PLAYING THE GREENS

If April is here and the dogwood is blooming in Augusta, Georgia, it must be time for the Masters, the world’s most cherished golf tournament. This unique event is at the center of every golfer’s imagination. To win it is to earn mythical status. The other major tournaments — the U.S. Open, the British Open, and the PGA — have their places, and some Americans and Britons may even profess that what they most desire is their national title. But no one is fooled. It is the Masters that inflames their ambition, the Masters that makes their hands bleed on the practice range.

Why this should be is the subject of countless books, articles, and conversations. On the key points, all agree. First, there is the universally felt reverence for the tournament’s founder, Bobby Jones. Second, there is the fact that the Masters, alone among “majors,” takes place at the same site every year, allowing for — as the television slogan has it — “a tradition like no other.” And third, there is the history of six and a half decades’ play, in which giants have triumphed and failed, and golf’s memories have been formed: Sarazen lacing his four-wood for a double eagle; Hogan losing his nerve on the greens; Arnie sucking on a cigarette and charging hard; DeVicenzo guilelessly signing an incorrect scorecard; Nicklaus exulting over a long, serpentine putt on Number Sixteen; Norman faltering yet again on Sunday; and Tiger trouncing the rest of the field. The Masters is a relatively new competition in a centuries-old sport, but, amazingly, it and the game have become almost inseparable.

What, then, amid pervasive Masterslust, does Curt Sampson have to add? Enough, it transpires. The author of 1996’s bestselling Hogan, Sampson has now tackled the Masters and its sponsor, the Augusta National Golf Club. When it came to the club itself, Sampson had no easy task, as Augusta National is notoriously secretive, making the Masons seem positively exhibitionistic by comparison. Indeed, the club’s members are forbidden to speak to a writer working on an unauthorized book. More than one member has been expelled for loose talk. Yet Sampson has managed to penetrate the gates, interviewing members and employees, both present and former, under circumstances resembling those of a witness-protection program.

Jones established the club in 1932, the tournament in 1934. (He never wanted it called “The Masters,” for reasons of modesty, but others prevailed.) His partner was Clifford Roberts, a hard, spiteful soul who was possibly the most powerful man in golf, and certainly the most feared. Theirs was a curious friendship — Jones so pure and beloved; Roberts so twisted and despised. Sampson guesses that Jones simply liked to be taken care of, and Roberts, a lord of Wall Street, was good at it. He could run or fix anything. He oversaw Jones’s financial affairs and attended to every chore at Augusta, leaving the master free to write his books, listen to music, and, tragically, battle the illness that, in 1971, would claim his life. As Sampson puts it, ” Roberts was the iron fist inside Jones’s velvet glove.”

Sampson’s most valuable contribution in his Masters is his portrayal of Roberts. Born in 1894, Roberts grew up in the hardscrabble Midwest and, later, East Texas. Both of his parents killed themselves. After serving in World War I, Roberts returned to Texas, where he found his way into the oil business. By 1923, he was rich. His fortune in his pocket, he went to New York, where he bought a large percentage of the brokerage that would become Dean Witter. Through Jones, a scion of Atlanta, Roberts met the powerful managers of Coca-Cola, and the two friends were awarded a bottling business in South America.

When Roberts himself committed suicide — putting a gun to his head on the grounds of Augusta in 1977 — he was worth over $ 100 million. The bulk of his estate he left to Planned Parenthood, for Roberts abhorred children. He once kept a prospective member out of the club because the man had five sons and daughters. As far as Roberts was concerned, “anyone stupid enough” to have that many offspring “isn’t smart enough to belong to Augusta National.” His own parents had also had five children.

In a life tinged with darkness, Roberts was extremely lucky in one respect (aside from the money): He became an intimate of his two heroes, Jones and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Roberts met Ike in 1948 and immediately cultivated his friendship (Augusta National not being a bad lure for a golf-mad general). When Eisenhower landed an advance for a war memoir, he promptly handed it over to Roberts to invest for him. At the club, Roberts built Eisenhower a house and a pond. He also introduced him to Augusta’s big-money boys, whom Eisenhower would come to know as the “Gang.” These men shepherded his way to the White House.

All the while, Roberts was making himself indispensable to Eisenhower. In 1952, when Eisenhower was persuaded to run for president, Roberts was at his side, leaning on delegates favorable to Robert A. Taft and accompanying Eisenhower on the stump. He operated as bag man for the campaign, breaking laws as he went. He also took care of a small woman problem — Kay Summersby, who was grumbling about her humble salary and one-room apartment. Roberts, in the style that Vernon Jordan would later make famous, arranged for her to have a comfortable job at American Express.

The day after the election, the president-elect flew to Augusta National. He would return there twenty-nine times during his presidency. As for Roberts, he spent one hundred and twenty nights at the White House, leaving personal belongings in the Red Room, which the mansion’s staff knew as “Mr. Roberts’s room.” On the days when they were not together, Eisenhower and Roberts corresponded.

Sampson’s book therefore contains a touch of political history, and of social history, too, as he describes the uneasy relationship between the town of Augusta and the strange, unwelcoming club in its midst. He handles the topic of race nicely, although probably to excess, devoting more space to Augusta natives Butterfly McQueen, Beau Jack Walker, and James Brown than to Nelson, Hogan, and Snead. He also recounts the familiar tales of the caddies, with their incomparable names: Cemetery, 8-Ball, Stovepipe, Rat, Three Fingers. The book often waxes sociological — every sportswriter’s disease — but it does not do so unintelligently.

In The Masters, Sampson displays all the virtues found in his Hogan book, chief among them perspicacity, humor, and grace. Yet the book has its faults: Its organization is haphazard; its musical references (necessary for Jones) are foolish; it imposes an eye-glazing discourse on agronomy; it incorrectly captions a famous photo of Nicklaus in 1975; and it omits the most stirring Masters victory of all — Nicklaus’s in 1986.

But the book delivers on the promise of its subtitle, to record the story of “golf, power, and money” at Augusta. It is the golf, of course, that ultimately matters most, for those who fantasize about the Masters could hardly care less about the power and the money, the pomposity and airs of the club, deservedly mocked. When they swing their clubs on their hard-baked municipal courses, or on the tattered mats of their practice ranges, they are striping a fairway wood over Rae’s Creek, hitting a precise iron to the sixteenth green, and, in the late-afternoon sun, being helped into the green jacket by the previous year’s champion. Not for nothing is the Masters “the toughest ticket in sports.” The tournament has been sold out since 1972, and its waiting list was closed in 1978. There is — it is true — nothing else, anywhere, like it.

Jay Nordlinger is associate editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.