For Golf Nuts Only

Rich Friedman

THE MASTERS: AN INTERACTIVE JOURNEY THROUGH ITS SIXTY-YEAR HISTORY Creative Multimedia, 513 Northwest 13th Ave., Suite 400, Portland, OR 97209, (503) 241-1530, $39.99

You have to breathe golf 24 hours a day and adore trivia about the Masters tournament to appreciate this CD-ROM (which requires Windows 3.1 or higher). If you don't fall into this category, you can stop reading.

Question: What is the longest putt in Masters' history? (A 100-foot birdie putt by Nick Faldo in 1989 at the second hole in the third round.)

Question: Which player missed a 1-inch putt? (Tommy Armour at the tenth hole in 1937.)

Question: What was the weather like for last year's Masters? (Good weather prevailed throughout the fifty-eighth Masters, with cool mornings and warm, sunny afternoons. Variable winds were at times erratic, which helped make scoring moderately high.)

And so it goes. If you want to relive, ad nauseam, Curtis Strange's 1988 hole in one on the twelfth hole via a small video window, it's there. We also learn that "the 12th has been the pivotal point in many a Masters, 1993 average score was 3.42, by far the highest number over par for any hole." Wind, we're told, was the primary culprit. In addition, there are aerial video views and 3-D computer-generated contour animations of each green showing the pin placements used throughout the years.

From the 1930s through the 1990s, there's a list of every player who made the cut, including his score, and for the winners, there's an elaborate scorecard of how they played each of the 72 holes. Even Bobby Jones, who was the creator of the Augusta National course, makes a cameo appearance. And for only $9.95, direct from Creative Multimedia, you can append this year's results to the overflowing Masters' trivia war chest you already own .