Tag Archives: Bobby Jones

Masters Countdown: How Augusta National Almost Built a Golf Hall of Fame

Posted on by
3
Bobby Jones, 1941 Masters.

Bobby Jones, 1941 Masters.

The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum opened in Cooperstown, New York, on June 12, 1939, and the Professional Golfers Association responded by inducting several legendary golfers, among them Bobby Jones, into its own hall. But the P.G.A.’s hall as yet had neither a building nor a plan for one.

Clifford Roberts, who was Augusta National’s chairman and co-founder, embraced the idea and suggested several sites on the club’s property. His favorite, initially, was an elevated six-acre parcel roughly two hundred fifty yards to the east of the tenth green. This was one of the building lots that the club had been trying to sell for a decade. Among the advantages of the site, Roberts wrote to Jones, was that visitors to the hall “would have four good views of the course instead of one.” He also liked the idea that “members using the golf course would have a good view of an attractive building”—though from a distance.

1932 Augusta National real-estate development plan, prepared for the club by Olmsted Bros.

1932 Augusta National real-estate development plan, prepared for the club by Olmsted Bros. Roberts’s initial choice for a hall of fame site was on the east side of the property, to the east of the modern eleventh tee–in the green stuff on the map above.

Roberts was especially concerned that golf’s hall of fame should be more compelling than baseball’s. A few days after the 1941 Masters, he wrote a lengthy letter to Olmsted Bros.—the club’s landscape architects at that time—in which he described a number of features that he thought ought to be included. “The more I think about it,” he wrote, “the more I feel that a building that houses a few plaques or a few bronze busts and that offers nothing else to the public, would prove to be a dull, worthless type of project, having no excuse for its existence except to attempt to glorify the leaders of golf. And I doubt that very much would be added to their fame.” One wing of the building, he continued, could contain “automatic movie machines,” which, for a quarter, would show instructional films by the game’s great teachers. Another wing could serve as both a comprehensive library and a bookstore. Visitors would be able to buy souvenir booklets, postcards depicting the Augusta National course, and “popular-priced copies” of some of the books in the library.

Roberts’s boldest suggestion was to construct “a miniature Augusta National course surrounding the Hall of Fame which would be a practical pitch and putt course and could be made a most attractive part of the landscaping scheme.” The holes would be scaled-down replicas of the holes on the big course. He proposed a fee of twenty-five cents per round. He also suggested building an “especially attractive” public driving range based on a plan that Jones had come across and thought highly of.

Despite Roberts’s enthusiasm, the project never came to anything, and there was no further discussion of building a miniature Augusta National. The two members that Roberts had been counting to pay for the project lost interest in it, and the club was not in a financial position to follow through on its own. And then news from Europe and the Pacific made other concerns more pressing.

Masters Countdown: Those Amazing Flowers

Posted on by
1

ANGC Circle 2

The photograph above shows the circle at the end of Magnolia Drive, in front of the Augusta National clubhouse. Everything is immaculate, including the green paint on the curbs—which is touched up frequently as the tournament approaches. The photograph below, which was taken in 1947, shows the same circle as it appeared during a period when the club was still strapped for money and couldn’t afford to pay the same attention to detail (or to pansies).

ANGC Circle 1

At the base of the flagpole in the photograph at the top of this post are plaques commemorating the co-founders of the club and the tournament: Clifford Roberts and Bobby Jones. The plaques are the only memorials to the men on the property. In 1941, two new Augusta National members—James Middleton Cox, a newspaper publisher, who years earlier had served three terms as the governor of Ohio, and his son, James, Jr.—proposed erecting a large statue of Jones near the clubhouse, not far from what would later become the site of the Eisenhower Cabin. Jones and Roberts were deeply unenthusiastic about the monument, and both were relieved when the Coxes, at Roberts’s suggestion, shifted their attention to the possibility of building a hall of fame on club property. I’ll have more to say about the hall of fame in a few days.

Masters Countdown: Bobby Jones in Color

Posted on by
14

Bobby Jones in Color

The photograph above was taken in 1947, during the next to last Masters that Bobby Jones competed in. His badge identifies him as Player No. 1. The photographer was apparently experimenting with an early color film. The negatives were discovered in an envelope in an old file cabinet at Augusta National almost fifty years later, around the time I began researching my book The Making of the Masters. No prints are known to have been made before that time.

