Strange trio who created the Masters

The traditions that define Augusta were developed by a reactionary Scottish camouflage expert. James Cusick reports

They like things to be neat and tidy at Augusta. Clifford Roberts, co-founder of the host club of the Masters, and perhaps the man most responsible for its image, could not face untidiness and loss of independence when cancer eventually ruined his health just as he passed 80. He blew his brains out with a Smith & Wesson .38 revolver one morning in 1977, but not before he had gone to the clubhouse barber for a haircut.

In 1921 then a young partner in the Wall Street brokers Reynolds & Co, Roberts made his first fortune buying and selling leases of Texas oil. Eventually becoming one of the largest stockbrokers in New York running profitable accounts like General Motors, he had made enough cash and had enough time to focus on golf. By 1931 Roberts had serious financial friends like the bosses of Coca-Cola and the Singer Sewing Machine company. But crucially, Roberts was the most important FOB, the "Friends of Bob".

When Bobby Jones - the young legend fresh from winning everything - hinted at his desire to build a great golf course Roberts found the money, found the backers and found the Georgia Nursery property belonging to a Belgian aristocrat, Baron Berckman. When the television cameras this week pan round the Masters course and commentators show off their horticultural expertise by praising the beauty of the azaleas and the double magnolias, it is the Baron and his "Fruitlands Nursery" who should be remembered.

The rest on view is down to Jones, Roberts, and a Scottish physician turned military camouflage expert turned golf-course designer, the remarkable Dr Alister MacKenzie.

In new research into MacKenzie's life by Professor James Scott, a retired obstetrician from Leeds, there are the first hints into why this triumvirate of the good doctor, Jones and Roberts were able to create the one thing Americans covert over all else - tradition.

MacKenzie's life as unearthed by Scott reads like a Hollywood drama. He was born in Normington, near Leeds, but the family came from Lochinver in Sutherland, northern Scotland. Lochinver is crucial to MacKenzie and therefore to Augusta too. Here the young MacKenzie was introduced to the skills of natural camouflage when he was out stalking red deer with his father.

Although he qualified as a doctor MacKenzie was never a committed man of medicine. He served in both the Boer and Great War but in 1916 he resigned from the Medical Corps, giving up the rank of major to become a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers to do camouflage work. He would later simplify the task of the course designer by stating: "The practitioner of camouflage tries to set up insoluble confusions with the enemy, the course designer uses the same skills to set soluble puzzles for the competitor." At Amen Corner on Sunday as the final nine holes approach, the image of MacKenzie's ghost in the colourful bushes watching to see if Augusta's camouflage is foxing the great men somehow seems wonderfully apt.

Scott believes MacKenzie was a jovial, roguish, outgoing and confident personality. "These features are best encompassed by the Scot's word gallus," he says. But one trait explains why MacKenzie may have fitted in well with the southern conservatism of Jones and Roberts. He was an autocrat and would have recognised the southern culture of a society where everyone was supposed to know their place. Scott maintains that MacKenzie's idea of political health "makes Reagan and Thatcher seem like liberals". In conversation MacKenzie would apparently enlarge repeatedly on the place of golf as a bulwark against Bolshevism.

No less a saint-maker than Alastair Cooke, who befriended Bobby Jones in his later years admits Jones was an "incurable conservative". When the first casual meeting between Jones and MacKenzie took place at the Pasatiempo golf course in California, MacKenzie's design work was already internationally respected. The two got on like house on fire.

Jones "conceptualised" Augusta, MacKenzie designed it. It would have "similar features" to St Andrews (two holes), two with Cypress Points, one hole similar to the fourth at Alwoodly, Leeds, and one each from North Berwick and Muirfield. The two men firmly believed it would become "the world's wonder inland course".

MacKenzie did not get a large fee for his work at Augusta. One person around at the time said: "If he made any money on that course he would hear the change jingle in his pocket". The hint is that the good doctor would stand many a round in the bar when things were going well. MacKenzie died before all the work on Augusta was completed and before the first "Invitational Tournament" would metamorphose into the Masters.

But if you are setting about creating "tradition" you cannot reveal anything that has been changed. From original photographs of Augusta and comparison with the course now there is more than a hint of change. The almost surgical detail of the way the course is looked after may echo MacKenzie's trade. But Augusta, though they will not admit it, is a pedigree product still evolving.

In 1947 Jones was stricken with a degenerative spinal disease that eventually put him in a wheelchair. He remained president of Augusta until his death in 1971. It was Roberts who fashioned the club's image, who insisted on its independence and who cracked the whip others, even Jones himself, felt. Fewer FOBs and more CEOs (Chief Executive Officers) dominated Augusta's tycoon-ridden membership under Roberts' dictatorship. Augusta is, always has been, establishment. Eisenhower's successful Presidential campaign was launched and almost run from Augusta. Roberts helped organise that. He also organised the dumping of Nixon from the Vice Presidential ticket in 1952.

That the club is almost exclusively white and is as much a reflection of the make-up of the Fortune 500 richest businessmen as a racist slur. But it also seems an inherent part of the southern states' culture.

Only when forced, as they were recently when Lee Trevino and others threatened to boycott the Masters unless the club changed its membership policy did the club relent and admit its first black member. But a few black faces in the clubhouse change little. If Trevino wanted appearances changed, then fine, Augusta would change its appearance. That is the business the club has always been in.

Perhaps the pinnacle horror of such a policy is the treatment Roberts handed out to his long-term friend. Jones' disease had worsened. The legend in his wheelchair could hardly hold on to a cigarette. At that time the "tradition" was for Jones to present the Masters champion with the coveted Green Jacket. But image must have got the better of Roberts. The extremely ill Jones was banned from taking part in the televised jacket ceremony. The fall-out was that Roberts was not invited to attend Jones' funeral in 1971.

Regardless of Roberts' prejudices and autocracy, his created tradition will be on display again this week. Try telling anyone in golf it is not real and no one will believe you.