If sport is meant to be unscripted drama then nobody bothered to tell the people who run the show at the Masters.

Chances are that Lady Gaga will have been invited to become Augusta National's first female member long before the gents in green jackets try doing anything off the cuff. Improvisation just isn't their style.

Worse still, the script seems even more important for the fawning American media. The very thought that the tournament might depart in any way from its customary narrative is enough to give them a fit of the vapours. They come along with a fixed idea of what is going to happen, and nothing is going to deflect them from recording it that way.

Helpfully, Augusta dishes up enough 'timeless traditions' and schmaltzy nods to an invented past to keep them in business. And nothing is more timeless or schmaltzy than the ceremonial tee-off which gets the tournament underway.

This ritual is, to quote Augusta's own publicity material, 'an evolving celebration of the tournament's great championship history'. Well, they were never likely to describe it as a bunch of dyspeptic old goats prodding a ball a few yards down the widest fairway on earth, were they? And nor should we, given that two Scotsmen were in at the start of the whole affair.

Jock Hutchison, a son of St Andrews who returned to his home town to win the 1921 Open Championship, and Fred McLeod, who won the 1908 US Open (at the gloriously named Myopia Hunt Club) 26 years after drawing his first breath in North Berwick, became Augusta's first honorary starters when they hit the first shots at the 1963 event.

The ceremony was quietly forgotten about for a few years after McLeod and Hutchison passed away in the mid-Seventies. It was revived, though, in the early Eighties when the celebrated trio of Gene Sarazen, Byron Nelson and Sam Snead took on the task for the greater part of the next two decades. Nelson retired in 2001, while Sarazen and Snead both died in office, in 1999 and 2002 respectively.

I was there when Snead hit that last shot exactly a decade ago. Had you read the US press the following day you would have gathered that Slammin' Sam might have lost a few yards off his famously prodigious drives, but he could still put it straight down the middle. Now I don't want to talk ill of the deceased – Snead died the following month – but straight down the middle was exactly where his ball did not go.

Where it did go was straight between the eyes of a rather porky spectator to the right of that first fairway. Snead's swing looked healthy enough from a distance, but the result was a spectacular slice which copped this hapless fellow on the bridge of the nose, laying him out cold, smashing his glasses and producing a vivid streak of blood across his cheek. Not since the great days of President Gerald Ford's off-piste excursions had a punter been decked by a golf ball quite so spectacularly as this.

Now at risk of getting a late invitation to the Leveson Inquiry, I was almost wetting myself with mirth at this point. In fairness, I had figured that the chap was still alive, and I would have worn a more sombre expression if I suspected otherwise, but it was a scene of rich comic possibility. Except to the American members of the fourth estate who had been there as well and who duly drew a discreet veil over the event and basically tried to pretend it hadn't happened.

It wasn't in their script, you see. And I suspect their coverage of yesterday's start will take a similarly circumspect tack this morning. From what I could see, the bringing together of golf's Big Three – Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Gary Player – as honorary starters of the 76th Masters tournament fell some way short (as their drives did) of being a runaway success, not least because Palmer looked like the only one of the trio who actually wanted to be there.

It was a little like watching an episode of Last of the Summer Wine, knowing that two of the cast would rather be in The Young Ones. But then, Palmer, now 82, has had a lot more time to practice for his dotage. As much as he is remembered as one of the giants of the game, his major-winning days ended in 1964, when he won his fourth Masters at the age of 34. Player and Nicklaus carried on collecting green jackets into their forties.

Palmer, then, has been playing the amiable old cove for the best part of 50 years. He was a ceremonial presence at Augusta long before he became a ceremonial starter. The 72-year-old Nicklaus, who finished sixth at the Masters as recently as 1998, seems finally to have accepted that he has moved into the Grand Old Man category, but Player, 76, would sooner stick tee pegs up his nostrils and dive naked into Rae's Creek than admit that his competitive days are behind him.

Nicklaus, for his part, has been an advocate of the Tee It Forward programme, which encourages golfers to play off tee positions more suited to their abilities than try to hit from where the professionals play. In which case, Palmer should maybe have set off from 20 yards short of the first green rather than from in front of the famous Augusta clubhouse.

By contrast, Player, who had presumably warmed up for the occasion with his usual routine of 500 pre-dawn press-ups before enjoying a hearty breakfast of vitamin pills, swung with an action seemingly little changed from 1957, the year he first played at Augusta.

There was a time when all three could hit the ball out of sight. In one sense, then, nothing has changed. "I don't think any of us could see that far," said Nicklaus when he was asked how far their shots hard travelled. On this occasion, though, his reply said more about their eyesight than their golf.