There is a great deal of confusion about Jones and his status as a player. Augusta National, in tournament publications, lists him as an amateur, but by the rules of the U.S.G.A he became a professional in 1930, when Warner Bros. hired him to make instructional films, and when, a little later, he began designing and promoting golf clubs for A.G. Spalding & Bros.

Jones retired from competition not because he had no worlds left to conquer; he retired because he abhorred the idea of being labeled a professional. In a letter to Clifford Roberts many years later, he described the typical pro as “an uneducated club servant”—a prejudice that dated to the early days of his competitive career, when only amateurs were accorded the honorific Mr., professionals weren’t allowed inside clubhouses, and tournament organizers distinguished between “gentlemen” and “players.”

“So long as I played as an amateur, there could be no question of subterfuge or concealment,” he wrote in 1960—a statement that clearly shows what he thought of playing golf for money. Roberts secured Jones’s participation in the first Masters, in 1934, by cleverly dodging the issue: in the tournament’s program listings and pairing sheets, he made no distinction between amateurs and professionals.

But the distinction was invariably noted elsewhere. The Associated Press and all other news organizations, in their coverage of the tournaments Jones competed in, listed him with the pros. Even O.B. Keeler, who had built his sportswriting career by celebrating Jones’s amateur accomplishments, took it for granted that Jones was now a professional. And so did Augusta National, officially.That’s why Charles Yates, not Jones, was honored as the low amateur in the first Masters, even though Yates’s score was three strokes worse than Jones’s.

Would Jones have played in the Masters if the club had been compelled to label him explicitly as a professional? Roberts said in later years that he suspected he probably would have, in order to help the club. But Roberts was uncertain enough that he never raised the matter with him, either then or later.

In Golf is My Game, Jones wrote that to give up his amateur status would have been “like giving up part of myself.” But, in fact, he gave it up in 1930. And he had a powerful incentive for doing so. His golf-related income in 1933, when the first tournament was being planned, was over $100,000; in contrast, Paul Runyan, who won nine events that year and was the tour’s leading money-winner, had gross tournament earnings of less than $6,500.

British Open Countdown: St. Annes Old Links Golf Club

Posted on by
Reply

Airplane, roller coaster, Yankees headcover, Other Gene, out of bounds: St. Annes Old Links has it all.

Just a few blocks from Royal Lytham & St. Annes, where this year’s Open is being held, is St. Annes Old Links Golf Club. From the parking lot, it looks like a down-at-heels muni, and it’s usually ignored by non-locals. You can see the whole course without turning your head, there’s an airfield over the fence, and the northern vista is dominated by the roller coaster at Blackpool, a seaside holiday spot whose nearest American analogs are Coney Island and some of the tawdrier parts of the New Jersey coast. (Prosperous Britons view Blackpool as beneath them, but your children wouldn’t.) Still, the course is far better than it looks, and it’s worth a visit (as is the roller coaster).

The roller coaster in Blackpool in 1983, when I rode it twice.

St. Annes is of historical interest as well, because it occupies part of Royal Lytham’s original site: the tenth and eighteenth holes are direct descendants of the earliest layout, and their greens are said to be the oldest in the region. The course has more than a few undistinguished holes, but it also has some tremendous ones. Maybe the best is the 450-yard, par-4 seventh, called Penance. Its left side is flanked by grassy ditches, which serve the same depraved purpose as the church-pew bunkers at Oakmont. Shots to the green generally play into a fierce wind, and they tend to end up at the bottom of a trench, in one of the numerous bunkers, under a spavined bush on a bank that hugs the rear left corner of the green, or against a shed just beyond the bushes. Another superb hole is the ninth, a claustrophobia-inducing par 3, which Bobby Jones liked well enough to measure, in 1926, for possible reproduction elsewhere.

Ninth green, St. Annes Old Links. That’s the clubhouse beyond it.

You might also see a helicopter. That’s Brendan on the left, walking toward the roller coaster.

Horton Smith, Titanic Thompson, Bobby Jones, Alfred Bourne, and Me

Posted on by
7

My golf club’s clubhouse as Horton Smith and Titanic Thompson knew it. It looks about the same today, although the trees and the porch have grown.

