The Magnificent Masters: Jack Nicklaus, Johnny Miller, Tom Weiskopf, and the 1975 Cliffhanger at Augusta (4 page)

“Outside the gates was so horrible, and inside the gates was so perfect,” says Ben Wright, an Englishman who had initially covered the Masters as the first golf correspondent for the
Financial Times
in 1966. “It was a total contrast.”

When constructed, Augusta National Golf Club was in the country, although only three miles northwest of downtown. To viewers on television, the manicured layout colored in hues of deep green still looked like it was miles from civilization, somewhere deep in the Georgia countryside. In reality, the property had become engulfed by commercial establishments, strip malls, and residential neighborhoods. The course had literally turned into a golfing oasis.

The main thoroughfare outside the club is Georgia Highway 28, commonly referred to as Washington Road. It’s named indirectly for the nation’s first president as it was the road connecting Augusta to Washington, Georgia. Golf’s ultimate pinch-me moment occurs when players turn off of Washington at the main guard gate. Magnolia Lane lies in front of them—330-feet of paved asphalt that runs straight to the front of the clubhouse. Making the drive under a canopy of sixty-one magnolia trees means they’ve arrived at the game’s most hallowed doorstep. The invitation they received in the mail just months earlier has come to life.

IT’S UNFATHOMABLE
, but in the beginning players actually turned down invitations to the Masters. Even holding an annual tournament at Augusta National Golf Club wasn’t an initial thought in the mind of the legendary figure who founded the club.

Robert Tyre Jones, Jr.—Bob to his friends, Bobby to his legion of fans—was possibly the most famous sportsman in America during
his tenure on the links. Throughout the 1920s, radio and newspapers carried the news of his exploits, creating a man of mythical proportions who was universally admired for his humility, integrity, and thoughtfulness.

Jones was America’s first golfing prodigy, having picked up the game as a five year old at East Lake Country Club in Atlanta. At age fourteen, he reached the quarterfinals of the U.S. Amateur in 1916. At age twenty-one, he captured his first major at the 1923 U.S. Open, a championship he would win a record-tying four times. He added a record five U.S. Amateur titles, three British Opens, and one British Amateur—all without devoting his complete attention to the game. He was an amateur—a term derived from the Latin word
amare
, meaning love. He played the game not for money but for the love of it. And the public loved him back. He was afforded the rare honor of two ticker tape parades in New York City following returns from British Open triumphs in 1926 and 1930.

Jones left the most improbable accomplishment for last. In a span of 120 days in 1930, he won what were considered the four majors of that period—the British Amateur at St. Andrews, the British Open at Royal Liverpool, the U.S. Open at Interlachen, and then the U.S. Amateur at Merion. It was referred to as the Impregnable Quadrilateral, or the Grand Slam—the greatest feat in golf history. Three months later, he retired from competitive golf at age twenty-eight.

At that time, Jones’s efforts to build his own golf club were already underway. He had enlisted a New York investment banker he’d met named Clifford Roberts to help him, and they began scouting parcels in Augusta, Georgia—a town on the eastern side of the state that cozied up to the state line with South Carolina and was at the time Georgia’s second largest city.

Founded in 1736 as a trading post on the banks of the Savannah River, Augusta had once been an industrial center of the Confederacy. On his “March to the Sea” in 1864, however, General William Sherman bypassed the city. As one of the few cities in the South
with its infrastructure intact following the Civil War, Augusta expanded its canal to the river and became a hub of cotton manufacturing. Its success soon attracted northerners looking for a convenient vacation spot where the winters were mild. Grand hotels and golf courses were constructed, and Augusta was on par with Pinehurst, North Carolina, and nearby Aiken, South Carolina, as holiday destinations after the turn of the century.

Upon seeing a 365-acre site that was once home to Fruitlands Nurseries—one of the largest in the South—Jones knew they had found the spot. “It seems that this land had been lying here for years just waiting for someone to lay a golf course upon it,” wrote Jones in his book
Golf Is My Game
. In 1931, the site was purchased, architect Dr. Alister MacKenzie was chosen to design the course (with significant input from Jones), and construction began.

