The Best American Magazine Writing 2020

by Sid Holt

  Augusta National opened in 1932. Its founders were Bobby Jones, the amateur golfing champion, and Clifford Roberts, a Wall Street stockbroker. Jones, an Atlantan and a lawyer, with an English degree from Harvard and an engineering degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology, was, except for Babe Ruth, the era’s most revered sports figure and is still considered, in the precincts where such mythologies pertain, the quintessence of the humble and graceful gentleman-athlete. As he grew disenchanted by fame and by competitive golf, Jones sought to establish a world-class private club in his home state—a winter course. Roberts, a flinty, fastidious martinet with a hardscrabble background and a knack for making himself indispensable to powerful men, befriended Jones and took up the cause. In Augusta, they found 365 acres of a defunct commercial nursery called Fruitland, which had been owned and operated by a Belgian family called Berckmans. (The owner before that was a slaveholder, and some evidence suggests that slaves were housed on the property.) Jones and Roberts hired a British designer named Alister MacKenzie to lay out a course, and Roberts set about building a membership. At first, he had a difficult time getting more than a handful of men to join, owing both to the remote location and to the Depression. In the first decade, the operation was basically broke. The failure to attract members led Roberts and Jones to abandon grander plans—for squash and tennis courts, a “Ladies’ course,” a new clubhouse, and the development of estates adjacent to the links.

  The tournament, first held in 1934, was Roberts’s gambit for attracting attention, members, and money. He persuaded Jones to come out of retirement to compete in it—an instant lure to fans and players alike—but at first Jones wouldn’t agree to calling it the Masters, finding the word too grandiose. A pivotal development, in the life of both the club and Roberts, was the membership of Dwight Eisenhower, who, at Roberts’s behest, first vacationed there with Mamie in 1948 and was thereafter besotted with the place, despite a rickety golf game. Jones’s health was declining, and Roberts adopted Eisenhower as his (and the club’s) principal means of advancement. Roberts served as Ike’s financial adviser and executor and, after Roberts helped arrange his run for president, as his bagman. During his presidency, Eisenhower made the club his Mar-a-Lago, visiting twenty-nine times; Roberts had a house built for him on the property. Eisenhower and his son were shareholders, along with other members, in a lucrative international Coca-Cola-bottling venture called Joroberts, run by Roberts and Jones, who were set up in the business by the Coca-Cola chairman and early Augusta member Robert Winship Woodruff, known as the Boss. Augusta National is still Coke country, although, in keeping with a Roberts edict of yesteryear, no brand names are visible at the concession stands.

  The golf establishment tends to remember Roberts as a sour figure, a charmless tyrant, and a canny sycophant—the bad cop to the faultless Bobby Jones. Given access to the club’s archives, my colleague David Owen, in The Making of the Masters, from 1999, painted a more nuanced portrait of Roberts, from his dismal, itinerant farm-boy childhood to his death, by self-inflicted gunshot, on the grounds of Augusta National in 1977, next to Ike’s Pond, which he’d had built for Eisenhower to fish in. Owen dismisses or, at least, parses some of the nastier Roberts legends. But, clearly, the club and the tournament owe their exacting standards and often peculiar, now widely venerated traditions to Roberts’s obsessive attention to detail and stubborn insistence on a certain way of doing things.

  Because of him, the Masters is probably the best-run sporting event in the world. “They have established the gold standard in terms of the conditioning of the golf course,” Brandel Chamblee, the commentator and former pro, told me. “I’ve yet to encounter anyone who is curt or rude. I don’t know how you can find fault with this place.” A standard of etiquette, attributed to Jones and strictly enforced, is printed on the sheets that patrons carry around, with groupings, tee times, and a course map: “ ‘Most distressing to those who love the game of golf is the applauding or cheering of misplays or misfortunes of a player’—Robert Tyre Jones, Jr. (1902–1971), President in Perpetuity.” The concession stands run smoothly, and the prices are famously modest: a buck-fifty for a soda or a sandwich, four dollars for a beer. You could say that it’s a prelapsarian paradise, a dream of a bygone America of good manners and affordable delights. You could also say that this America never really existed, except as a figment of privilege and exclusion, and that the conjuring of it, on such a scale, is a kind of provocation.