Horton Smith won the first Masters, in 1934, and he won again in 1936. Two and a half years after that, he got married in the little Connecticut town where I live, ninety miles north of New York City. The bride was Barbara Bourne, whose parents owned a 40-room weekend house here. The legendary golf hustler Titanic Thompson attended the wedding and, during a golf outing at our nine-hole club, gave a ten-dollar tip to his caddie, a local kid who, once he’d become an old man, sometimes played golf with me. (The regular rate in 1938 was 35 cents a loop, 60 cents for two bags.)

Barbara Bourne and Horton Smith (far left), along with lots of Bournes.

Barbara’s late grandfather, Frederick Gilbert Bourne, known as “Commodore,” had been a president of the Singer Sewing Machine Company. He owned a 110-room summer place on Long Island, a 28-room castle on the St. Lawrence Seaway, in the Thousand Islands, and the entire first floor of the Dakota apartment building, in New York.

Horton Smith’s late grandfather-in-law, “Commodore” Frederick Gilbert Bourne, 1851-1919.

Barbara’s father was Alfred Severin Bourne, who, in addition to being the 1934 men’s champion of my club, was a founding member of Augusta National. He served on the five-man Organization Committee, and was a vice-president until his death. Without him, the first Masters might never have been held.

Barbara Bourne and her father, Alfred Severin Bourne, in the late 1920s or early 1930s.

The Bournes spent winters in Augusta, which was popular as a resort destination partly because it was just about as far south as a New Yorker could travel overnight by train and still play golf on arrival. Alfred belonged to Augusta Country Club, and his playing partners there occasionally included Bobby Jones.

Kenneth Bourne (son of Alfred) and Bobby Jones, probably at Augusta Country Club.

In 1931, as Jones and Clifford Roberts were trying to get Augusta National going, next door, Bourne wrote them a check for $25,000—a quarter of the sum that Roberts figured they’d need to build their course. Bourne apologized that he couldn’t be more generous, and told them that if they’d come to him before the Crash he’d have underwritten the entire project. (Bourne missed the first three days of the first Masters because he was competing in—and winning—an amateur event in Aiken, South Carolina, twenty miles from Augusta.)

Alfred Bourne (center) and various playthings, Thousand Islands, 1930s.

Alfred Bourne died in 1956. His weekend house in my town is now the main building of a boarding school; not surprisingly, it’s called Bourne Hall. Each year for the past six or seven, the school and my club have held a tournament, called the Bourne Cup, in which eight or ten of the school’s alumni (some of whom are also members of my club) are almost always soundly defeated by eight or ten members of my club (some of whom are also alumni of the school).

Bourne cap, from Bourne Cup.

This year, the school’s team included a member of the class of 1951, named Dave. He told me that when he was a boy he spent several summers caddying at the club, and often caddied for Alfred Bourne. He said he once asked Bourne if it would be all right for him to use a fielder’s mitt to shag Bourne’s practice balls. (Dave loved baseball but lacked opportunities to hone his technique.) Bourne said that would be fine, and they made a game of it. Bourne was a generous tipper, Dave told me (although he squandered most of his  earnings, a nickel at a time, in the club’s Coke machine).

My club’s caddie corps in 1925, sitting on the front steps of the clubhouse. Note the neckties on the ten year olds. The gloomy-looking (and tie-less) grownup at right is the head pro. The wee lad in knee socks, two seats to his left, is his eventual successor.

A senior member of my club, whose name is Dick, also caddied for Bourne. He told me that he would warm up by hitting exactly thirty practice balls, which Dick would scoop up in a leather bag while keeping an eye out for players teeing off on the sixth hole. (The club’s driving range in those days was just the right side of the sixth fairway.) After counting the thirtieth shot, Dick would run back to Bourne, who would play the first hole, chip to the eight green, play the ninth hole, make the same circuit again, and go home.

Dick, who used to caddie for Alfred Bourne,at our town invitational tournament, October, 2008.

The day before this year’s Bourne Cup, I had the immense good fortune to play a round at Garden City Golf Club, also known as Garden City Men’s, where the U.S. Open was held in 1902. Before we teed off, I wandered around the clubhouse (where jackets are mandatory but shirts are not), and gazed at all the cool stuff. And among many other extremely interesting things I learned that the winner of the Garden City club championship in 1921 was Alfred Severin Bourne. I forgot to take a picture of the plaque with his name on it, but I remembered, later, to take a picture of a similar plaque, back home:

Early champions at my club: two Bournes and several missing years.

