Augusta's most old fashioned rule is a stroke of genius, writes RIATH AL-SAMARRAI - here's why the Masters allows spectators to live in the moment

Let's start with the Spanish lad who did that thing in the wrong place at Augusta National on Thursday. His name is Jose Luis Ballester and he's a fine golfer - US amateur champion in 2024, the best of Europe the year before, hits it a mile. Lovely swing.

But this isn't really about him. No, this is about how word got around, which is to say the means of travel between what he did and how folk came to know it.

'You heard about the Spanish guy?' said one journalist to a few of us in our designated media building, a buggy ride away from the course.

'Which Spanish guy?' came the response, and this was a conversation taking place in different groups all over the room.

'Ballester, the amateur. Some suggestion he's taken a p*** in Rae's Creek.'

Now that required a second of processing. When you venture to these parts, it's not a scenario you expect. So first you laugh, then you want to learn if it's accurate, and at a point along the way you disappear into the great technological black hole of Augusta.

Because you will probably know about the Augusta phone stuff by now. Meaning you'll know if there's one thing guaranteed to rile the green jackets more than peeing into their favourite creek, it's bringing a phone onto their golf course. That would be a diplomatic incident.

Which presents a problem when a phone is a handy means of establishing, in a timely manner, if a 21-year-old did indeed go for a wee in sacred water on a remote part of a 365-acre site.

But that was a dead end - even though we can use phones in the media area, what use is it when anyone you might know in the vicinity of a desecrated creek has left theirs in the car?

Any other sporting event and you would assume phone footage would make it to social media, and quickly, but obviously that was a lost cause, too. Same goes for asking the club - peeing in creeks, using phones, getting responses to certain enquiries all live in the no-no zone.

And so a surreal chase for confirmation was undertaken by several colleagues and they all needed to wait.

In this case, the end of Ballester's round was due a good couple of hours after the rumour had first been passed by word-of-mouth from fans in a grandstand at the 13th hole to a group of American reporters. When Ballester was done with his chips and putts, he was finally asked outright by those same journalists if he had sprayed more than a few drives.

Yes, he said, it was true. And what is more, if he had his time over, he would probably do it again, he added. Before long it was the tale of the Creek Leak.

This was all jolly good fun, you see. Part of that was down to the subsequent sparing of Ballester's life by the green jackets, but it was also the element of suspense. The waiting. The pursuit of something ridiculous and the relief, if we may call it that, when a uniquely absurd story was delivered in a uniquely absurd place and it all happened a little slower than we are used to these days.

Such is life at Augusta National, this land that time forgot. Or rather, this land that chose to forget about time and fortified its position with a more rigid version of the magna carta.

Much of what we are required to conform to here is a bit silly - there are ways in which you are permitted to sit on the grass and ways you must not - but behind the pomposity are strands of genius. And that is why we're talking about phones, because their abolition from the course is possibly the very best part of attending this tournament.

Do not confuse that for a dig at the golf - the golf is wonderful, as is watching it on television. But doing so without a portal to lesser distractions in your hand is so much better, because it simply happens nowhere else on the sporting planet.

Instead, you are present in moments. You are absorbing them, living in them, seeing what you don't see when you are messaging, doom-scrolling, performing amateur photography, posing for selfies or posting videos of golfers slashing into Rae's Creek.

On Friday, I noticed that Rory McIlroy takes six to seven glances up a fairway before launching each drive, rather like the pre-serve tics of Rafael Nadal, and Jon Rahm, a Spaniard, curses at himself in English. You feel their tension and their tension becomes a layer of your experience, of your understanding of them.

Some of it is wildly trivial, but all of it sucks you into a deeper connection to what you have gone to see, paid to see, and received the ticket for which many, Spanish amateurs or otherwise, might pee on a powerline to have.

I spoke to Tommy Fleetwood recently on this very subject and heard the athlete perspective - he loves the phone-ban at Augusta because he doesn't feel so much like a passing vehicle on the content highway.

When he strikes an iron here, he won't look up to be greeted by screens held high by the arms of human cranes. When one goes well, he noted that the cheers are more real, more authentic, more involved. The risk of being filmed in an unflattering pose is that much less.

That made me think of Ange Postecoglou's gripe the other week about being confronted by Tottenham fans with phones, purely with the motivation of catching him out. More fundamentally, it draws me to a memory of being on Centre Court when Andy Murray won Wimbledon for the second time in 2016 and around half of those there watched match point through their screens.

Same goes for Keely Hodgkinson winning Olympic gold in Paris and any ring walk to a title fight I've attended. There are too many other examples to list, but they all blend into one big creek of diluted moments at a time when too much of sport is being condensed and simplified in its packaging.

Augusta got ahead of the curve by pretending the curve never existed in the first place. We would be better off peeing into the wind than challenging their application of some traditions, but when it comes to watching sport the correct way, those old boys in their green jackets got it right.

Andre Onana should have kept his thoughts away from social media before karma bit a chunk out of his backside against Lyon. What aged worse - his transfer to Manchester United or his pre-match tweets playing down the opposition?

But there was still something a little rich about the gun-to-a-knife-fight response of Nemanja Matic, the former United midfielder now playing for Lyon: 'If you are one of the worst goalkeepers in Manchester United's history, you need to take care what you're talking about. If it was Van der Sar, Schmeichel or De Gea saying that, then I would question myself.'

A quality headline, sure, but you might be forgiven for wondering if Matic was mistaking himself for Roy Keane. To perform a quick review of Matic's five seasons at United, one of which was good and none yielded a trophy, would suggest he'd be better off leaving his stones outside the door of his glass house.

Ange Postecoglou says he has spent months hunting those responsible for leaking information about Tottenham's numerous injuries this season.

The time might have been better spent wondering if a strategy built on relentless sprinting before and during his various injury crises was giving the mole a little too much to work with.