I can't get over how queasy the Masters made me feel.

I used to love the Masters, probably started loving it before I really even played golf. There was always something just so gosh-darn perfectly golf-y about it.

The grass on the fairways always looked like grass the way a little kid would draw it: greener than green, flat (when it wasn't flat it "undulated," smoothly, languidly, kinda sexily) and, most importantly, it always seemed two dimensional, players and their Titleists floating just above it, spikes the only things that actually broke that flawless plane.

Divots lifted clear of those fairways seemed to release with something approaching Teflon ease. I couldn't imagine, still can't imagine, what it would be like to feel a 7-iron smoothly slip through that silky surface, a lovely Bermuda grass toupee plopping down a few yards away.

Balls launched from the fairways disappeared into the air, magically reappearing on the greens with a wondrous poomp that left no doubt that the ball was back where it belonged. There was no HDTV, so the balls really did "disappear." Nutty camera operators would fling their lenses skyward, rolling the stomachs of watchers everywhere, but there was nothing to actually see in those shots, just vertigo.

The grass on those greens was somehow even greener, smoother, faster. And the wondrous things people could do with putters! Ahhh…. Balls struck just so seemed to dance a tango across those greens, drifting and spinning and stopping and starting and dropping home with a satisfying rattle.

Around those fairways and greens, great, huge, ent-ish trees towered over everything. This was no course dropped in a desert or hugging a coastline. No, there was an arboreal splendor here that to this day helps define in my mind what a golf course should be.

The azaleas were always blooming, silent explosions of preposterous color: pinks and reds and whites and oranges.

The fans, excuse me, the "patrons" were always humble and polite and appreciative of the remarkable privilege they had been granted by the membership to simply be on the grounds, just like all good "patrons" should be.

The birds were always chirping.

But then, gradually, over the course of years, as I grew older and as sacred cows grew somehow less sacred, the curtains started to pull away.

People talked more openly about the club's exclusivity, and the lily-white nature of its membership. Its first black member was admitted in 1990.

In 2002, Hootie Johnson, Augusta National's chairman from 1998-2006, got into a public spat with Martha Burk of the National Council of Women's Organizations over the club's men-only membership policy. Burk saw it as discriminatory; Johnson saw it as his private club's right, likening it to Junior League, the Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, fraternities and sororities.

Less morally questionable but equally ridiculous, CBS, the Masters broadcast partner, got busted for piping in fake birdsong during their telecasts.

So there I found myself, watching on television, listening on the radio, as Tiger Woods kicked off his 2010 redemption tour at Augusta, his appearance at the Masters his first real public appearance since he lost a game of chicken with a fire hydrant last Thanksgiving.

But before it all got started, before any actual golf was played, I had to listen to Billy Payne, the current chairman of Augusta National, publicly lambaste Woods before allowing him to tee it up.

I found Payne's comments, to use language he can understand, out of bounds. Anyone who still speaks of holding professional athletes up to his children or grandchildren as "role models" is living in a reality far removed from the one I inhabit, and is asking for continued disappointment. That Billy Payne, he of the letter-of-the-law-if-not-spirit-of-the-law club that doesn't admit women and for years refused blacks as anything other than staff (In Georgia?!?! Shocking!!!), should wag his finger and look down his nose at the perceived moral shortcomings of an individual who plays to exactly the same letter of the law leanings is more hypocrisy than most can stomach.

That Billy Payne had the ego to pontificate that Woods "forgot in the process to remember that with fame and fortune comes responsibility, not invisibility," simultaneously paraphrasing Stan Lee's greatest catchphrase and begging the question, "What have you done to raise the moral standard today, Mr. Chairman?" points further to the absurdity of the life Mr. Payne lives.

Payne saw the need to speak for "we" and "us," somehow wrapping his Cloak of Morality around everybody else to judge a philandering professional athlete. Hey, newsflash: we're not in Mayberry anymore, Billy! I'd be curious how many philandering members you've called on the carpet before, hmmm? Or does Augusta National not have any members guilty of such "egregious conduct"?

All the while, Tiger sat, looking glum, looking hurt, but nodding and grimacing away, another box on his redemption checklist crossed off.

Then the ad started running. You know, the creepy/brilliant Nike ad with Tiger staring soulfully into the camera as the words of his late father roll, edited and spliced together from something so far removed from context as to be laughable?

Lastly, just for good measure, we saw Phil Knight, chairman and co-founder of Nike, Woods one real remaining sponsor, walking the course arm in arm with Tiger's mom.

And that's when the whole thing got queasy on me. That's when it all became so obvious to me that while Tiger was in seclusion, after going to sex-addict rehab, he wasn't just working on his swing (or, God forbid, his marriage), he was working on a commercial, a campaign, a rebranding. His transformation from suck-up Tiger, smiling and signing autographs on Thursday and Friday, to same old, same old Tiger, whining and glowering and stalking and leaving as fast as possible without a word of congratulation to anyone else, took place before our eyes. Gone was the guy who just wanted forgiveness; back was the guy who wanted everything else.

I don't know what I expected, exactly; Tiger's redemption, or his first tentative steps towards it. But that's no better than holding cloistered athletes up as "role models," not really.

Tiger's redemption is not for me, and it's certainly not something to be broadcast from the golf course. I just wish there wasn't this apparent enthusiasm to package it all and the ensuing enthusiasm to consume it.

I hope we can all stop talking about it now and move on.

The whole thing is making me sick.