Media center volunteers take pride in work

Perry Huffman’s long tenure as a Masters Tournament worker/volunteer goes back to a memo he saw on a bulletin board in the locker room at Augusta’s Academy of Richmond County in 1975.

Huffman, then a baseball player for the high school, remembers the note was recruiting athletes who wanted to work at Augusta National Golf Club during Masters rounds.

“I signed up and came out here,” said Huffman, who is working his 38th Masters this week. “We got $7 a day, but I would have done it for free because I love the golf tournament.”

Huffman remembers getting his pay at the end of the week – $28 for the four tournament days, placed in an envelope.

“That was a lot of money for a teenager back then,” he said.

Huffman, who started on the leaderboard on the 10th green, is now a scorer on the huge scoreboard inside the Media Center, a spot he’s been at for the past 14 years.

“It’s been a fantastic week,” said Huffman, who takes time off work to volunteer on the board. “This is my favorite week of the year.”

In the late 1970s, he went from being a “worker” for the tournament to a volunteer. There were some small perks that went with the new job – and one big one.

In late May, before Augus­ta National closes for the season, there is a day when the volunteers, who are from all over the country, return to Augusta to play the course.

Other than that, all the volunteers get is a $10 meal ticket, an Augusta National hat and three shirts with the club’s logo. The shirts are replaced with new ones every third year (they get new ones in 2015). The volunteers also get to see the greats of the game play during their breaks.

Huffman is part of a 12-member team that works the Media Center scoreboard. Every player’s hole-by-hole score is recorded by hand. Sliding ladders are used to reach the names at the top.

“We take so much pride in what we do,” Huffman said. “We take pride in not making mistakes. This board, it is a tremendous job.”

Their work is supervised by John Cheek, who is working his 41st Masters as worker/volunteer. He’s joined at the board by brothers Randy, of Six Mile, S.C., and Andy, who lives in North Augusta.

“They always talk about tradition, and you can go back to the tradition of the families that have worked out here over the years,” said John Cheek, whose parents worked the tournament before him.

“In the early 1950s and 1960s, the people of Augusta kept it going and supported it,” John Cheek said of the Masters. “As the family members started working together, it became like a reunion. This is the week we got together. We work together, we go out and eat together.”

After the Masters ends, the working media’s job will be done and they’ll be gone for another year.

Huffman and Cheeks, and the others on the Media Center scoreboard, will be back later in the week.

“We will come down and take everything down, reorganize all the numbers, put it in alphabetical order and get it ready for 12 months from now,” Huffman said.