It was absolutely the worse time to build a golf course. When the club formally opened for play in January 1933, the country was coming off its worst year of the Great Depression with 23.6 percent unemployment and a gross national product that fell by 13.4 percent. Roberts had figured selling national memberships to a private club built by the world’s most famous golfer would be effortless. Suddenly, even with an initiation fee of $350 and annual dues of $60, he could get few men to join. By 1935, the number of golf courses in the United States had contracted by a third, and Augusta National would dangle on a financial teeter-totter with its survival unsure for years.

For Jones, difficult times didn’t dampen lofty goals. He wanted to bring a U.S. Open to his course. America’s national championship was his true love. He finished first or second eight times in a nine-year span. With Jones’s stature and connections within the United States Golf Association, his dream was to have the championship played in the South for the first time. But the Open was traditionally held in June or July when the club would be closed during the hot Georgia summers, and USGA officials feared that moving the championship up to March or April would create too much of an
inconvenience for players and the qualifiers that would have to be held in parts of the country that might still have snow on the ground. And they thought Augusta was too small to support the event.

Jones’s disappointment inspired a thought in Roberts. The club could hold its own tournament and make it unique. There would be no qualifying to get in the field. It would be invitation-only.

The intention wasn’t for the tournament to become a major championship or a championship of any sort. For Jones, nothing rivaled the U.S. Open. In fact, Jones, Roberts, and Fielding Wallace, the club’s first secretary, initially believed conducting a successful event might entice the USGA to bring the Open southward. Instead, their tournament would be a celebration of golf—the great champions, top players of the day, and Bobby Jones. And, everyone with a financial stake hoped the tournament would help sell more memberships.

First, they needed Bob Jones to come out of retirement. He would be the major drawing card. Jones didn’t want to play, but he realized the benefits his appearance would bring and eventually relented.

Then, they needed lots of publicity. For that, there was member Grantland Rice, the preeminent sports writer of the time. O.B. Keeler, who had followed Jones’s entire career, was also on board. Persuading their fellow scribes of the era to cover the tournament wasn’t a problem either. Most of them adored Jones and were delighted to provide good publicity to any endeavor with which he was associated.

Since it was going to be an invitational, players would have to be invited. At the time, telephone usage was expensive, and not only did many people not have one, but those who did often shared a party line with others. The telegraph had been in use for nearly a century, but it was far too informal. Therefore, formal invitations were mailed. It was the least expensive, quickest, and most convenient and reliable form of communication in 1934.

All former champions of the U.S. Open and U.S. Amateur were invited, as well as the top players from the present day. Even with Bobby Jones committed to play, the acceptance rate wasn’t 100
percent. In those tough economic times, there were players who couldn’t afford to travel and leave their club jobs for a week.

With Jones in the field of seventy-two, the inaugural tournament teed off on March 22, 1934. R.S. Stonehouse struck the opening tee shot on what’s now the 10th hole (the nines had been reversed during construction, and they were reversed again prior to the second Masters). Horton Smith, one of the game’s young stars who would meet his future wife that week (the daughter of member Alfred S. Bourne), won the tournament. Jones finished a respectable tied for 13th and continued to play in the Masters until 1947.

The following year, Gene Sarazen, the game’s top player who wasn’t in the field in 1934 because of a previously scheduled tour of South America, entered. He seemingly had no chance to win as he stood in the fairway of the 15th hole—which had been the 6th the previous year. This hole was a downhill par five with water in front of the green. Just 220 yards away, Sarazen decided to go for the green on his second shot. He hit a 4-wood that cleared the water and tracked right into the hole for a double eagle. With one swing, the 15th at Augusta National became one of the most famous holes in golf with the rarest feat in golf mythologized at the typewriters of Rice, Keeler, and others. Sarazen’s double eagle spurred him on to tie Craig Wood, who had all but been handed the winner’s check. Sarazen won in a playoff the next day.