Want to Buy a Building Lot at Augusta National?

Posted on by
9

Olmsted Brothers' 1932 Augusta National real-estate development plan. If your eyes are good enough, note the tennis courts and the brand-new clubhouse—none of which were built. Also note the small practice area, between the ninth and eighteenth holes.

Augusta National Golf Club suffered severe financial problems during its first two decades, which coincided with the Great Depression and the Second World War. Its lenders actually foreclosed in 1935, just eight months after Gene Sarazen had seemingly secured the future of both the club and the Masters by hitting “the shot heard round the world.” (I explore those difficulties at some length in The Making of the Masters.)

One of the club’s best hopes for raising money in the early years was to sell building lots overlooking the course. Roughly a third of the club’s property was reserved for that purpose, and the lots were delineated and numbered on several early maps, including the plan reproduced above. For the most part, the lots occupied areas west of the second fairway and east of the tenth and eleventh. (Note to Laurentius: The spot where Rory McIlroy’s yanked tee shot on the tenth hole ended up during the final round of the 2011 Masters was near the edge of Lot No. 1.)

The club’s development plan, which was created by the landscape architecture firm Olmsted Brothers, called for two dozen building sites, and additional acreage was reserved for more. Most of the lots were between three and five acres; the largest, No. 6, was twelve acres. The club actively tried to sell those lots or others for more than twenty years. Boundary lines were cleared, access roads were built, lots were numbered with signs that faced the roads, and a major, continuing effort was made to stir up sales—all without success. In the early 1930s, W. Montgomery Harison, an early member, bought three adjoining lots just beyond the first green, but he was the only taker. He built a huge brick mansion, which stood until 1977, and the elder of his two sons built a much smaller house next door. (Harison’s younger son, Phil, was the tournament’s official starter for more than sixty years. He died 2008, at the age of 82. His own son is a member now.)

W. Montgomery Harison's house overlooking Augusta National's first green, during the Masters in 1941. (The photographer was standing near the ninth green and looking up the first fairway.) The house was torn down in 1977.

After the war, the club briefly considered leasing or renting the remaining lots, at annual charges ranging from $250 to $500 a year. When no enthusiasm for that idea was evident, the club gave up on the original subdivision and for four or five years pursued a more modest development plan in a different location. This new subdivision—which was to be called De Soto Trail—was situated just east of the area now occupied by the par 3 course. It consisted of twenty-four lots, most of them about a half-acre, and was targeted not at club members but at local middle-income families. To avoid the expense of building an access road and installing utilities, the club in 1949 offered the entire parcel to Augusta real-estate agents. There were no bids. The club then tried without success to sell the lots individually. Late in 1952, a developer offered $18,000 for fifteen acres. Roberts viewed that figure as too low, and the club eventually abandoned the entire idea.

Today, golf fans and even club members are almost always amazed to learn that Augusta National, in more than twenty years of conscientious effort, could turn up only one buyer interested in building a house near what today may be most fabled golf course in the world. If the same lots were offered for sale today, the bids would undoubtedly be astronomical. The failure of the real-estate projects underscores the immensity of the challenge that Clifford Roberts and Bobby Jones, Augusta National’s founders, faced in nearly every area of the club’s operation. As late as the early 1950s, Roberts couldn’t get local real-estate developers to return his calls.

It was only in the mid-1950s—when the tournament was securely established, and both the club and the country were on better financial footing—that Roberts began to view all development ideas as a mistake. A local club member named Julian Roberts (no relation) eventually bought Harison’s property and later sold it back to the club. One of Clifford Roberts’s last acts before taking his life, in 1977, was to walk to the first tee with the help of a waiter so that he could look up the fairway and assure himself that the house had been torn down.

 

Why Golf Tournaments Last Four Days

Posted on by
6

Seventy-two-hole golf tournaments at the time of the first Masters, in 1934, were invariably scheduled for three days, with a thirty-six-hole final on Saturday—an accommodation to the nation’s blue laws. It was Bobby Jones who thought of expanding the schedule. “My idea in stringing out the medal play over four days,” he wrote in a letter to Clifford Roberts, the club’s chairman and co-founder, not long before the tournament, “was to give time for special events to be sandwiched in between.” These events included an optional alternate-shot match, an approach-and-putt contest (to be held on the practice putting green), an iron contest (to be held in the old practice area, which can still be seen between the ninth and eighteenth fairways), and a driving contest.

