceremony in the Butler Cabin at Augusta as soon as a CBS director says it’s OK. For a repeater, it’s no problem. Faldo’s jacket rests in a closet at Augusta National, ready to be hauled out for the festivities.

A new winner presents only a slight problem, for jackets in medium, medium-large and large are available from the membership and are temporarily draped on the winner by the previous year’s champion.

When the camera’s eye blinks shut, the jacket is retrieved and measurements are taken for the new winner’s green jacket, created in gabardine or cotton and Dacron and hung in the closet, never again--never again--to be worn on something starring Letterman or Leno.