by William Gallo
Sports Illustrated

For the people on The Hill, Tbo's Traditional Brunch was always a tougher ticket than the Masters. In the days when the ladies from the Junior League were practically giving away tournament badges down on Broad Street, what old Augusta coveted was an invitation to the annual April masterpiece of J. Robert Teabeaut II, M.D. But even later, when Masters tickets got as hard to find as good help, Tbo's party was still the thing.

Consider. After four or five nights of drinking and not much in the way of solid food, devotees of the game were in sore need of a stick-to-the-ribs kind of meal - along with a couple of pick-me-ups to fuel the final hours of Masters week. A specialist in forensic pathology, the doctor understood this. "In those days, if you didn't go to seven parties every night, you hadn't been out," says Tbo. "You can imagine. By Sunday morning...."

By Sunday morning old Augusta needed a doctor. So every December, for more than 20 years, he would have 350 pounds of prime, boneless beef hung for aging. He would get his chairs reupholstered and send the drapes out for cleaning. He would call down to Smoak's on Walton Way and order enough tomato aspic and cauliflower with cream sauce to feed, well, who knows?

Tbo could invite 50 or 80 local friends to the Traditional Brunch, but everybody had seven or eight houseguests, and before he knew it, there were 500 people out there in his garden up on The Hill, drinking Irish coffee and brandy milk punch and bourbon on the rocks, popping champagne corks over the house in the direction of Summerville Cemetery and telling Mr. Robert Johnson and his crew exactly how they wanted their steaks cooked.

Those weren't the only attractions. If the winter had been mild and Tbo's bulbs threatened to bloom early, he would pack them in ice so that everything would burst into full splendor on the crucial Sunday. When his guests started arriving at 10 a.m., straight from church, the garden was always a blaze of color. He might also freeze spring flowers into huge blocks of ice. Or furnish the grounds with bunnies and chicks for Easter. One year his old friend Martha Boardman Fleming surprised Tbo with a bagpiper. Another time he asked one of his students from the Medical College of Georgia to show up in a Playboy bunny costume. And no one who is anyone on The Hill, in the fine old neighborhood called Summerville, will forget the Sunday morning when the Doctor's housekeeper, Mattie Devoe, burst from a huge papier-m‰chŽ Easter egg, shimmying and shaking in her maid's uniform. In old Augusta that was the kind of touch people appreciated. It was the perfect send-off for Masters celebrants en route to stand Sunday vigil at Amen Corner or on the cool veranda of the Augusta National clubhouse. Mattie, dancing out of an egg. This was also the party where outsiders could always get tournament badges. Even after Arnie and television and burgeoning throngs of middle-class golfers had turned Augusta's simple old game into something else - into something they thought they understood up in New York or out in California - after Ben Hogan and Sam Snead and lesser mortals had stopped parading through downtown in white Cadillac convertibles provided by the Johnson Motor Company and a Masters badge had become a status symbol, you could still get one in Tbo's garden, sometimes just minutes before the leaders teed off in the final round. Way back, the doctor pitched in by buying eight badges, but even when the National cut him back to two, he more often than not gave those away.

Call it Southern hospitality. The people who lived in the willow-shaded mansions of Summerville had been going to the Masters since Rae's Creek doubled as a kids' swimming hole. When cows from the adjacent dairy used to wander onto the fairways. When the caddie master at the neighboring Augusta Country Club used to lock his charges in a pen and keep order with a bullwhip and pistol. They remembered how Eisenhower campaigned to have that big pine on number 17 at the National chopped down because he was always knocking his drives into it - and how Clifford Roberts, chairman of the Masters, turned down the President of the United States. They even remembered when a visitor to town could deliver a country ham to anybody who lived along Washington Road and get Masters tickets in return, along with a parking spot.

On the other hand, a lot of people in old Augusta don't even bother with the scene at the National on Sunday. In Tbo's prime, if Augustans hadn't already rented their houses for the week, for $2,000 or $5,000 or more, and gotten out of town, many of them were likely to remain in his garden for the afternoon, availing themselves of his hospitality and wit, maybe even watching the last few holes on TV. Over the years there were no fights that he can think of. And if someone occasionally blundered into a serving table or took a three-hour nap in his azalea bushes, so be it. Tbo always threw a splendid, life-giving brunch, and the champagne flowed, but he never hired a photographer.

In Squeaky's Tip Top, Sonny Hill is explaining golf and the hold that Augusta National exerts on the local psyche. "Now to tell you quite honestly, I am more of a fisherman than a player," he says between gulps of beer. As if to underscore the point, Sonny is wearing a blue baseball cap with a plastic catfish stuck through its crown - bewhiskered snout in front, tail fanning out in back.

