‘A tradition unlike any other’: The Masters Tournament and controlled consumption in professional golf

Contemporary sport is increasingly organised around a prosumer logic in which audiences simultaneously consume, produce, and circulate sporting content through digital and networked media. This shift has intensified the commodification, mediatisation, and rationalisation of sport consumption, positioning fan participation as a central organising principle. In contrast, the Masters Tournament represents a striking institutional anomaly within this landscape. Through the prohibition of most electronic devices, the maintenance of analogue scoreboards, and the regulation of patron behaviour, the first major tournament in the men's professional golf calendar curates a form of consumption rooted in presence, scarcity, and tradition, whilst permitting limited personal image capture through digital cameras. Drawing on sociological theory, particularly Weber's analysis of rationalisation, Bauman's critique of consumer society, and scholarship on the collapse of production–consumption boundaries, this article examines The Masters as a critical case of the selective management of participation within prosumer sport culture. The analysis demonstrates how institutional control, exclusion, and symbolic power preserve a distinctive, presence-based mode of consumption within a digitally saturated sporting landscape. The article contributes to the sociology of sport by interrogating the limits of prosumption and demonstrating how elite sporting institutions regulate participation to maintain cultural authority, prestige, and social distinction.