No offence to Zach Johnson, who seems a perfectly pleasant young man and is clearly a talented golfer, but that was a really awful Masters. And although it may seem unfair to make one man responsible, you probably had to blame Tiger Woods.
A Woods win, taken for granted before the start of the competition and still believed to be a certainty with only three holes to play, would have got the Augusta National committee off the hook. Look, they could have said as he pulled on his fifth green jacket, how our course allows the cream to rise to the top.
In fact their course spent four days putting the world's best golfers through a series of absurd and largely meaningless tests, in which failure was absolutely no reflection of talent or application. Those who did well certainly merited praise for their persistence in the face of adversity, but those who were defeated by a capricious course did not deserve to go home feeling humiliated.
Augusta's local paper had to try very hard yesterday to get its readers excited about a win for the 31-year-old Iowan. "Mainstream America has a hero in Johnson," it trumpeted, and the victor did indeed tick all the requisite boxes: he was raised in Cedar Rapids on pork chops and sweet corn, he came up the hard way via several years on the Hooters Tour, he embraced his blonde wife and 14-month-old son as he came off the 18th green, he thanked his coaches, his family and his Lord Jesus, and he showed a proper humility in the face of his good fortune.
He was also - and this is greatly to his credit - one of only five golfers among the 60 who completed all four rounds not to have registered a double-bogey or worse throughout the 72 holes. The others were Woods, Vijay Singh, Jim Furyk and Vaughn Taylor, who is Johnson's best friend on the Tour. The scoreboard, in other words, was a hideous mess. There was so much yellow in there, denoting over-par scores, with so little black (par) and red (below-par), that it looked like a southern-fried omelette cooked with red peppers and burnt bacon.
It seemed as though the committee, bearing in mind the rains of previous years, had prepared the course to accept a soaking that never came. Instead the conditions were dry, cold and windy. The result was more or less a lottery until the final day, when the committee relented and watered the greens in order to present the paying customers with something resembling top-class golf. But that came too late for many competitors, including Dave Womack.
A 28-year-old amateur, Womack was back at work yesterday, selling insurance in McDonough, Georgia. He had spent the weekend as he usually does - "on the couch, watching the guys go at it". But on Thursday and Friday he had competed in the Masters for the first and - let's be frank - probably the last time. Having qualified after winning the US Mid-Amateur title, he shot 84 in the first round and 81 in the second for a combined total that put him one shot ahead of Severiano Ballesteros. The Spaniard's 166 was the worst score of all those players who missed the halfway cut.
There were no birdies for Womack on Thursday. On Friday, however he beat par on four holes, and at the 9th, where a huge audience watches the players approach the spectacular raised green, the famous Augusta roar went up as his birdie putt dropped. He had heard it before, echoing from distant parts of the course, but this time it was for him.
"I hit some good shots," he said outside the recorder's hut on Friday evening, the last rays of the setting sun in his eyes. "Better than the score showed. And it was fun, specially getting the crowd going. You hear the roar all over the course, and it's nice to get one for yourself."
That morning he had taken friends and family for the ride up Magnolia Lane. Sadly, his Masters finished with his triple-bogey seven at the 18th, via an azalea bush and a sand trap.
"We took our time comin' up the 18th," he said. "I didn't play it that well, but I enjoyed the walk. And it's been a great week. Now it's back to the real world. But I've been here once. I can always say that. There's nothing to be disappointed about. I didn't shoot the best that I'd like to shoot, but Augusta National is tough. I hate it's over."
He will have his memories and a stack of photographs. But his smile and his brave words could not disguise the essential truth of the week, which was that, like a lot of other golfers, Dave Womack was worth a whole lot more than the number on his card.
