As you know, I normally only add a diary piece after every event that I've played in. However, I thought I'd make an exception to that rule for the major weeks of the year so here are my thoughts from the year's first big event.

As a boy I used to turn on the television on Saturday night with great anticipation, to see Steve Ryder present coverage of the first big golf tournament of the year from the stunning Augusta National. The spring time colours were always a pleasure to tune into and it always felt like the start of the golfing season.

Back in the late eighties the coverage of The Masters was very limited as I remember it, with only the back nine being covered and only at the weekend to boot. The saying 'it all begins on the back nine on Sunday' was, for those of us not lucky enough to be there in person, literally true.

Things certainly have changed a lot in those twenty years. Live coverage of the par three contest and Amen Corner on interactive channels and web feeds, coverage of the whole course on all four days now available and the field itself has opened up so that whereas the Masters really was an invitational event, it now has a qualifying process in place. However, when the invitation drops onto your front doorstep, believe me it feels like you have been invited personally by the chairman and it will always feel like a privilege to be invited, not a right for the world's top golfers. That alone sets The Masters slightly apart from golf's other three major events.

Some things haven't changed in twenty years though, in that when Steve Ryder used to show us the leaderboard for the first time, invariably a European golfer would be near the top of it. This year was no different, with my good friends Ian Poulter and Paul Casey flying the flag well into the tournament. Lee Westwood was there most of the way too, looking like he was playing perhaps the best golf from tee to green, but as we all know by now, if you don't putt fantastically well at The Masters you just cannot win it and that looked to be the case last week for Lee.

Our Open champion showed his battling qualities to finish in fifth place and although never really in contention to win it, it shows just how Padraig has become a major player in the game. And a man we all love on tour, Miguel Angel Jimenez, smoked his way to eighth place with a great last round of sixty eight.

And so to the winner - one used to think that major winners followed a career path that would include a glittering amateur career, slow but steady progress on one of the world's two main tours before becoming a regular winner, then cementing yourself as a world player by winning in America as well as Europe and of course your homeland. Only after all this experience had been gained did the golfing world believe that a player would hold up to the pressure that the closing holes of a major championship bring with it.

There have been exceptions over the years but this year's champion, Trevor Immelman, followed this path almost exactly. Trevor always looked as though he had the game to become a major winner, but turning that talent and all the expectations that come with it into a golfer with a green jacket on his back is no mean feat. In the last couple of years, he has fought back from illness and become a father - maybe this life experience has helped him on his journey to the top. In the end he won at a canter, but that last furlong, especially at Augusta National, seems like the longest, hardest finishing stretch in golf with all the disasters that lie in wait. Trevor finished things of clinically and so The Masters could not have a more deserving champion.