  As a televised event, the Masters is peerless. You don’t have to be a golf fan to enjoy it or to enjoy napping in front of it. The apparatus for all this footage—the camouflaged camera towers, the buried cables, the hidden microphones—is hardly noticeable when you’re there. The club maintains tight control over the broadcast and has been awarding one-year contracts to CBS since 1956. The Masters could fetch more on the open market, but Roberts and subsequent chairmen have exchanged higher rights fees for control, which, in the end, has enhanced the event’s prestige and ultimately its earning power. Originally, only the final four holes were broadcast. Later, coverage expanded to include the “second nine,” as the back nine is called at Augusta. (Jones felt that “back nine” evoked an image of one’s rear end.) Now the entire tournament is televised, and this year an app carried every shot by every player in the field. Because the players compete on what is more or less the same terrain, year after year, they do so in the context of bygone feats and failures, a folklore of shots made or missed, so that the way each successive champion tackles, say, the par-three twelfth is analogous to the way generations of folk musicians interpret “Long Black Veil.”

  And yet they do so in an oligarchs’ playground rather than in coffee shops. Augusta National has more in common with the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive men-only encampment in the California Redwoods, or the World Economic Forum in Davos than it does with Wimbledon or Fenway Park. From the beginning, even though subscription fees were modest, it was a club for the rich and powerful. The majority of the members, then as now, were from outside the South. In the early days, the eastern WASP establishment prevailed. Now it’s the CEO class, which, of course, remains mostly white and male. Many of those CEOs are Southerners, and supposedly the Atlanta contingent still holds sway. “The Masters is a Southern institution the way the Vatican is an Italian one,” Tarde said.

  The chairmanship certainly has some of the pomp of the papacy. The writers used to get an audience with the chairman, but now there’s usually just a press conference in an auditorium. On Wednesday, the current chairman, Fred Ridley, a real-estate lawyer from Florida and a former amateur golf champion, submitted to his, with a few dozen members assembled at the back of the hall, like a convocation of cardinals—all in their green jackets. Ridley was onstage, flanked by two committee members. The reporters addressed him as Mr. Chairman, or Chairman Ridley. He talked for a while—about the recent death of the writer Dan Jenkins, the rainy winter, future construction projects, and the success of the final round of the women’s national amateur championship, which Augusta had hosted the week before for the first time—then opened the floor to questions.

  The first came from a reporter right in front of him: “Chairman Ridley, when I watch other tournaments on television, I notice lots of cell phones, I notice lots of yelling. Will you please talk about the decorum in place at Augusta National that sets the Masters apart?”

  “Thank you,” Ridley said. “I think that’s something that does set us apart.”

  So it was that kind of a press conference. Only one question, occasioned by the women’s championship, came in with a little bite: “In hindsight, was it a mistake to be so restrictive for so long?”

  “We can always look back and say we could do better,” he replied. “I don’t think it’s particularly—well, it is instructive. It’s always instructive to look at the past.”

  The history of the club, like that of so many institutions in the Deep South/United States/world, is fraught with backwardness and bi
gotry. Charles Sifford, a prominent black golfer in the sixties, once quoted Roberts as saying, “As long as I live, there will be nothing at the Masters besides black caddies and white players.” No one has been able to corroborate this statement, but it does describe the state of things there for decades. (Owen, for what it’s worth, unearthed examples of Roberts expressing his hope that black golfers would soon qualify for the tournament.) It wasn’t until 1975 that a black player, Lee Elder, made the field, and only in 1990 did Augusta invite its first black member, Ron Townsend, an executive at the Gannett Television Group, to join. (One does not apply for membership; the invitation just comes when it comes, though there are back channels for communicating a desire to be considered.) Among its early members were Jock Whitney, who financed Gone with the Wind, and Freeman Gosden, best known for performing, in black-voice, on the radio program Amos ‘n’ Andy.

