AUGUSTA, Ga. -- The green jackets arrive at Brickle's Cleaners on Washington Road with wine stains on their sleeves, half-smoked cigars and old scorecards in their pockets, and when the weather doesn't cooperate at the Masters, completely soaked with rain.

That's when Tracy Brickle goes to work. He will run them through his massive dry-cleaning machine for exactly 47 minutes and 53 seconds, then use a pedal-operated steam press to flatten out the wrinkles. They are transferred to a shoulder stand for one final, careful inspection, with Brickle eyeing every crease and thread.

Each one is placed on a wire hanger with a cardboard guard, and the sleeves are stuffed with acid-free tissue paper to make them look perfectly round. The most famous garment in sports is then bagged in the same plastic used on all the dress shirts and suits in the shop.

The cost: $6.81.

"They did a thing on the green jackets the other night on ESPN, and all the players talked about how much they wanted to get their hands on one," Brickle said from the family's store this week. "I have to tell them, I get to touch one just about every day."

As the sun begins to set on Sunday evening at Augusta National, one of the 87 golfers in the field will slip on one of those famous green jackets in a ceremony that is as iconic as the tournament itself. That champion is allowed to keep his jacket for one year, and if history is any indication, he will take full advantage of that honor.

But what if he messes it up?

Bubba Watson wore his while eating at Waffle House, a scattered-and-smothered accident waiting to happen. Phil Mickelson took his through the drive-thru at Krispy Kreme, sticky fingers be damned. Tiger Woods brought his to bed and "held it like little blankie" while he slept, and Adam Scott partied so hard with his at an Australian pub, a button fell off.

No one wore the thing out quite like Sergio Garcia, the 2017 champ. He donned it at his wedding, at the pitch of a Real Madrid soccer game and to ring the opening bell on Wall Street. He looked down before he was about to do a morning show last April and saw huge grease stains on his sleeve, then felt the same way he would if a tee shot was headed for Rae's Creek.

"I'm thinking, 'My God, I've had the jacket for a day and a half and I already have two massive stains on it,'" Garcia said. "What am I going to do?"

Brickle knows what to do. He has seen every possible stain at his shop on Washington Road in Evans, Ga., just a 15-minute drive from Magnolia Lane. He is the equivalent of the men in white gloves who polish the Stanley Cup, responsible for keeping the biggest prize in golf from losing its luster.

And nobody knows who he is.

# # #

Augusta National has revealed almost every detail about its green jackets, which is big part of the lore of this place.

They are exclusively made at the Hamilton Tailoring Co. of Cincinnati, with tropical-weight wool -- about two and a half yards of it -- from a mill in Dublin, Ga. The brass buttons are made in Massachusetts. The breast-pocket patch, with the club's logo, is sewn in North Carolina.

The entire jacket takes about a month to produce and costs about $250. The only people who have one are the tournament's champions and the club's exclusive (and private) list of about 300 CEOs and power brokers who are members, and they are strictly forbidden from taking them off the course.

All that we know. But how they're cleaned?

That was a closely guarded Augusta National secret. I asked a club spokesman for the information via email last week, and he replied that he could not provide any background on the topic and, taking that no comment a step further, politely asked that I didn't quote him in any story.

So I launched an investigation. Members pleaded ignorance. Cold calls produced no results. An undercover sting operation at the club itself was fruitless. Finally, when reached at her home in Augusta, the 78-year-old matriarch of the Brickle's family business came (ahem) clean.

"We've been doing them for a long time," Wiley Brickle said. "A looooong time. The Masters is a big deal. It really is. You've got people from all over the world who come here to watch it. For us, it's more of a privilege that they allow us to clean them."

Why Brickle's? Why this dry cleaning shop, the one a few miles down Washington Road in a white stucco-faced building with pink trim next to a Publix grocery store and across the street from -- what else -- a Waffle House?

"I have never asked why," she said. "They just like the way we do them, babe. We take very special care of them."

It was Tracy Brickle who explained, in painstaking detail in a pair of interviews, just how special.

He is a 52-year-old Georgia football fan with bushy eyebrows who has lived in the Augusta area all his life. He suffered a mild stroke a few years back, losing some feeling in his right hand, but that hasn't kept him from doing a job he learned as a grade-school kid.

Twenty-four hours before the first golfers tee it up the club down the road, a half dozen employees are in the back of the shop pressing dresses and zipping them along on garment conveyors. The place smells like chemicals from the machines and cigarette smoke from the break area, and Brickle warns his visitor to watch for the low-hanging pipes.

Brickle doesn't have any green jackets to clean -- they are usually brought in, a dozen or so at a time, in the weeks before and after the Masters -- but he'll be ready with same-day service if one needs a tournament-week sprucing up. But that only happens if they get here before 10 a.m. Hey, rules are rules.

They all may look the same to the untrained eye, but Brickle knows better. Each garment requires a slightly different treatment. Some are older than the top players in the field.

"There are so many different green jackets," he said. "Some of them, you have to press really hard. Some of them, you can barely put an iron on them. You have to know how to handle each one."

This is why, he said, he handles each one from start to finish. Only three people are allowed to touch them in the shop -- his driver, his wife and himself -- and only Brickle does the cleaning. Teaching someone else how to handle them, he said, would be "too much of a headache."

Stains are not usually a problem, unless the jacket's owner makes the mistake of trying to rub it out himself. If it rains, like it did when Scott won in 2013, he'll hang the jackets for several hours to let them air dry.

"If they get rained on and you throw them in the machine," Brickle said, "you'll ruin them."

He hasn't ruined one yet.

He's not about to, either.

# # #

Brickle's family, like most people who live in Augusta, have a long relationship with the Masters. His father, Bill, used to work in the leader board on the 15th hole until he died. His mother remembers walking to the course "back when it wasn't much more than a cow pasture."

But Tracy Brickle believes his connection is deeper. He once drove the company's van down Magnolia Lane to deliver the cleaned jackets -- he was told to never do that again -- and used to pick up Sam Snead's dry cleaning personally at his hotel during tournament week.

"I've only put one jacket on," Brickle said. "I put on Jack Nicklaus' jacket and I told Augusta National that I put it on. We're the same exact size in jackets. It felt good. They wear really well."

He figures that as few as five Augusta members know that he's the one who cleans their jackets, and the PGA pros certainly have no idea. That's not a surprise. How often does anyone really think about their dry cleaning unless somebody screws it up?

When the jackets return to Augusta National from his shop, they are taken out of Brickle's plastic bags and placed inside the lockers belonging to the members and past champions. On Sunday evening, either an old winner will slip his on again or a new entrant to the club will get one placed on his shoulders.

Then that happy golfer will take it out into the real world, an accident waiting to happen at every Waffle House or overcrowded pub. He need not worry about those stains, though. Not with Brickle back in Augusta, waiting.

"I'll get 'em out."

Steve Politi may be reached at spoliti@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @StevePoliti. Find NJ.com on Facebook.