Better late than never (but with trademark candor), the man who ruled Augusta for 40 years sits down to revisit his turbulent reign

By John Garrity

Clifford Roberts got right to the point. "I'm told that you specialize in an unusual form of journalism." 

I shifted in my chair and let my eyes wander toward the plasma TV on the wall behind the bar. The Golf Channel was airing highlights of Phil Mickelson's PGA win at Baltusrol. "Specialize is too strong a word. The only other" -- I turned back toward Roberts, searching for the right word -- "er, deceased person ... that is to say...." 

 "Donald Ross, I know," he said. "We talked." The former Masters chairman tapped the discard pile from his game of solitaire with an old, liver-spotted hand. "He said you helped him with his turning-in-the-grave problem."

 "Well," I said, "he was sick of reading that he was turning in his grave every time somebody altered some course he'd...." 

 "I didn't say it."

 I drew back. Roberts was glaring at me as if he had caught me wiping my nose on the sleeve of his green jacket. "I'm sorry," I said. "I...."

"I didn't say it," he said. He sagged in his chair, looking worn out. "I didn't say it."

The Augusta National Golf Club is closed during the hot summer months, but the voice on the phone -- a Southern-accented male voice with a deferential lilt -- had said that "Mr. Cliff" could meet me in the Grill Room before dinner. The guards in the gatehouse on Washington Road must have gotten the word because for the first time they let me pass without challenge. Sun filtered through the leafy canopy of Magnolia Lane as I rolled up to the clubhouse in my rented Buick. I encountered no one in the entry to the old plantation house, but I knew the way to the Grill Room. The chairman was seated at a window table, playing solitaire. Aside from a young black man in a white waistcoat -- who brought me a lemonade without my having to ask -- Roberts and I were alone.

"What didn't you say?" I asked.

He reached inside his jacket and took out some folded newspaper clippings. Unfolding one, he slid it across the table. The headline read, tiger woods makes masters history. Several paragraphs down, marked with a penciled exclamation point and a handwritten "No!" was an underlined passage:

The runaway victory by a 21-year-old black man at the formerly all-white Augusta National struck many as a posthumous rebuke of tournament founder Clifford Roberts, who once said, "As long as I'm alive, golfers will be white and caddies will be black."

I recognized the quote. "And you didn't...."

He shook his head. "How would you like that for an epitaph?"

I said nothing. Waiting a beat, Roberts unfolded the other clippings and pushed them toward me. One, from a 1971 Sporting News, had this Roberts quote: "We are the losers by never having had a black American in our tournament. If we had a Willie Mays in this field, our badges would sell out even faster than they do, and our television ratings would improve." Another clip celebrated Lee Elder's victory in the 1974 Pensacola Open, a feat that had earned Elder a place in history as the first black man to qualify for the Masters. This second article had Roberts saying, "I am relieved. We wanted a black person in the Masters tournament, and I'm sure Lee Elder is much happier that he got here on his playing of golf. And he's totally welcome."

Roberts waited for me to finish scanning the lines. When I looked up, he didn't hesitate before speaking. "I was always careful not to feed those socialistically minded press boys any ammunition they might use to attack the club."

This last comment had the unintended effect of reminding me that Roberts was no swamp-belt naïf. Born in Iowa and raised in California, he had moved east and made a modest fortune as a broker on Wall Street. He had then turned casual meetings with two prominent figures into lifelong friendships of profound significance. The first friendship, with legendary golfer Robert Tyre (Bobby) Jones Jr., transformed a nursery property in sleepy Augusta, Ga., into an obsessively private millionaires' club with a world-class golf course. The second friendship, with D-Day commander Dwight D. Eisenhower, had made Roberts the personal financial manager and close political crony of a two-term president.

"Are you suggesting a conspiracy? Do you think somebody planted that quote to make you look bad?" I asked.

"No, I simply think that maybe the reporters were lazy and didn't check it out." Roberts pulled a book from a briefcase at his feet and slapped it on the table. The title on the dust jacket was Just Let Me Play: The Story of Charlie Sifford, the First Black PGA Golfer.

"Page 175," Roberts said.

Turning to that page, I noted the header -- "The Lily-White Masters." I then read the carefully marked passages, in which Sifford charged that the Masters had intentionally rigged its invitation rules to exclude him from competing because "they didn't want a black, specifically me, on their golf course. The most prestigious golf course and tournament in America were also the most conniving and the meanest." Three paragraphs later, recalling a proposal in the late 1950s that Sifford be invited to the Masters as a goodwill gesture, the golfer wrote, "Word came back from the late Clifford Roberts, long the autocratic chairman of the Masters.... 'As long as I live,' Roberts said, 'there will be nothing at the Masters besides black caddies and white players.'"

I looked up. "There it is."

