“Yes, yes, yes,” cried Sam Torrance. “Ooh, ooh, ooh,” groaned Peter Alliss. People call golf a passionless game, but clearly they forget Augusta, where birds chirrup the spring's glad tidings from pine to pine, where azaleas riot in fertile protuberance and where, if you crouch quietly by your television set, you will soon enough hear the unmistakeable call of the golf commentator coming into season.

They love it out there, don't they? If you'd had a dollar for every time Gary Lineker paused to hymn the majesty of “this glorious course”, you'd have earned more last week than Gary Player's caddy. Alliss, meanwhile, seemed hell-bent on a mission to say the word “magic” more times across four days than Paul Daniels has managed to say it in a whole career.

Of course, these days, it's nice to find something that “the Voice of Golf” does feel unequivocally content with. Far be it from us to suggest that Alliss, in the years of his anecdotage, has entered a state of worldly disenchantment from which not even the most incautiously stiff gin and tonic at sundown might bring him back. But he does definitely enjoy a grump.

Consider the scene as Trevor Immelman and Brandt Snedeker walked together through the lengthening shadows up the 18th fairway on that final day - the culmination of this tournament. And what was Alliss up to? He was moaning about how long it had taken them to get there. “I really do think the powers that be need to think very carefully about timings,” he said.

Still, fair point. Upwards of five hours does seem a pretty long time for two men to get around 18 golf holes, however magical, especially given that, as Alliss carefully pointed out, these people don't have to look for their own balls. And if the place really was as magical as everyone was saying, surely the players would be finding the odd portal between holes and speeding things up.

Another example of Alliss's harrumphing: in the split second after the ball left the face of Immelman's club, on his approach shot to the final green, the predictable freelance glory-seeker in the gallery shouted, “Geddinthahole!” “Oh, shut up,” Alliss said. Again, grumpy - but likely to chime loudly, one felt, with the watching audience. We understand the committee at the Augusta National Golf Club to have been quite resourceful, historically, about restricting the kinds of people it admits. Can't it find some way to exclude society's “Geddinthahole” minority? Surely even the forces of political correctness would turn a blind eye.

Anyhow, remember that, at Augusta, one is continually being fed soft-focus shots of the course, set to gentle, acoustic, guitar-led Muzak. Now, I'm as big a fan of a well-mown lawn as the next man, but, for broad portions of the Masters coverage, you could easily be watching a commercial for private healthcare. In which context a bit of grumpiness, like that demonstrated by Alliss, turns out to be a handy corrective.

Similarly, thank heavens for Ken Brown's video inserts. The BBC analyst is one of a small number of people who may walk on the greens at the Augusta National without getting shot, and he did so to great effect and with great energy. Indeed, one has not seen sports-related gardening like it since the golden days of Tony Greig's biro-injected wicket inspections for Sky Sports.

Brown patted the greens, stroked them, demonstrated their different cut-lengths at the fringe. If he had rolled about on them naked, it would not have surprised us. It would, however, have got him shot. Only people who have won the Masters at least three times are allowed to roll on the greens in the nude.

“It's great to have David Bellamy working for us,” mocked Lineker. Brown was Bellamy as impersonated by Lenny Henry, really. Yet no one else brought home as vividly what those players were up against. The image will live long of Brown tossing three balls behind him on the green at the 17th. And, well, “gwapple my gwapenuts” if those balls weren't sliding back towards his feet from an entirely different direction about a minute later.

Hats off to Immelman, then, who prevailed in the face of this pastoral deviousness, and celebrated immediately with his small son, as Zach Johnson did last year.

Our worry is that one day, a not especially famous golfer will ascend to glory at Augusta without an infant to pep up the emotional post-round scenes. It may be an idea to have a spare one on stand-by in Butler Cabin, just in case.

A handful of healthcare commercials later, the South African was being levered into the fabled green jacket, which is, let's face it, in simple material terms, sport's worst prize. I mean, look at it. And they're not even allowed to keep it. Would it kill the organisers to stretch to some trousers one year, and make it a suit? And then let them take it home? It's not like they don't earn it.