“At Augusta National,Not Talking About Race Is Tradition”: Race and Journalistic Repair Discourse at the Masters Tournament

Abstract

This study uses collective memory, second-draft history, and the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to examine sports coverage of Augusta National Golf Club (ANGC) and the Masters Golf Tournament in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S., particularly the George Floyd protests. We analyze 29 articles in the New York Times (a national newspaper of record in the U.S.) and Golf Digest (an access-dependent specialty outlet) between 2020-2025 to examine if these publications engage in journalistic repair and address their own editorial histories of racial exclusion while reporting on the club’s commemoration of Lee Elder as the first Black golfer to play in the tournament in 1975. Findings reveal that both outlets constructed second drafts of history, but did not critically analyze the role of their own newsrooms in reporting histories of racial exclusion at ANGC and the Masters. Moreover, the study contributes to critical sport communication scholarship by showing how national and specialty sport media outlets differ in their reporting of institutional memory and race discourse by selective remembering and reproduction of institutional silences.