Roberts liked the four-round idea—one of many golf innovations introduced at the Masters—in part because it eliminated what he believed to be a disadvantage for players who were “unable to do their best scoring if forced to play thirty-six holes in one day.” He also liked the fact that the schedule would enable the club to sell four days’ worth of tournament-round tickets instead of just three. (Tournament-round tickets sold for $2.20, including tax; practice round tickets were $1.10; series tickets, good for all week, were $5.50.) Roberts had initially wanted the driving contest and other special events to be scheduled alongside the practice rounds—on Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday—partly because he hoped they would increase practice-round ticket sales, and partly because he thought a long schedule of activities might make the tournament seem more substantial to local hoteliers and merchants, whose support would be needed both that year and in the future.

Incidentally, Roberts loved the special events, and he helped to create many of them. One year, he arranged an exhibition for local children, who were given free practice-round tickets; he scheduled the exhibition late in the afternoon so that it wouldn’t conflict with school. Another year, he devised a competition in which the pros took turns trying to repeat Sarazen’s double-eagle shot from the fifteenth fairway. (None succeeded.) For the 1942 Masters, he wanted to hold a complex “ringer score contest” in which the seven tournament champions would compete against the rest of the field during the four practice rounds. The contest was never held, but not for lack of support from the chairman. (Among other things, he wrote, the competition would “give the newspaper boys something to write about” during the first half of the week.) According to one spectator from that era, “The contests were fun, because the pros were always so relaxed and having such a good time.”

Those early special events were the precursors of the Par 3 Contest—another Roberts innovation. The first was held in 1960 (and won by Sam Snead) after enthusiastic lobbying by Roberts. “I am really rather bullish on the idea of making use of the Par-3 course as a distinctive pre-tournament event,” he had written the year before. “If so, it can be quite a feather in the cap of the Masters Tournament.  I say this because no other club holding a tournament could duplicate what I am proposing we do at Augusta. So far as I know, no other club has a Par-3 layout and, even if they do, I am sure they don’t have anything to compare with ours.” The event has always drawn a huge and enthusiastic crowd. It is also popular with the players and their children—even though no winner of the Par 3 Contest has ever gone on to win the Masters. Yesterday’s event was shortened by rain and lightning. Padraig Harrington and Jonathan Byrd were leading, at 5 under, when it was called.

Masters Countdown: Ninth Hole

Posted on by
3

Augusta National's ninth green, 1935.

Clifford Roberts, Augusta National’s co-founder and first chairman, liked to say that he made only one contribution to the original design of the course. During the construction of the ninth hole, he persuaded the contractor to create a level landing area in the steeply tilting fairway at the distance he normally drove the ball (about 180 yards). “The engineer was not at all enthusiastic about accommodating me,” Roberts wrote in his book about the club, “but finally agreed to bring back a tractor and do the job.” Roberts later told friends that he had requested the change because he didn’t want any of his matches with Bobby Jones to be decided by his luck at hitting a fairway wood to an elevated green from a downhill, sidehill lie. The current ninth hole was then the eighteenth, and Jones customarily either gave Roberts nine strokes or allowed him to begin their matches with a nine-up edge. Even so, Roberts needed all the help he could get.

(Augusta National doesn’t use the U.S.G.A.’s handicapping method. It has its own simple system, devised by Roberts, which is based on the number of pars a player ordinarily shoots, with a small adjustment for birdies. Essentially, if you make six pars, your handicap is twelve. The Roberts system works well, is easy to compute, and allows daily modification.)

Roberts’s difficulties with the second shot on the ninth hole were shared by most of the club’s other members, who, like him and unlike Jones, weren’t long enough off the tee to come close to the ideal driving area, at the bottom of the hill. And neither Jones nor Alister MacKenzie, who designed the course, was at all disapproving of Roberts’s modification. In consultations among the three, Roberts’s role was to supply the viewpoint of the average golfer, and Jones and MacKenzie both solicited his opinion. Roberts’s landing area is still visible in the ninth fairway, and it still receives plentiful use from members and guests, as well as from occasional Masters competitors.

