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Here's a subjective list of the most influential figures in Augusta National history, going backward: Tiger; Jack; Frank Chirkinian, the CBS golf producer; the King (Arnold Palmer); President Eisenhower; the midcentury triumvirate of Nelson, Hogan and Snead; architect Alister MacKenzie; Bobby Jones.
And then there's the figure, far less known, who towers over that tensome: Clifford Roberts, the club's Chairman in Memoriam.
The life and death of Roberts imbue everything at the Masters. (Among other things, the man was a perfectionist.) Augusta's sublime Par-3 course, which opened 50 years ago, was built at Roberts's insistence, and this year the Wednesday Par-3 contest, another of his children, will be televised for the first time. A homecoming, in a manner of speaking.
On a weekday morning in September 1977, during the club's offseason, Roberts, 83 and ill with cancer, was found dead near the edge of his little course, a short note to his wife, Betty, in his breast pocket. It's a death that still stirs debate within the old guard, especially in the mind of the former chairman's personal waiter.
In the years since Roberts's suicide, the Par-3 contest has turned into a festive afternoon event, with thousands of spectators filling the grassy slopes that surround the course. (You could say it was the first stadium course.) On TV this year you might see Phil Mickelson make a righthanded swing; or Jim Furyk's four-year-old son caddying for him in a baggy white jumpsuit; or Jack Nicklaus, retired from Masters play, still making pitch shots in public.
But when Roberts invented the contest, in 1960, he had something more serious in mind: a nine-hole competition to replace a long-drive contest and a golf clinic that he had found lacking.
"He was always looking for ways to give spectators value," says David Owen, author of The Making of the Masters, a fascinating book about Roberts.
When Roberts announced the first Par-3 contest, he also mandated that the big course would close at 2:30 on the afternoon of the event. The players didn't need an interpreter.
"It meant he wanted us to play in that Par-3 contest, and we did," says Gary Player, who has participated in all but one and will play again this year. "Mr. Roberts came up with so many marvelous ideas for the Masters — The dinners, the Champions locker room, the green coat ceremony — and that Par-3 contest is certainly one of them."
Player has three aces in the event (he's the leader in that category) but has never won it. The course record is 20 (Art Wall, Gay Brewer). The ringer score for the course (the total of the best score ever for each hole) cannot be lowered (nine!).
Roberts himself once made an eagle on the course, in 1966. To the degree that the hole in one represents perfection, you can imagine his satisfaction. That Ike was in his foursome that November day could only have added to his pleasure.
Roberts, a Wall Street banker who left school at 16, cultivated relationships with two 20th-century icons: Jones (winner of the Grand Slam) and Eisenhower (winner of World War II). When Roberts and Jones were planning the club in the early 1930s, Roberts wanted a short course in addition to the main track, but Jones did not. The debate never went far, owing to the shaky finances of a young club in the Depression years.
In 1958 Roberts hired a well-known Southern architect, George Cobb, to design and build nine par-3 holes near the clubhouse, on sunken, boggy land that would be out of the wind for late-afternoon winter golf. Since then, two more holes have been added; the Wednesday event is played over seven Cobb holes and two Tom Fazio holes.
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