MEMO from the publisher

For any of us who need signposts to spring beyond the pages of the calendar and the smell of the air, there is help. There is, for example, the bright end of golf's winter tour and the beginning of its spring tour, The Masters at Augusta—as reliable a marker of the season as robins and rain.

So this will be a memo all about golf.

In next week's issue Artist Tony Ravielli describes the Road to Augusta with drawings from his winter tour sketchbook. This is a Ravielli readers have not seen before. In his drawings he comments on the atmosphere of sport and takes the scenic view—an approach which differs from his detailing last week of the mechanics behind Sal Maglie's Art of Pitching and his weekly rendering in Tip from the Top of a golf secret for easy visual analysis.

An artist endows a subject with a quality as personal as handwriting and as biased as an exclamation—and thus does things no photographer can. This is easier to see than to say. I hope you agree when you look at Ravielli's drawings of the tour.

But what a photographer can achieve with the subject of golf you will also have a chance to observe week after next in SPECTACLE. There John Zimmerman's camera catches The Masters, its crowds, its color and its heroes, including Demaret, Nelson and Snead—and its beloved host, Robert T. Jones Jr.

While on the subject of golf, it seems proper here to answer a question often asked lately: "Who is Barry Burn, the author of On and Off the Fairway"! now our monthly feature about the professional golf scene.

Well, Barry Burn is a highly split personality. He is, to tell the truth, a trio of SPORTS ILLUSTRATED golf writers. When these writers decided to sign themselves with a collective pseudonym, they thought of Barry Burn—the name of the brook (or, as Scotsmen say, "burn") which runs through the famed Carnoustie course, coiling back and forth across the 17th and 18th fairways, making Carnoustie's finish one of the toughest in the world of golf.

And Barry Burn, by the way, will be writing his next and now customary column in the April 7 issue.

PHOTO

RAVIELLI

PHOTO

ZIMMERMAN