Tradition echoes in every corner of the Augusta National. For every little change, subtle development introduced by the club, Masters week stays pretty much the same.

Players practise, debutants gape in awe of the stunning surrounds. Touts line Washington Road offering to buy and sell practice day tickets. The biggest crowds attend the preparation days, spectators are called patrons.

Everything that can be is painted a deep green to reflect the colour of the fairways or brilliant white to match the bunkers.

The week follows a similar routine, the top players visiting the interview room extolling the virtues of Tiger Woods and discussing the unique difficulties of Augusta where you don’t just have to find the greens, but the right part of the greens.

And then, on the Wednesday, there’s the par three competition, where we gain another certainty – the winner of that never goes on to claim the green jacket come Sunday night.

But Padraig Harrington, twice a winner of this wonderfully convivial short hole contest, is the candidate for the Change Party. He refuses to accept that the Par 3 event is potential curse.

“I’ll be playing and trying to win it,” he said. “I’m hoping that winning it three times might be a charm. I believe that if you want to put some spin on it superstitious-wise, if you’ve won it twice you are bound to win the actual event.”

Harrington insists it offers a perfect eve of tournament tune up. “A little nine hole light-hearted bit of fun, card in your hand can help you get focused,” he said.

It also helps you get used to the inevitable tensions of a major week. The Open Champion revealed: “People don’t realise, you stand on that first tee, it’s a 100 yard shot and you can’t tell where the wind is coming from.

“It’s your first shot of the day, your bearings are off and the crowd is six or eight or ten feet from the hole and you are thinking don’t hit it in the crowd!

“It’s one of the most nerve wracking shots of the week.”

The Par 3 tournament is no longer for Woods though. It is not that he wants to be saddled with “the curse” more that it gets in the way of his usual meticulous routine.

“It’s changed,” said the four-time champion who hasn’t played it for several years. “I thought it was a lot of fun to play, but now it is a little bit distracting to get ready for the tournament.”

One of the most recent changes to the Masters was the re-introduction of the eligibility rule that allows every winner on the PGA Tour a place in the tournament.

This has produced tickets for Brian Bateman, Nick Watney, Daniel Chopra, DJ Trahan, J.B. Holmes, Steve Lowery and, as recently as last Sunday, Johnson Wagner who triumphed at the Houston Open.

“This is a dream come true to be here,” said Wagner. Even before he arrived he was ready to buy into the Augusta practice day tradition of trying to skim across the water a practice day tee shot on the par 3 sixteenth.

Wagner struggled to sleep on the night of his Houston triumph. He said: “All I could think about was skipping balls across sixteen and getting the gallery to give me a big roar.”

He is staying at a house with a swimming pool and a perfectly placed grass bank that offers a great chance to practice the shot, but he won’t take the opportunity for fear of upsetting the neighbours. “They probably wouldn’t appreciate it,” Wagner conceded.

American Boo Weekley continues to entertain us in the local Augusta Chronicle newspaper. “There are some pretty golf courses, but this is by far the prettiest I have set foot on,” he says in his daily diary.

“You see some monuments out there and stuff like that. I didn’t look at none of them. I just saw them.”

Weekley’s refreshing honesty (he admitted at the Open that he didn’t know St Andrews was the home of golf) continues in his column. “I couldn’t tell you what three holes were Amen Corner,” he admitted.

He also confessed that it took him around an hour to work the navigation system in his car to find where he is staying this week. He is my kind of guy.

Finally for now – happy times have returned to the Five Live house where our luggage finally turned up more than 24 hours late and vibrant table tennis and basketball tournaments have begun.

Andrew Cotter and Alistair Bruce-Ball are the early ping-pong pacesetters, but another Augusta tradition is that first round leaders rarely go on to win. The week is young.