After only its second year, the Masters achieved star status, but it wasn’t officially the Masters. Roberts had originally proposed the event be called the Masters Tournament, and in fact, that’s what nearly everyone from club members to press members called it from the very beginning. Jones objected, thinking it too presumptuous, and it was officially the Augusta National Invitation Tournament. By 1939, he relented on this as well.

Jones, Sarazen, and the public relations machine had put the Masters on the front pages of sports sections across America. But it would take the Second World War and a reset for both the country and the club before the tournament would really take off.

Initially, the Masters had been anything but a financial success, but it survived the Depression. Following the War, its commitment to excellence, forward thinking, and the decision to plow money back into the course and tournament were paying off. It had weathered the storm and positioned itself as one of the top tournaments in golf.

The star soon became the course itself with dramatic elevation changes, ingenious green complexes, and memorable risk-reward holes. The goal was a links-style golf course that made players think with many features taken from Jones and MacKenzie’s favorite, the Old Course in St. Andrews, Scotland. The layout, with scattered hillocks and mounds, had relatively few bunkers and no rough. It was not particularly long either, but in Jones’s opinion it provided “the most interesting test of golf in America.” The generous width of the fairways emphasized second shots with preferred angles of attack from certain sides, and the greens were large and undulating. The routing of the holes provided constant change in direction. Owing to the land’s history, it became a most esthetically pleasing course with azaleas, dogwoods, and pines lining the corridors.

The players were treated better at Augusta National than at any other stop on the professional circuit. From the beginning, the tournament rounds were contested over four days, at a time when tournaments usually were three-day affairs with 36 holes on a Saturday to skirt blue laws and the Sabbath. The pairings were changed daily, and players were grouped in speedier twosomes for every round. In the late-1940s, scoreboards were placed throughout the course instead of employing standard bearers to walk with each group. In the early-1950s, ropes lined the playing areas of each hole with only contestants and caddies allowed inside them. Annually, the purse was one of the largest in golf, and, unlike other tournaments, there was no entry fee. In 1951, officials paid every single professional in the field, and once a cut was instituted in 1957, they kept paying those who missed it. And of course with its limited invitation-only field,
the Masters, as its name implied, developed an air of exclusivity with players treated more like guests instead of competitors.

In addition to the players, there was a commitment to the enjoyment of spectators—or patrons as Roberts preferred to call them. Natural mounding was constructed around greens for better sight-lines. There was a lack of overt commercialization. There was private security. In 1960, the club worked with television to create a new scoring system using numbers in relation to par—red numbers to signify how many strokes under par a player was at that point, green ones representing over par. Prices of food, beverage, and merchandise remained reasonable. By 1975, a ham sandwich cost just sixty-five cents and a Coca-Cola forty cents. “We put some meat into the sandwiches, too, and our Cokes are fourteen ounces,” club manager Phil Wahl pointed out. There was no charge for on-site parking in one of 10,000 spaces. Spectator guides with a map of the course, descriptions of the holes, and bios of the players were always complimentary since their first publication in 1949, as were daily pairing sheets. The goal was to provide patrons with an unparalleled experience.

The tournament’s reputation was also enhanced when each of the first nine Masters was won by a future World Golf Hall of Famer, a trend that continued with the likes of Sam Snead, Ben Hogan, Jimmy Demaret, and Cary Middlecoff after the war. To the general public, big name winners meant it was a big tournament. And the club got even more attention in the 1950s when one of its members, Dwight D. Eisenhower, was elected President of the United States.

Images of Eisenhower at Augusta were yet another symbol to be ingrained in the minds of the sporting public. There was the iconic logo devised by Jones himself, an outline of the United States with a flagstick and hole cut where Georgia lies. There was the green jacket, initially made for club members to wear. Beginning in 1949, a jacket was awarded to each champion—one of the most distinguished and recognizable awards in sports. And unlike other championships, having
the Masters at the same course year-after-year meant the public was intimately familiar with holes such as 15 and 16 and 18.