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The Masters

Although it may seem that the four major championships have been the four major championships forever, that isn't even close to being the case. In fact, there is considerable disagreement on exactly when the notion of golf's current Grand Slam came into being. As recently as 1953, when Ben Hogan became the first and only man to win the Masters, the U.S. Open, and the British Open in the same year, he didn't even play in the PGA. What's more, he never returned to Great Britain to defend the title he had won at Carnoustie or anytime thereafter.

Imagine a golfer in today's world somehow pulling off the miracle of winning the first three majors in a year and then passing up the PGA. It just wouldn't happen. Of course, Hogan's decision was based at least in part on the difficulty of rushing back from Great Britain and then going through seven days of match play at a time when he still hadn't completely recovered from the 1949 automobile accident that almost killed him. But, even so, if a player today had to crawl around the course for a chance at sweeping the four majors he would do just that.

Shortly before the Open was played for the thirty-fifth time (there hadn't been a tournament in 1870 because Young Tom Morris had retired the championship belt by winning it three straight times and no one had yet come up with something else to play for), the U.S. Golf Association decided to hold a national championship of its own. It was held at Newport Country Club, 36 holes played on the same 9-hole course in one day. The winner was Horace Rawlins, who shot 173. In 1898, for the fourth U.S. Open, the USGA matched its British counterpart by extending the event to 72 holes. But it was only in 1900, when the great Harry Vardon ventured across the Atlantic to win the championship, that the Open played in the U.S. began to approach the status of the Open played in Great Britain.

In fact, in 1930 when Bob Jones won his historic Grand Slam, the four events that made up the Slam were the U.S. and British Opens and the U.S. and British Amateurs. In those days it wasn't automatic that a top golfer turned professional, because it wasn't a terribly lucrative profession. Almost all pros held club jobs in addition to playing in tournaments and, to a cultured man like Jones, who held a law degree, the notion of playing golf to make a living was absurd. As late as the 1950s very good players passed up the chance to turn pro because it was such an uncertain way to make a living. Only the very top players made big money. It wasn't until Arnold Palmer came along and brought both corporate America and TV to the game that the tour started to become the place to be for almost anyone who showed an ounce of ability.

A little more than a year after winning his Slam, Jones and his friend Clifford Roberts purchased a piece of property in Augusta, Georgia, called Fruitlands Nursery. On July 15, 1931, the lead story in the Augusta Chronicle carried the headline "Bobby Jones to Build His Ideal Golf Course on Berckman's Place." (The Berckman family had owned the nursery) The subheadline read: "National Club Will Be Headed by Great Golfer." The somewhat hyperbolic news story began this way: "Bobby Jones, King of the links for probably all time, whose superiority in golf has been displayed on the finest golf courses in the entire world, has come to Augusta to build his ideal golf course."

Jones's prestige and Roberts's business acumen got the golf course built and the club started although it was in the midst of the depression. Most of the charter members - fifty-nine men who paid $350 each to join - were from New York, men who did business with Roberts. The club opened in January 1933, and Jones and Roberts began planning an invitational golf tournament right from the start. The first Masters was played in 1934, with Horton Smith beating Craig Wood by a shot to win. It was known then as the Augusta National Invitational because Jones thought the term "Masters," which Roberts preferred, pretentious. By 1938 Jones gave up that battle, since most people - players included - were using the Roberts terminology, and the tournament has been known as the Masters for the last sixty years.

Since then a number of books have been written about the history of the club and the golf tournament, the best and most recent being Curt Sampson's The Masters: Golf, Money, and Power in Augusta, Georgia, which was published in 1998. Sampson explains in detail the difficult beginnings the club had, the trouble it often had in paying bills, and, perhaps most amazing, the lack of interest in the tournament locally until well after World War II. Not only was it easy to buy a ticket to the Masters in the early days, Roberts and company did everything but plead with people to take them.

That did not mean the tournament did not have an impact on the golf world. From the moment Gene Sarazen hit his "shot heard round the world," the four-wood second shot he holed for a double eagle at the 15th hole during the final round in 1935, the Masters and Augusta National became an important part of the golf year. The Sarazen Bridge is named in Sarazen's honor as a tribute to that famous shot. What many people don't remember is that the double eagle didn't win the tournament for Sarazen but put him into a tie with Craig Wood, who was already in the clubhouse. The next day Sarazen won a 36-hole playoff by five shots. (Wood did finally win the tournament in 1941.)

Cliff Roberts (Roberts committed suicide in 1977) was known as a tyrannical, my-way-or-the-highway leader. The men who have succeeded Roberts as club chairman - Bill Lane, Hord Hardin, Jack Stephens, and, last spring, Hootie Johnson - all have been considered more reasonable and approachable than Roberts. And yet, just as Roberts forced CBS to remove Jack Whitaker from its telecasts thirty-three years ago because he referred to the crowd around the 18th green as "a mob," Stephens did the same thing to Gary McCord in 1994 for making references to "body bags" behind the 17th green and for saying the greens were so fast they appeared to have been "bikini-waxed."

