Valentino Dixon’s drawings of the Augusta National were published by Golf Digest while he was in prison, which highlighted his plight and led to his release after 27 years

Valentino Dixon saw Amen Corner for the very first time on Tuesday, and of course it looked just as pretty as he had pictured it in his mind. Dixon, a talented artist, fell in love with Augusta National while he was serving a 39-to-life sentence in Attica for a murder he did not commit. He has never played golf, or even stepped on a course until now, but he discovered it when a prison warden at Attica gave him a photograph of Augusta’s famous 12th hole and asked if he could make a pencil copy of it. The photo spoke to him. “It seemed so peaceful,” Dixon said, “and so pretty.” He was captivated by the place. He has drawn hundreds of pictures of it since.

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In 2011, Dixon sent some of them to Golf Digest. It published his story the next year, as part of a series called Golf Saved My Life. “No one likes to hear you’re innocent,” he wrote. “I get that, and I don’t talk about my case to the inmates or guards. Everyone’s innocent, right?” Only, he really was. He had been a bystander when a 17‑year‑old boy called Torriano Jackson was shot dead on a street corner in Buffalo, and was convicted for it even though witnesses exonerated him. He had a previous conviction and got railroaded by the system. “When you’re young and black it can happen, and it happened to me.”

The article earned Dixon national publicity, and follow-up coverage on NBC, Fox and other sports networks. Last year, after 27 years in prison and countless appeals, his conviction was vacated and he was finally released. One of his lawyers, Donald Thompson, told Golf Digest that “once a case crosses a certain threshold of media attention it matters, even though it shouldn’t”. He added: “It’s embarrassing for the legal system that for a long time the best presentation of the investigation was from a golf magazine.”

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Now Dixon is free, he is trying to make a living as a full-time golf artist. Golf Digest got him a press credential for this year’s tournament. On Tuesday he was pottering around, happy as a clam. He stepped in on Tiger Wood’s press conference, and even got an impromptu putting lesson from Tom Watson. And like everyone who comes here for the first time, he was overwhelmed by how picturesque it all is, even prettier than it looks in the magazines and on TV.

“A lot of it I recognised,” he told the Augusta Chronicle. “This one tree that bends over, I’ve drawn it so many times. But just being able to see the detail in person, and the bridge and the stone, and the colouring of the stone – a photograph can’t capture that.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Spectators enjoy the sunshine at the picturesque Amen Corner during the 2013 Masters. Photograph: Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images

Of course the reason Augusta National looks so dazzlingly good is because the club spend so much time and money making it that way. Look too closely, and you realise it’s phony. Really, that inviting water has been dyed blue-black, the lush grass has been spray-painted green in the patches where it is worn thin, and that charming birdsong is piped in through the loudspeakers hidden in the trees. It only works if you check in your scepticism at the main gate along with your mobile phone. Which is fitting, because golf always involves the suspension of disbelief. Every hacker has to trick himself that the next round will be the one where it all clicks.

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Spend enough time here, though, and hypocrisy of it all starts to show through. They were there to see again on Wednesday, when the club’s chairman, Fred Ridley, gave his annual press conference. Ridley is the man who pushed through the club’s new Women’s Amateur Championship, which was held for the first time last week. Like all Augusta members, Ridley loves to talk about the club’s history and traditions, and pours it on thick as syrup when he is talking about the legacy left by the co-founders, Clifford Roberts and Bobby Jones. Until he was asked to comment on the way in which women had been excluded from here for so many years.

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And then, all of a sudden, Ridley decided he was not so keen to dwell on the past after all. “We can always look back and say we could do better, no question,” he said. “But my focus is on the future and where we are now and where we want to go. I don’t think it’s particularly …” and at this he caught himself just in time. “Well, it’s instructive to look at the past. We learn from the past. But what I think is most productive is to look at where we are today.”

And where we are is that women are allowed to play here competitively for one day a year, just so long as they are amateur. The pros on the LPGA Tour would love to do it, too. But the club is not going to let them any time soon. Because, as Ridley said moments later, “it goes back to history”. He explained that “our focus throughout our history have always been on, as far as our efforts to promote the game outside of the Masters, have always been on amateur golf”.

Envy Valentino Dixon, it is likely Augusta National won’t ever look so good to him as it did this very first time, when it all seemed so bright and beautiful. It never does.