"They take that whole entire thing out there and pave it over with cement, ain't 29 people in this town gonna miss church come Sunday," says Hill. "The people of Augusta built this thing up from nothing, and I'll tell you quite honestly, folks out there at the National don't give diddly back. You could used to go out to the practice rounds; now you're lucky to see the thing on TV. And the rich people. National says jump, they jump. National tells 'em to behave, they behave. They turn into a whupped dog."

Truth be told, the Masters puts millions into the local economy, though the club makes it a policy to never say how or how much. The money is needed because the town of Augusta has taken some whuppin' itself in recent years. Despite the picture of full-flowered glory and fine manners that golf fans see on television every Masters week, the city that lies beyond the high gate of Augusta National has some problems. The prosperity of the ballet, the opera, the symphony and the new museums and the development of River Walk are all good news. But those elegant French boutiques in downtown's failed Port Royal retail development closed their doors inside of three years. There have been layoffs at Savannah River Site, the nuclear plant across the river in South Carolina that is one of Augusta's largest employers. Some people wanted to call the newly refurbished home of the GreenJackets, Augusta's Class A baseball team, Ty Cobb Stadium in honor of the Hall of Famer who lived there for many years. But the book and movie depicting Cobb as a nasty bigot killed that: The GreenJackets play in Lake Olmstead Stadium. Then the Atlanta City Council came out against Olympic golf at Augusta National, citing the club's long history of discrimination against women and minorities.

As if all that weren't enough, the city staggered through a major fiscal crisis last spring. Was $5 million mismanaged? Seven million? No one could tell, and no one could explain. Not Mayor Charles DeVaney, who along with several city council members chose not to run for reelection. Not the people around him. Certainly not Augusta's 45,000 citizens, who found some municipal services threatened for a spell.

Beyond the beauties of Magnolia Lane, other imagery can startle the stranger to Augusta. Visit the swooping chamber of commerce building downtown and you can't help noticing its neighbors - the Marine Room ("Girls! Girls! Girls!") and Baby Dolls, where the current attractions include Miss Dallas and Miss Michelle, artists all but unknown in Dr. Teabeaut's distant garden. As in many American cities, retailers have fled to the suburban malls, and the last of the downtown movie palaces, The Miller, shut down a few years back. The only token of immortality remaining on Broad Street is Augusta's Confederate Monument, a white tower erected in 1878 and inscribed this way: no nation rose so white and fair: none fell so pure of crime. Crime in Richmond County is another story. Forty years after the segregationist Cracker Party finally loosened its grip on Augusta, local politics can still be a welter of personal opportunism and racial friction. In 1983 County Sheriff J.B. Dykes left office after pleading guilty to two counts of obstruction of justice. The next year, Augusta's only African-American mayor, Ed McIntyre, was convicted of extortion and jailed after asking for kickbacks. In the spring of '95 came the fiscal mess. And last November, Augusta and Richmond County voted to consolidate their governments after 30 years of hot debate. That quadrupled Augusta's population in an instant, but it hasn't brought tranquillity: Boosters say consolidation is good for attracting business, but with the affluent white suburbs now conjoined with the city, black political power has been diluted. As the smoke clears, Augusta's first mayor-chairman is one Larry Sconyers, a son of poor white farmers who parlayed the family's back-road barbecue joint into a major landmark with 425 seats and a national following of rib eaters. Sconyers may have been riding around in a white stretch limousine the day after he was elected, but some things never change: He still sports a gold pig ring and matching gold pig necklace, and he still opposes set-aside programs for minority businesses, and he dismissed a study that concluded blacks weren't getting their share of the pie.

"It's business as usual," says Barbara Gordon, the fiery editor and publisher of The Metro Courier, a black Augusta weekly. "The good ol' boys are still in charge, and until that changes, blacks will be excluded from the economic development process. People all over the country watch the Masters, but black folks here pay little or no attention to it. They have other problems. There's another world here beyond those manicured greens and the azaleas - and it isn't nearly as pretty. This place is one of the most racist little cities I've ever seen in my life, and I mean that sincerely."

If Martha and Betty Boardman's great-grandfather hadn't taken the side of the South before the War Between the States and moved his family to Augusta, they would have been, well ... Yankees, condemned to boiling pot roast amid the snows of Connecticut and hauling the Sunday New York Times from room to chilly room. As it happened, though, the Boardman sisters were blessed with sublime Southern girlhoods in a fine, tree-shaded house on The Hill and summers on the cool shore of Boardman Lake, southwest of the city, now square in the middle of the U.S. Army's Fort Gordon. Back then the girls swam before breakfast, ate cold watermelon in the afternoons and rode their own merry-go-round. Almost from the moment Gene Sarazen scored the famous double eagle in 1935, the Masters was in their blood, which is some of the bluest in Augusta. Their father helped build the family fortune in oil; their golf-loving mother walked after Horton Smith and Ben Hogan at Augusta National - with perhaps five or six other people in attendance. Later, Betty Boardman was a 10 handicap and the women's champion of Augusta Country Club. The sisters began giving Masters parties 25 years ago.

