SIDELINE CUT:The Masters combines the very best of television sport and soap opera and, for traditionalists, Augusta and the BBC are a match made in heaven, writes KEITH DUGGAN

IS THERE even a point to the US Masters golf tournament if the BBC can’t broadcast it? Auntie’s coverage of the whitest sports event on the planet resumes this evening and traditionalists here and across Britain will breathe a sigh of relief because the Beeb’s absence from the opening two days of the contest has stripped away much of the illusion and magic.

For most sports fans, the Masters at Augusta combines the very best of television sport and soap opera. Not for the first time, the tournament coincides with the Easter weekend and so for those who grew up in Ireland in the 1980s, when the country genuinely closed down on Good Friday, the Masters golf tournament was intoxicating in its colour and its noise.

It didn’t really matter whether or not you gave a hoot about golf: having some cat named Curtis Strange on television was better than nothing. Most of the cast of stars at Augusta – Lee and Ben and Jack and Arnie – looked like JR Ewing’s sidekicks, taking a break from oily business dealings in Dallas for a weekend on the course. Augusta was littered with the kind of Americans that never popped up in Hill Street Blues or Miami Vice or the major imported US dramas of the day.

The Europeans were obligingly stereotypical in appearance; it was hard to imagine a more Spanish-looking dude that Seve Ballesteros and where could Bernhard Langer have come from if not Germany?

BBC began broadcasting the tournament in full with perfect timing in 1986, the year that marked Jack Nicklaus’s unforgettable comeback and ever since then, it has, along with Wimbledon, been the jewel in the crown of their sports coverage.

For the BBC were expert in adding a touch of English gravitas to an event that is as quintessentially Southern American and stubbornly 20th century as the novels of William Faulkner. The Beeb are the world masters at evoking the importance of tradition, whether in politics, culture or sport.

Give ’em half a chance, a few bars of Mahler and five minutes of lost footage from a 1938 Doncaster Rovers game and they will make a hopeless FA Cup mismatch between the present day Rovers and Chelsea seem like an epochal event. Augusta and the BBC was always going to be a match made in heaven.

The Beeb’s golf men savoured the fragrant air at Augusta the way Bob Marley The Wailers appreciated marijuana. The dreaminess of the Augusta National course suited Peter Alliss’s incantations and murmurs better than anyone else. No front man ever looked quite as dapper as Steve Ryder did ensconced on the lawn and chewing the fat with Sandy Lyle or Nick Faldo or whoever happened to wander by.

Even when Ryder left the Beeb, they had cultivated a ready-made replacement in Gary Lineker. For older Everton fans, Lineker will always remain the absurdly tanned and lethally efficient six-yard goal-poacher who enjoyed one productive season at Goodison in 1985-’86, although Liverpool pipped their rivals to league and FA Cup glory.

But when you saw Lineker at Augusta clearly revelling in the sophistication and elegance of the whole show, it seems football was just an apprenticeship to this brilliant gift that he has for making major worldwide commercially-driven sports events seem like garden parties.

This is how the Beeb always treated the Masters: you know deep down that the golfers are, by necessity, self-obsessed and furiously driven competitors desperate to win. But as the BBC present it, they are just part of this beautiful garden soirée that might have been thrown by Jay Gatsby himself.

Somehow the Beeb have always managed to provide a distraction from the fact that there is something a bit strange about Augusta. The remarks emanating from the White House this week acknowledging that Barack Obama would indeed be in favour of allowing women to become members of the Georgian club threatened to stir up a hornet’s nest that the guardians of the place would rather let lie.

The White House comments could be seen as opportunism in an election year or could be interpreted as a mere acknowledgement of the fact that it is 2012. It is incredible that Augusta has managed to get away with this James Bond show of chauvinism for so long: incredible to think that Hilary Clinton has a better chance of becoming president of America than of joining the ranks of Augusta chairmen that stretches back to Clifford Roberts. He was the myth-maker at Augusta who, in the most macabre moment in the club’s history, shot himself to death with a Smith Wesson pistol on the par three course in 1977.

It was Roberts who allegedly vowed that so long as he was chairman, “all the golfers will be white and all the caddies will be black”.

That changed only in 1975 and the club began accepting black members as recently as 1990. Even today, the field of golfers remains predominantly white but it is significant that very few of the caddies are black during a period when the earning potential for bag-carrying has skyrocketed.

Peter Alliss and the Beeb make light of this inglorious championing of segregation and of sexism and they do this by concentrating on the fascinations of the golf course and by reminiscing about the past masters who have played there. For that is the other peculiar thing about Augusta – the place is a museum.

The apple-pie tradition of old Masters winners being allowed to play long after their driving license has been revoked is honourable and touching. But it still comes as a surprise to the television audience to see old golfers lining up at the first and causing alarm among spectators standing just behind the rope as they embark on shaky practice swings which cause people to involuntarily duck. There was something haunting – though they kept him off the television screen – about poor Billy Casper, green jacket class of 1970, doggedly shooting his +34 score of 106 in 2005. It was plain wrong, as if Pele one day showed up for trials for the current Brazil national team.

Still, some people find it comforting to see the Masters of yesteryear out there on Augusta. It helps to sell the illusion that time actually stands still in the place. The BBC have been brilliant at honouring that myth and as well as that, they helped to create the illusion that the Masters tournament was too classy for anything as vulgar as advertising. As the coverage broke for the incessant ad breaks that punctuate the coverage Stateside, the BBC would effortlessly fill in the gaps.

So they are back tonight for the Masters which had been given advance billing as perhaps the greatest one in years. If the anticipated showdown between Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy materialises, it can be enjoyed without interruption. Enjoy it while it lasts because the chances are that they are on borrowed time and are bound to be squeezed out of the reckoning by broadcasters with deeper pockets. It’s a shame because as Carly Simon sang back in 1977 when James Bond and the custodians of Augusta shared the same worldview, Nobody Does It Better.

The world’s moved on since then but, at Augusta, they do their best not to notice.