Augusta is an authoritarian place regardless of who is in charge. The club's approach has always been the same: The Masters is our tournament. If you do not like the way we put it on, you are welcome not to participate. And, if you do participate, you will be asked to behave in a certain way. If you cannot do that, you will be asked (told) to leave.

The attitude of the men who run the club and the tournament is perhaps best explained by the lines of red-lettered type that appear on the flip side of every pairings sheet issued during the Masters. The back side of the pairings has a map of the club and a mockup of the scorecard. At the top of the page, impossible to miss, is the following:

MESSAGE FROM: ROBERT TYRE JONES (1902-1971) President in Perpetuity, Augusta National Golf Club ...

In golf, customs of etiquette and decorum are just as important as rules governing play. It is appropriate for spectators to applaud successful strokes in proportion to difficulty, but excessive demonstrations by a player or his partisans are not proper because of the possible effect upon other competitors.

Most distressing to those who love the game of golf is the applauding or cheering of misplays or misfortunes of a player. Such occurrences have been rare at the Masters, but we must eliminate them entirely if our patrons are to continue their reputation as the most knowledgeable and considerate in the world.

written in April 1967

Augusta National and the Masters had come a long, long way since their beginnings. Palmer and Nicklaus had made the tournament into a major sports event, rather than just a major golf event, with their victories - Palmer four, Nicklaus five from 1963 through 1975 before tacking on a miraculous sixth in 1986 long after he had graduated from fat phenom to slender icon - and the prestige and importance of the Masters had grown steadily.

The club had gotten quite rich because of the Masters but not nearly as rich as it could have. The price of a ticket for the four days of the tournament had been fixed at $100 for years, and the club sold only 25,000 of them. Ticket scalpers did boom business - selling the passes for up to $8,000 apiece in 1997 - but if you were one of the fortunate few who were on the ticket list, you paid $100. Needless to say, if the Lords of Augusta raised the price for the week to $500 or even $1,000, there would be very few dropouts. And if there were, the waiting list for tickets was so long that it had been cut off twenty years earlier.

Parking was free. Food on the grounds cost about half - or less - of what concessions at most sports events cost. The huge souvenir tent located just inside the main gate was jam-packed from morning till evening with people lining up for hours just to get inside. The lines were sometimes so long it would not have been inappropriate to put up signs like the ones at Disney World that say, "45 minutes from this point." Masters memorabilia - hats, shirts, sweaters, sweatshirts, raingear, socks, mugs, glasses, prints, keychains, scorecards, golf balls - wasn't cheap but it wasn't outrageous. And, like everything else, if the prices had been doubled, every item would still sell out during the week. What's more, tournament week is the only week of the year when Masters memorabilia is on sale. Unlike Wimbledon, which had taken its logo global to cash in on its prestige, the members at Augusta make their killing - about $7 million gross - in a week and figure that is enough.

And then there was television. Right from the beginning, Clifford Roberts had insisted that the club retain almost complete control of the Masters telecasts. CBS had been the first network to televise the tournament, and forty-two years later it was still the only network that had televised it. CBS and Augusta always had a one-year contract, which kept the network on a very short leash. One mistake too many and the Lords could be on the phone to ABC or NBC in an instant.

If the membership had been willing to let CBS or any other network run their telecasts the way other golf telecasts were run, they probably could have gotten four or five times more than the reported $4 million CBS paid. NBC had paid the U.S. Golf Association $13 million a year in 1995 to wrest the rights for the U.S. Open from ABC. In return, NBC and cable's ESPN gave the Open wall-to-wall coverage from Thursday to Sunday - about thirty-five hours of live coverage. The more hours they were on the air, the more opportunity the network had to sell commercial time, which it did - usually about thirteen minutes of commercials per hour.

CBS and cable partner USA Network are allowed ten hours of live Masters coverage. Each hour contains exactly four minutes of commercials - two minutes for Travelers Insurance and two minutes for Cadillac - period. Although the front nine had been wired with TV cables for years, coverage from there was still limited. More often than not, by the time TV went on the air the leaders were already on the sixth or seventh hole. Most golf fans can close their eyes and describe Augusta's back nine in minute detail. But, unless they have been inside the hallowed gates, they have rarely seen the front nine, especially the first six holes.

And so, while much is made about the millions the Masters brings into the Augusta National coffers, the truth is the club could easily make four or five times more than it makes. But the members would rather retain complete control over their tournament, over the telecast, and - perhaps most important - their privacy than rake in more money. Everyone who belongs to the club knows that talking about the club to outsiders is strictly forbidden. Only the chairman is allowed to speak for the club.

Although some insist that the Masters was considered one of golf's major events from 1934 on, others insist that it wasn't until after World War II that it acquired that sort of prestige. Regardless, there is little doubting the fact that all the majors - and golf in general - became far more significant after Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus arrived on the scene.

John Feinstein. : In Pursuit Of Golf's Holy Grail. Little Brown and Company. 1999.

The Masters: Golf, Money, and Power in Augusta, Georgia A junior, amateur, and college golfer shares the thrilling history of the Masters golf tournament, reveals its controversial secrets and provides a complete picture of the town of Augusta, the politics, the racism--every factor that affects the greatest of all tournaments. Photos.

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