  But it wouldn’t be entirely accurate to chalk this up merely to geography. The game of golf has its own ugly history with regard to African Americans; the Professional Golf Association, which governs touring golfers in the United States, had a whites-only rule until 1961. There are plenty of private clubs in the Northeast, for example, that have fewer black or Jewish members than Augusta National does, and there are still a handful of prestigious clubs that do not accept women—but those clubs do not put on the world’s most prestigious professional tournament.

  This was the core of the argument made by Martha Burk, the head of the National Council of Women’s Organizations, in her campaign, prior to the 2003 Masters, to pressure the club’s chairman at the time, a South Carolina banker named Hootie Johnson, to accept women as members. Johnson, insisting on the club’s right to privacy and self-governance, and citing such single-sex organizations as the Boy Scouts and the Junior League, dug in, as did the media, most notably the Times, which made Augusta National an A1 staple. In an editorial, “America’s All-Male Golfing Society,” the Times urged Tiger Woods, who had won the previous two Masters, to boycott. “It’s frustrating, because I’m the only player they’re asking,” Woods said. “They’re asking me to give up an opportunity no one ever has—win the Masters three years in a row.”

  One finds now, in the back and forth of this saga, foreshadowings of the cancel-culture wars of today. As Alan Shipnuck recounts, in The Battle for Augusta National: Hootie, Martha, and the Masters of the Universe, published in 2004, the club hired a Washington consulting company, WomanTrend, run by Kellyanne Conway, which produced a survey whose finding was that Augusta National’s membership policies were not topmost on the list of women’s concerns. Burk—reasonably, once you see the questions—derided it as a “push poll” and “highly unethical.” Two days later, Jesse Jackson entered the fray: “We strongly support the movement to end gender apartheid at Augusta National Golf Club.” In the end, Woods, too, came out in favor of admitting women. In a press conference, Johnson replied, “I won’t tell Tiger how to play golf if he doesn’t tell us how to run our private club.”

  Eventually—and somewhat amazingly, looking back from the reputation-strewn battlefields of 2019—it all just sort of went away. To let its sponsors off the hook, the club announced that it would stage the 2003 Masters by itself, without them—opting, once again, for control over short-term profit. And then, nine years later, the first two women were admitted: Condoleezza Rice, the former secretary of state, and Darla Moore, a financier from South Carolina.

  Around midnight on the eve of the first round, while killing cockroaches in my room at the Rodeway Inn, I got a text message from an acquaintance who works in finance. A client of his had canceled at the last minute, which left him with a spare pass to Berckmans Place. He offered it to me.

  Berckmans is the Oz within Oz, a lavish dining-shopping-and-drinking complex accessible only to those who have been approved by the club to buy passes, at a cost of ten thousand dollars for the tournament. The club built Berckmans seven years ago, behind a wall of greenery southwest of the fifth fairway, to give favored patrons and corporate friends a sumptuous refuge from the elements and the throngs, and presumably to capture some of the revenue it had been ceding to off-campus entertainments.

  The Masters may be America’s top corporate-hospitality event; because it’s a golf tournament, it attracts a clubbier cohort than the Super Bowl or the Final Four, and because the competition lasts four days rather than two minutes, like the Kentucky Derby, it can please more of them. Kenny Dichter, a founder of the jet-lease company Wheels Up, called the tournament “Coachella for CEOs.” “This is where we entertain our premium-experience guests,” Andrew Chason, an executive at Creative Artists Agency, told me. “The prestige, the privacy, the beauty of the grounds, the traditions, the quality of the production—it can’t be beat.”