Hord Hardin, who was the president of the U.S.G.A. from 1968-69 and was Augusta National’s third chairman, between 1980 and 1991, told me a story in 1996, shortly before he died, that I’ve heard in several versions. Augusta National had a few women associate members in the early years. (Most, if not all, were members’ wives—possibly including Roberts’s first wife, Mary Agnes Bishop, whom he married in 1937 and from whom he was divorced not long afterward.) In the clubhouse one day, one of the women told Roberts that she had just made a hole-in-one on the eighth—a 500-plus-yard uphill par 5—and Roberts asked how that was possible. Hardin told me, “She was playing the ninth, and flat missed her tee shot. The ball hit a something off to the right, flopped up in the air, and went in the hole on the eighth green, no more than fifty yards away. When he heard that, Mr. Roberts is supposed to have said, ‘That’s it. No more women members.'” Roberts and Jones’s original plan for the club had included a second course, intended mostly for women, and a large women’s locker room, which was to have been situated in the huge new clubhouse they intended to build as soon as they could afford to tear down the dilapidated old plantation house. The Great Depression forced them to scale back their ambitions, and prevented them from demolishing what today is probably the most recognizable building in golf.

As the photograph above shows, the ninth green’s famous false front, which contributed to Greg Norman’s spectacular final-round collapse in 1996, was originally more pronounced. (Look at the far right-hand edge of the photo.) The ninth hole is also seventy yards longer than it was during the first tournament. The most recent extension was during the summer of 2001, when the Masters tee was moved back thirty yards and a high stone wall was built to seclude it from a service road just beyond it. At the same time, additional trees were planted on the left between the new tee and the members’ tee, to eliminate the possibility of tournament players’ using the first fairway as an alternate driving area, and new pine trees were planted along the right side of the ninth fairway, to tighten the landing zone. Even though the hole today is 460 yards long from the tournament tee, Masters competitors often have as little as a nine-iron or a wedge for their second shot.

Players, fans, and television commentators who claim that Augusta National had no rough until Hootie Johnson added the “second cut,” in 1999, should study the photograph below, which was taken at the 1949 Masters. The rough in the foreground is several times the height of any grass on the course today. And note the greenside bunker configuration. MacKenzie’s original large bunker was later reconfigured and divided into three, and then at some point after 1949 the bunker nearest the tee was removed.

Ninth hole, Augusta National, 1949 Masters.

That’s the end of my hole-by-hole Masters Countdown for this year. I’ll take it up again next spring, beginning with the tenth hole—although I’ll have one or two more things to say about the Masters before this year’s tournament is over.

Masters Countdown: Eighth Hole

Posted on by
3

Augusta National's eighth green, 1935.

When the eighth green was built, it looked very much the way it does today, with tall, steeply contoured mounds on either side. In 1956, though, Clifford Roberts, the club’s co-founder and chairman, had the mounds removed. “That’s the only time I can really remember Mr. Jones getting mad at Cliff,” Phil Harison, a longtime member, told me in the late 1990s. “But he removed the mounds for a reason. They blocked the view of the spectators at the tournament, and once they were gone the spectators could see a lot better. But Mr. Jones got awfully upset about that. He really did, because without the mounds the hole was much less interesting, and the green didn’t look like any other green on the golf course.”

Augusta National's eighth green in 1956, after the mounds had been removed to improve sight lines for spectators.

Roberts never thought that removing the mounds improved the hole—and, indeed, the new green was dreadful. It was featureless and vaguely hourglass-shaped, and it could be approached without trepidation from almost any angle. But Roberts felt strongly that spectators ought to be able to see. Not long before he died, though, he decided that the sacrifice had been too great and that the mounds should be restored. The change was finally made in 1979, not quite two years after his death. Byron Nelson led the project, along with Joseph S. Finger, an architect who, among other accomplishments, had played golf at Rice University in the thirties on a team that was coached by Jimmy Demaret. In restoring the mounds, Nelson and Finger relied heavily on photographs taken during the thirties and forties. Harison—who had grown up in a house that used to stand just beyond the first green—consulted on the project as well. During the Second World War, when the course was closed, he had often ridden a motor bike over the mounds, and he told me that he retained a sort of physical memory of their shape.