Roberts jabbed a finger at the book, indicating that I should keep reading. Sifford's next words were, "I can't remember now if that quote came from a newspaper or by word of mouth. I wish I did know, because if he said that in the newspaper, I can't believe that it wasn't picked up throughout the whole country."

Roberts pounced. "If I said it. If! Well, there's a reason it didn't get picked up by newspapers. It's because I didn't say it." He pushed his spectacles closer to his bushy eyebrows. "Would you like another lemonade?"

"What?" I looked at my glass. It was empty, even though I hadn't taken more than a sip or two. Immediately, the young waiter emerged from the kitchen with another lemonade for me and a scotch-and-water for "Mr. Cliff."

"Race and gender," I said, trying to gain some semblance of control over the interview. "Those two issues have dogged Augusta National from the beginning."

Roberts, calmer now, took a sip of his drink and nodded. "There were certain racists -- meaning people who wanted to stir up some kind of fuss, no matter which side of the fence they were on. I remember one person of the Jewish faith who wrote us one time, and he didn't ask, he said, 'I demand to know whether you permit Negro members and Jewish members in your club.'" Roberts snorted. "A communication of that sort was not worthy of a response. We merely threw it in the wastebasket."

"You thought people who criticized your exclusiveness were out of line?"

"It simply wasn't an issue. From the time that Bob Jones and I started the club, we told people that membership in the Augusta National was by invitation only. It's not a club where you fill out a form and apply and then are either accepted or refused membership. So, in that sense, no one has ever been turned down. I'll mention, along those lines, that we had no regulations that prevented us from inviting anybody because of religion, color and so on."

"Did you have any members who...?"

"I remember one time" -- he raised a hand to cut me off -- "some reporter asked, 'Cliff, do you have any Jewish members?' I said, 'I can't answer that question because it's not the sort of question we ask our invitees.'"

"Some would say that not asking the question provided you cover."

He gave me a sharp look but didn't rise to the bait. "I don't think you can possibly understand what it was like in the South in those years," he said. "You could never discuss race in a sane fashion with the Southern white people. Even those who were generally quite broad-minded couldn't be reasoned with on the topic of integration. To them it meant just one thing -- mixed marriages."

"Do you mean Southerners in general?"

"I'm talking about members of the Augusta National who lived in Augusta and other people who lived in places like Atlanta and Charleston. Reasonable people about most any other subject, but when it came around to integration they simply said, 'It means mixed marriages.'" He cleared his throat and stared for a moment at the cards on the table. "Looking back on it all, I have to concede that those people were a lot more right about it than I thought at the time. Go down and take a gander at Brazil, where they've had forced equality for 100 years, and I'll be damned if it's a pretty sight. Ask any businessman operating in Brazil, and he'll say if he had his choice he'd hire only white people to work for him. His second choice would be to hire nothing but one hundred percent black people. Without a doubt his third choice would be mixed-race people because it turns out they are pretty much worthless to a company." He cleared his throat again. "But I seem to be digressing."

I had my own thoughts about that, but Roberts signaled he wanted to move on to a less sensitive subject. "Tell me about Augusta's first membership meeting."

The chairman's mouth -- a straight-line frown up to this point -- relaxed into a little smile. "First and only," he said. "The year was 1933, the club was brand-new. Bob Jones, who was a lawyer, after all, thought we should do things by the book. I had just opened the meeting when Grantland Rice jumped up.... You know who Grantland Rice was?"

"A famous sportswriter."

"That's right, and a charter member of Augusta National. Anyway, Granny jumped up and said all the other clubs he had belonged to had gone broke because they'd made the mistake of holding a meeting, and he didn't want to see Augusta National make the same mistake. So he proposed that Bob and I should run the club as we saw fit without the hindrance of any further meetings. He said, 'All in favor, stand and say aye.' Everybody stood and yelled, 'Aye!' And that was that. All Bob and I could do was join in the laughter and capitulate."

The Rice resolution, I pointed out, had effectively given him dictatorial powers. "You controlled everything," I said. "You did the hiring and firing. You made the rules. You expelled members for minor infractions. You ran the Masters. You dictated how television covered the tournament...."

"Your magazine" -- he turned that hard gaze on me again -- "said I ran Augusta National the way Napoleon ran France." He waited for a response and, getting none, cackled in a way I found mildly alarming. "I called the shots, sure. But every decision I made was based on a single thought: What would Bob Jones do?"

"That's it? It was all about Jones?"

He nodded. "Bob was the most popular figure in the history of American sports. He was so beloved, in fact, that he couldn't play golf anywhere without it turning into an impromptu exhibition match with hundreds or even thousands of spectators in attendance. So you see, Bob and I built Augusta National for the simplest of reasons -- to give him a really private place to play the game. Men only were to be members, and we agreed to refrain from any social activities not related to golf."

