Imagine a basketball court with lumps and bumps all over the floor so the players stumble and the ball bounces unpredictably. Imagine a tennis court with slopes that deflect the path of the ball at unforseeable angles. Imagine table tennis played in a wind storm.

That’s the 2016 Masters.

When stars like Phil Mickelson and Rickie Fowler miss the cut… When Masters champion Patrick Scott struggles to break 80… When the world’s best golfers fail miserably to control their game…

When this kind of fiasco occurs, it’s time to question the way the course is set up.

Nobody can play golf on a cement surface. Nobody can hit  a 300-yard drive straight in a hurricane. The outcome of a game played under such conditions is based on luck, not skill.

The Masters course is dried out by the cold and wind. The greens are as slick as hardwood table tops. The fairways are as hard as four-lane highways. Ball control is out of the question.

If the snobs who run the Masters have any sense, they will shorten the course today, turn on the sprinklers to soften the fairways and greens, modify the difficulty of the pin placements and give the players a chance to show off their skills.

We fans deserve a show we can applaud, not the humiliation of our heroes. Even the Masters can lose its luster if egotistic idiots insist on making Augusta unplayable.