Jones and Roberts used to ask Harison to fill out groups in Augusta National’s main member-member event, the Jamboree, beginning when he was thirteen; he and a partner won the event in 1941, when he was sixteen. He didn’t officially become a member until 1946, when he turned twenty-one, but at that time, he told me, Jones and Roberts kidded him by saying, “Oh, you’ve been a member for years.” Harison attended every Masters, beginning with the first, and was the tournament’s official starter for more than sixty years: it was he who introduced each player on the first tee—everyone from Bobby Jones to Tiger Woods. He died 2008, at the age of 82.

During 2001, the tournament tee on the eighth hole was moved back and to the players’ right—part of a course-wide effort, supervised primarily by Tom Fazio, to lengthen the course and increase the premium on accuracy and controlled shot shape off the tee. The fairway bunker was doubled in size and stretched toward the green. (The old bunker ended roughly at the peninsula of turf near the left center of the new bunker. See the photo below.)

The eighth hole has had a fairway bunker in approximately the same position since the course opened. Changes in its size and in the location of the tournament tee—all of which were made, in part, to keep the bunker in play—provide a good indication of how much tournament players’ driving distance has increased since the early 1930s: the far edge of the bunker today is roughly a hundred yards farther from the tee than it was during the first Masters.

Looking back toward the tee from the eighth green. The hole's single bunker is on the left.

Masters Countdown: Seventh Hole

Posted on by
5

 

A not especially intelligible drawing of Augusta National's seventh green, from the program for the first Masters, in 1934, when the seventh had no bunkers.

The seventh wasn’t much of a hole in the early days. (The consensus, as described by Clifford Roberts, the club’s co-founder and chairman, was that it was “the only weak hole out of the eighteen.”) Alister MacKenzie, who designed the course, likened it to the eighteenth at St. Andrews, but the resemblance was superficial. Both holes were short, and both had large greens and no bunkers, but in comparison with the venerable and surprisingly difficult closing hole of the Old Course, the seventh at Augusta was a pushover. Many players today would have been able to drive it.

In a letter to MacKenzie in 1933, Roberts wrote, “I think the real criticism . . . is that it lacks character. Ed Dudley [the club’s first professional] made a suggestion which appealed very much to me. He proposed putting a bunker in the middle of the face of the green and letting it wedge into the green. In other words, his thought is to partly develop this green into two sections, the same as is true of one of the greens at Lakeside, California. Bob [Bobby Jones] did not have very much to say about this proposal, but I do not think he was much impressed by it. I think, in truth, that Bob is really hesitant about making any alterations or incidental refinements till you can come here and see the layout.”

Perry Maxwell

Nothing significant happened until 1938, when Horton Smith—who had won the first and third tournaments—suggested elevating the green and fronting it with several deep bunkers. He also suggested moving the green twenty yards back and to the right. Jones and Roberts both approved. The design work was done by Perry
Maxwell, an Oklahoma banker-turned-architect, whose best-known course is probably Tulsa’s Southern Hills. Maxwell had been a partner of MacKenzie’s during the final years of MacKenzie’s life. (Their last joint project, completed in 1933, was Crystal Downs, in Frankfort, Michigan.) The transformation of the seventh green, which cost $2,500, was paid for by Lewis B. Maytag, who was one of the club’s earliest members and was the head of the Maytag Company. In addition, the driving area was tightened through the addition of a grove of pine trees on the left side of the fairway. (There were already trees on the right.)

Maxwell made several less dramatic changes in other greens—among them the first and the fourteenth, to which he added pronounced undulations. Such undulations were his trademark and were known as “Maxwell rolls.” MacKenzie was no longer alive at that time, but he undoubtedly would have approved: he loved dramatic contours. In The Spirit of St. Andrews, he wrote wistfully about the early greens at Machrihanish, a legendary links course, designed by Old Tom Morris, on the Kintyre peninsula in western Scotland: “Some of the natural greens were so undulating that at times one had to putt twenty or thirty yards round to lay dead at a hole only five yards away. These greens have all gone and today one loses all the joy of outwitting an opponent by making spectacular putts of this description.” For the disappearance of such features, MacKenzie blamed a preoccupation with the elimination of “unfairness”—a word that he scornfully placed in quotation marks.

Today, the seventh is 450 yards long—110 yards longer than it was for the first Masters—and the landing area is narrow. Just fifteen years ago, the seventh was considered a birdie hole, even by members. Now it’s a tough par for any player whose tee shot ends up in the pine straw.