  Wheels down: out pour the premium-experience guests. A certain kind of Instagram feed fills up with photographs of rich people, famous people, lucky people, flashing the Gulfstream grin. The catch is that the hotels, restaurants, and caterers of the city of Augusta (known to many Georgians, however unfairly, as “Disgusta” and to Roberts as a “little tank town”) aren’t really up to the task of taking care of all these people in the manner they may be expecting. And so a luxury pop-up culture has sprung up outside the gates. Augusta homeowners cover their annual mortgage payments and landscaping bills by renting their houses to the out-of-towners, who, in turn, host clients and friends for spectation by day and dinners and other festivities by night. Celebrity chefs are flown in. Even the journalists get in on it. The press building’s bigger names often have a full slate of paid appearances, entertaining diners with pro-level patter and off-the-record scuttlebutt. This practice may explain why journalists are so deferential to the tournament—it’s their meal ticket, too. CAA, which represents a number of top golfers, produces a dinner series; this year’s, managed by Danny Meyer, featured nine chefs and a sommelier and staff, for a group of just thirty people. Mercedes and the other two domestic tournament sponsors, IBM and AT&T, are provided with so-called cabins (which could as easily be called mansions) on club property, down by the tenth fairway. Various fixers and event planners put together elaborate itineraries, which sometimes include a round of golf at a nearby club, such as Sage Valley, across the South Carolina border—a highly regarded Augusta National clone founded in 2001 by a real-estate magnate who had given up on being invited to join the real thing.

  A Berckmans badge might be part of the program. Just after sunrise, I arrived at the acquaintance’s rental house, not far from the club, and boarded a van with some of his clients, the executives of a large entertainment company. Not long afterward, the van pulled up to a pavilion, where a dozen or so attendants stood smiling and waving to us. “Welcome to Berckmans!” a security guard called out. “Bird songs too loud? I can turn them down for you.” Signs indicated that phones and photography were prohibited inside.

  At the metal detectors, two men behind me, whose golf shirts identified them as employees of a prominent private-equity firm, asked if I’d carry an extra folding chair of theirs through security. Everyone is allowed one chair. Presumably, these two were carrying additional ones for their superiors, or else—could it be?—angling for an unfair advantage. As soon as the grounds open each morning, chair holders—first members and their guests, then the general public—fan out across the course and secure their viewing spots; you leave a chair behind, usually with a name tag or a business card affixed to it, then wander around in the expectation that it will be vacant, or immediately vacated, when you come to claim it. Sometimes the chairs stay empty, like barely used country houses.

  Berckmans operates for just one week of the year. This is astonishing to contemplate: it’s a small indoor village, reportedly ninety thousand square feet. There are shrines to various touchstones of Augusta National lore and a vast, immaculate store that sells Masters merchandise, one of several on the grounds. Sweaters, hats, shirts, jewelry, club covers, platters, pens. You can buy official merch only on si
te; Augusta National sells nothing online or outside the gates. You might guess that this restriction would cut into sales, but scarcity fuels desire, or so it appears, judging by the queues at the shops and by the patrons lugging around clear-plastic shopping bags stuffed with purchases for the people back home. The club doesn’t share sales figures—it doesn’t even reveal how many tickets are sold—but a popular estimate is that it moves fifty million dollars of merchandise in that one week.

  In some ways, Berckmans is just a food court, but exclusivity can be mind-altering. A badge holder pays for nothing. People who can afford a meal at any restaurant in the world derive a thrill from dining without being handed a check. There are five restaurants: Ike’s; Calamity Jane’s, named for Bobby Jones’s putter; MacKenzie’s Pub, for the course architect; the Pavilion, outside; and Augusta’s, a sprawling Art Nouveau palm-frond-and-tin-ceiling seafood emporium, where you can get raw oysters, étouffée, and bananas Foster. For breakfast, our host chose Ike’s. There were hooks under the table on which to hang our ball caps. “The little things,” he said. A TV on the wall carried a live feed of Jim Nantz, off air but on site, having his hair strategically restructured. At the buffet, we heaped our plates with biscuits, grits, eggs, French toast, and candied peaches. I thought guiltily of my colleagues at the press center, having to make do with omelets and no hooks for their hats. As I hid in a john to jot down a few notes, I noticed that the restroom attendants cleaned the stalls after each patron’s use. (Later, I overheard a man talking to his wife on a courtesy phone: “Guess what: every time you go, there’s a guy who runs in and cleans the toilet.”)