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John LaFoy, Cobb's longtime design associate, spent many days at Augusta National with his boss and Roberts in the 1970s. He remembers Roberts for the tongue sandwiches he ate at lunch and for his extraordinary precision. LaFoy has all the original documents related to the course, including Cobb's original hole sketches on onionskin paper. The course cost $72,178 to build and should be credited, LaFoy believes, to Cobb and Roberts.
"Mr. Cobb always said there was a special relationship between Mr. Roberts and the Par-3 course," LaFoy says. "Mr. Cobb would say that Mr. Roberts felt kind of left out of the design of the original course."
The Par-3 holes, every bit as lush as the holes on the big course, are all variations on a theme: Hit a short iron a precise distance to a small green or your ball will suffer death by drowning. The course is modern, unique and excellent.
"Mr. Roberts wanted the little Par-3 course to be something of his very own," LaFoy says.
And maybe, too, a gift for his friend Ike. In the last 14 years of his life Roberts, who married three times but never had children, grew close to the club's general manager, Phil Wahl. He once put an arm around Wahl and said, "My son."
A year after tending to Roberts's death, Wahl, at age 43, was killed in a traffic accident on Berckmans Road, near the gates of the club. His widow, Janice Wahl, 68, still lives in Augusta.
"I believe, from what I was told, that Mr. Roberts built that course for President Eisenhower, as a place he could get away from it all, even his Secret Service guys, for a quick nine holes or some fishing, and get back to the cabin and Mamie," says Wahl. (Mamie Eisenhower, as First Lady and afterward, regularly joined her husband at Augusta and was "a lonely sort of person," Wahl remembers.) The little course could be played in 90 minutes, and it didn't take long to catch a fish.
"Mr. Roberts kept that pond stocked," she says.
If Roberts had Eisenhower in mind when he built the course, there's no known written record of it, and Roberts never discussed it publicly. But secretiveness is part of the Roberts legacy and of the club's peculiar charm; it never revealed much about the circumstances around Roberts's death. His body, in accordance with his wishes, was cremated, and people at the club have been saying for years that his ashes were distributed around Amen Corner and over the Par-3 course. Janice Wahl has always doubted that.
"My husband told me that he buried the urn that held Mr. Roberts's ashes," she says. "Where, I don't know. I didn't probe into those kinds of things with Phil. He took that secret to his grave."
The day after his final Masters, the superb '77 tournament won by Tom Watson over Nicklaus, Roberts signed a photograph of himself for Phil Wahl and wrote on it, For Philip R. Wahl, The best club manager the Augusta National ever had or expects to have. Wahl's son, Phil Wahl Jr., a Wachovia executive in Augusta and a prominent civic leader, treasures that picture.
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