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The inscription would constitute a sign of affection. She believes the Par-3 course is, too. That he chose to end his life by its side she finds fitting. But the poignant, lovely setting can't mask that the death was violent.
"Gunshot wound to the head," it says on Roberts's Richmond County death certificate, which shows Bahamian citizenship, a common tax shelter.
Rayford Wigfall, Roberts's personal three-meals- a-day waiter at the club, remains haunted by what he saw on the morning of Sept. 29, 1977. When he went to Roberts's suite in the clubhouse to open the drapes and take his breakfast order, no one was there.
An across-the-club search for Roberts, led by Phil Wahl, began.
At around 9:30 a.m., Wigfall heard a housekeeper, Annie Smart, scream after finding Roberts's lifeless body on the side of a work road near the Par-3 course. Wigfall says he was the first person to respond to the scream.
"I saw no gun," Wigfall, 70 and retired, says.
He acknowledges that he could have missed it, but he doesn't think so. "I looked from his head down to his feet. I was right over him."
Owen's thorough book, written with club cooperation, says the gun was found beside the body. But if Wigfall is correct, that there was no gun beside Roberts when his body was first discovered, one plausible explanation would be that some never-identified-person or persons assisted Roberts with his death and took the gun. If so, Wigfall was unimpressed with the work.
Roberts "was wearing a London Fog all-purpose winter coat, buttoned up all wrong," Wigfall says. To Wigfall, that doesn't fit. Roberts was fastidious in all matters. Look at his tournament. It will give you an idea.
Wigfall receives a pension check from the club, $108.35 a month. When he's a little short, some employees leave an envelope with some cash in it with the security guard at the Gate 6 entrance on Berckmans Road. Wigfall worked at the club for 30 years, and even when he had trouble with the law (shoplifting at Dillard's, that sort of thing) Augusta National took him back.
It's all part of a world — the secretive and paternalistic private club, led by an autocrat — that's now just about dead. Who today would build a perfect little nine-hole par-3 course as a gift and never tell a soul about his intentions? Nobody.
When Roberts was ill, Janice Wahl once said to him, "Mr. Roberts, I want you to know, when my children and I said our morning prayers today, we prayed for you."
"Hmph," Roberts responded, as she tells it. He paused. "Well, goddam. You know, I have always believed in the prayers of children."
"I don't think Mr. Roberts believed in God," Ray Wigfall said the other day.
What then, he was asked, did Mr. Roberts believe in?
He answered in a word: "Himself."
