Aussies celebrate nation's first wearing of the green

GOLD COAST, Australia — The queue stretched around the corner – adults paying tribute in various shades of green, children with painted faces and young women sporting eye-catching summer outfits.

They carried hats or flags or programs to be autographed. They brought smartphones to snap pictures. Some had things they wanted to share or say. Others were too shy or intimidated to say anything.

From the opposite side, an older man inched closer and closer until a security guard pointed him toward the back of the line. The man held his hands in front of him and said the one thing everybody was thinking.

“I just want to get a look at that beautiful coat.”

Adam Scott, the hometown hero returned to Queensland to play in the Australian PGA Championship, was no stranger to these galleries. But the green jacket he was wearing was a foreign article that Australians had seen only in pictures and being worn by men from other nations.

This green jacket was a symbol not only of Scott’s achievement seven months earlier at Augusta National Golf Club but also of national pride. Scott summed it up with a roaring “C’mon, Aussie” when he sank a dramatic birdie putt on the 72nd hole. It’s a cricket phrase that many Australian sports fans had muttered longingly each April and worried might never actually come.

At least not in some of their lifetimes.

“I’m so glad I lived long enough to see an Australian win the Mast­ers,” said Al Howard, the PGA of Australia’s oldest professional, who cel­ebrated his 100th birthday a month after watching Scott win the Masters.

Howard died in January, but his sentiment lives on in a country of only 22 million people that prides itself on being just as good as all the bigger countries in the games they love.

Despite all the Greg Normans and Peter Thomsons and Bruce Devlins and Jim Ferriers who tried, Augusta remained an unrequited love. Last April, Scott won in a sudden-death playoff against Angel Cabrera.

“It has to go down as one of the most significant sporting accomplishments in Australian history,” said Luke Elvy, an Australian broadcast journalist.

“It’s been one of those things – Augusta National and the green jacket – like a monkey growing into a gorilla on our back. For Adam winning, it’s become akin to our sporting Mount Everest, and he’s our Sir Edmund Hillary.”

Said Scott’s father, Phil: “It was a big deal for Australians. Whatever anyone else thought of it, it was a big deal for Australians. For a few reasons, but purely inside the golf world, it’s all the known stories: We’d never won it.”

Adam Scott still marvels that it came down to him.

“When we won the America’s Cup, that was a significant moment, and people have compared it to something like that,” he said. “There’s been 77 years of the Masters, and there’s never been an Aussie winner. Greg made it a thing, and the whole time I’ve said I can’t believe the jacket’s fallen on my shoulders in the end. That was my destiny in the game of golf. I hope there’s much more to come, but if there isn’t, it’s an incredible thing that I’ll have next to my Masters win for Australia.”