During the tumult that comes with the final days of the NBA season, there is always one reliable oasis of calm: 

The Saturday before the last day of the regular season is an off day, planned in advance so that all 30 teams can play on Sunday, the final day on the schedule. 

For Garrett Temple, the tradition — like many others’ — is to sink into the couch and watch The Masters, the idyllic golf tournament that always falls on the last weekend of the NBA season. 

It’s a habit that took root back in 1997 when a then 22-year-old named Tiger Woods was taking the golf world by storm and surging to a record-setting win at Augusta National, the first of 14 major titles and one of the most dominant runs by any athlete in any sport. 

Growing up in Baton Rouge, La., a then-10-year-old Temple wasn’t a golfer. He was from basketball royalty in the state and was poised to follow his father’s footsteps as a high school star and eventually play at LSU, a campus he used to ride his bike around as a kid. 

But Woods represented something different — someone young, athletic and of colour — and one afternoon of watching him on the prowl, Temple felt the excitement in his living room. 

“I hadn't played golf at all. And my Dad, he had dabbled a little bit, as he got some opportunities as a retired (college and NBA) player, but he didn’t know how to play at all really,” said Temple. “But I said to my Dad, ‘I want to learn how to play golf’. He said okay, and we went to Walmart, and I got a set of clubs, some Wilsons. And we got some lessons the next week, one time, and I’ve been playing ever since.”

Meeting a fellow golfer is like making an instant friend, but there are levels to it. 

There are a lot of people who play golf and put it in the same category as bowling, or table tennis, or maybe skiing: something fun to do when the occasion permits and the weather is good, with not much thought given to it before or after. 

Then there are those who have, for better or worse, had the game seep into their molecular structure. It exists like a low-level vibration in your being, looking........

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