Of course, no other club or municipality can match the resources of Augusta, which is said to take in $115 million from the tournament. (Its members don’t need that money.) The underground irrigation and ventilation system is so advanced that the club can dry the greens if the course is too wet, thereby speeding up the putting surface and making it more difficult.

4. The Concessions
The members didn’t get rich by paying $8 every time they wanted a beer at a sporting event, and they won’t charge you that much either. It costs only $4 for a cold one and only $1.50 for the famous pimento cheese sandwiches the club serves to all comers. (You have to like pimento cheese.)

The club does, however, rake in a ton of money from the souvenirs it sells exclusively on the course. Golf Digest estimates that Augusta pulls in $47.5 million from selling patrons bragging gear.

5. Berckmans Place and the Hospitality Houses
If you have an extra $6,000 for the week, you can luxuriate in Berckmans Place on the course, a 100,000 square-foot entertainment, dining, and drinking complex, next to the fifth fairway, that opened in 2013. I don't, so I checked into some of the countless corporate hospitality houses surrounding the club that are there for the business-networking hoi polloi.

The Masters is a fantastic place to wine and dine clients and impress friends and family if you’re a corporate bigwig, but you can’t actually go into the clubhouse. So to entertain their guests, many companies rent out local houses and install a slew of tents, flat screen TVs, and a rotisserie pig. (For what it’s worth, security is lax.)

6. The Parties
The parties in these hospitality houses, and at other restaurants and bars in town, combine to make the whole long weekend feel like spring break for preppy, middle-class adults. Former PGA madman John Daly, for example, comes in an RV and hangs out by the Hooters, where he sells his trademark Loudmouth golf pants and drinks spiked Arnold Palmers with all the sunburned patrons in the parking lot.

7. The Traditions
You probably won’t be bringing those Loudmouth “trousers” on the course. The caddies still wear traditional white jumpsuits and the patrons are usually well-dressed and always wearing belts. They don’t use cell phones on the course, so there are no selfie sticks. Children are seen but not heard. You cannot wear your baseball cap backward, and there is no running.

There also are a host of unwritten rules that everyone just follows, regardless of how many $4 beers they’ve had. It’s a wonderful experience to be surrounded by American adults that are well-behaved without being required to be so by law. People don’t even fight for seats—the earliest attendees scout out a spot for their lawn chairs and leave them there all day without problems.

8. Augusta, the Town
It turns out Flyover Country is amazingly well-organized. Most sporting events are a catastrophe of infrastructure collapse, but Augusta is so relaxed and leisurely, even when the size of the city's population randomly doubles once a year for a week.

From the instant you arrive at the small municipal airport, you’re serenaded by Jimmy Buffett and Alison Krauss (in the persons of one or two nonthreatening buskers) and offered a rum and coke at the bar. Everyone is there for the same purpose, and it’s almost as if everyone knows each other already.