"No women."

"Not as members, no. But I wouldn't characterize the club as inhospitable. Mamie Eisenhower loved to come here, despite the fact that she had no interest in golf. We had a great variety of plant life from all over the world, and Mamie, like most ladies, was terrifically interested in flowers and trees. And she liked the way she was treated by the staff, practically all of which, of course, was colored help." As if on cue, the young waiter appeared again, but only to pick up our empty glasses. That, and the fact that darkness had fallen outside, told me that my time with the chairman was almost up.

"You need to understand," Roberts continued, "that General Ike and I never had an in-depth discussion on the plight of the colored people. His views, like those of most white Americans, evolved during the two terms of his presidency. From the beginning he made it crystal clear that he didn't believe in second-class citizenship for any U.S. citizen. But he also felt that no Negro had a chance, no matter how much white people tried to help him, to achieve full equality and status until, say, a hundred years had passed. The General felt that change had to come about very slowly, and if you tried to rush such things you were courting disaster."

I jumped in. "Yet it was President Eisenhower who sent federal troops into Little Rock when Orval Faubus used the National Guard to keep black kids out of Central High School."

Roberts gave me one of his withering are-you-really-a-sportswriter looks. "Well, you had this worthless sort of governor in Arkansas who somehow trapped the President into sending federal troops. Ike had to, you understand, if he was going to discharge his duties under the Constitution. And trust me, a big majority of the Southern white people hated Ike for that. As far as they were concerned, he was trying to start another Civil War."

"Even in Augusta?"

"Oh, yes, indeed. I had to put some friendly pressure on the Augusta Chronicle to get them to terminate their nasty personal attacks on Ike. And you know, the route in from the airport was always lined with thousands of well-wishers when the President and Mamie came down to Augusta, but right after Little Rock there were fewer people, and there wasn't a whole lot of smiling or waving. Mamie was stunned. For my part, I was relieved that no real unpleasantness occurred. Nobody booed the President, as far as I know."

"Did that surprise you?"

"Yes, because your average Southerner was pretty hotheaded about the Negro problem. Especially the poor whites, the mill workers and the farmers."

"How did the president handle it?"

"It seemed to me that he never managed to unwind on that trip. He appeared a little distracted. For the first time since I'd known him, he played bad bridge."

Roberts collected the clippings and the book and put them in his briefcase. "I wish you had more time" -- a puzzling statement, since I had no firm plans for the evening or, for that matter, the rest of the week. "I intended to say more about the tournament, about how it has grown and prospered and how it has kept Bob Jones's memory alive. Many years ago I argued that the day would come when a properly managed golf tournament, operating in some big city, might take in a quarter of a million dollars!" He smiled at my reaction to the pitifully small number. "But I never thought it would happen in a little tank town like Augusta."

The waiter, cleaning up behind the bar, switched off the television. Realizing that it was now or never, I took a deep breath and blurted it out: "Your suicide."

Roberts froze.

"September 29, 1977," I continued. "Illness has forced you to step down as chairman, but you're still president of the club. You go out to the par-3 course around 2:30 in the morning wearing pants and a trench coat over your pajamas. You've had a night watchman help you load your pistol." Roberts continued to stare at me without giving any hint of what he was thinking. "Your body is discovered early the next morning floating in the creekbed by Ike's Pond."

Clutching the arms of his chair with both hands, Roberts stood up. I thought he was going to deliver a sharp rebuke, but instead he flashed a wan smile. "You've heard the joke, haven't you?" he said. "Two Augusta National members are talking. One says, 'Cliff Roberts went out on the par-3 yesterday.' His friend says, 'How'd he do?' And the first fellow says, 'Shot a .45.'"

I don't know if he expected me to laugh; I managed a wince with an appended smile. It was only later that I worked out that Roberts was trying to show me his playful side, the quality that had appealed to Jones and Eisenhower. To the rest of the world he was the last of the great autocrats. To his friends he was the wisecracking golfer, the needling bridge player, the prankster who had himself filmed "walking on water" for the amusement of the membership.

The lights went out behind us as we walked out of the Grill Room. Roberts shook my hand at the clubhouse door, surprising me with the firmness of his grip. He said, "I've told you things that could hurt some people's feelings, but I think it's important to be frank. I only ask that you look into that awful quote about black caddies and white golfers. I don't mind for myself, but the reputations of two great men should not suffer because of something I said a long time ago. And certainly not for something I didn't say."

A half hour later, as I slid into a booth at T-Bonz on Washington Road, I noticed a piece of pale-blue paper protruding from the handkerchief pocket of my sport coat. I plucked it out and stared at it. With a fountain pen, someone had written "p. 175."

Issue date: April 4, 2006