For her part Martha, 66, never much cared for actually hitting the ball, and she doesn't even blink when she reports that, after moving away for 10 years with her first husband, she spent another 20 years on the Augusta National waiting list before she was able to buy a pair of annual Masters badges: "Actually, I never thought I'd see the day," she says. "And I know that if you do something they don't like out there - which no one I'm acquainted with would ever do, of course - they'll yank your tickets in a New York minute. Everybody in Augusta plays golf, but it's too slow for me. I don't see enough result. I'd rather dig in the garden and see what I did at the end of the day. Or cook. I'd rather cook than eat."

In Masters weeks past, Martha has prepared Brazilian dinners for 150, six-course Greek feasts, and French and Portuguese extravaganzas. She once decorated her Charleston, S.C., beach house to resemble the Santa Maria under full sail, and she makes a surpassing Bloody Mary. "I wouldn't let a caterer anywhere near my house," she says. Nor an ounce of pretense. "I don't go for highfalutin crap," she says, "and Gucci shoes don't make me come to attention." But if a recipe calls for a clove of garlic, she tosses in four, and she's likely to keep a fresh drink close at hand.

"In Augusta we love to entertain our visitors," Martha says, "and Masters week is the pinnacle. Everybody here drinks like a fish, and we like parties. Besides, we get so sick of lookin' at each other that we embrace any new face we see. This can be a gossipy little town, but pretty soon you just don't have anything left to talk about. So the Masters is kind of a renewal each April. New blood."

At her house Martha's sister does things her own way. Last year Betty Boardman Bowring, 68, had a little Spanish place she knows up in Greenwich Village pack paella for 60 in dry ice and fly it down to Augusta on the next flight. She also imported the resident songbird at New York City's Gramercy Park Hotel. Things must be just right in Masters week, down to the last note.

Of course, not everyone drops by to see the Boardman sisters. While Martha means well, it is difficult for her to transcend her time and place. On interracial or interethnic romance, for instance, Martha has a tart opinion. "The cardinal does not hook up with the blue jay, does it?" And every morning of her life, she says, "I wake up and look up to the heavens, and I say, 'God, I thank you for making me' - in this order - 'Southern, white, Anglo-Saxon and a nongolfer.'"

A friend of Martha's remembers a Sunday evening in April not long ago when, looking for another quip and one last drink, he dropped by her place to see if a party was still raging. Instead, the graduate of Cordon Bleu and the rest of the world's cooking schools had tacked a note to her door: no tacos, it read. go home.

In 1983 one Charles R. Harris, of nearby Blythe, Ga., crashed his truck through the gate at Augusta National, careered on toward the clubhouse and took five hostages in the pro shop. President Ronald Reagan was visiting that day, and this was Harris's way of saying he wanted a word with him. The intruder was subdued, arrested and subsequently sentenced to 10 years in prison. The immutable code of behavior at the club was quickly restored. No running. No shouting. No periscopes. No unseemly forms of dress. No boasts of important local friendships. And, it goes without saying, no scalping of Masters tickets. Listen: A sheriff's officer posing as a scalper once hauled a man off to jail just for trying to pay an inflated rate - little matter that the prospective buyer was a Catholic priest.

No one has put up a monument to Charles R. Harris, but there are some in Augusta who take secret pleasure every time some lonely rebel defies the city's most powerful institution - when Lee Trevino disassociates himself from the club by changing into his spikes in the parking lot, when a local member gets banished for selling tee times to the unwashed, when a caddie (or a player!) hides ticketless friends in the trunk of his car and motors right past the sign that reads positively no admittance.

Among this set Augusta's current Joan of Arc is Kathie Edwards, who sells souvenir T-shirts out of a trailer on Washington Road. Two years ago Edwards was one of two dozen small merchants who got a stern letter from Augusta National warning that they had violated the club's trademark guidelines with their products and demanding that they cut it out. Edwards was the only one who fought back. She had to go to Atlanta, 130 miles away, to find a lawyer because no one in Augusta would represent her. And she had to relent when her money ran out. But now well-wishers, even the occasional bank president, will stop by the shop to shake her hand. "Of course, no one will say anything in public," Edwards says. "They wouldn't dare. But I've lived here all my life, and I'm tired of being bullied by the National. So I didn't just say no. I said, Hell, no! And I may not be done with all this. Tell you one thing, I'll be out there with my van again this year."

In the poor, white district of Augusta called Pinch Gut, hard by the river, no one gave a damn for golf. Until he was 20, Jackson Carswell saw the game as a bunch of fools chasing a little ball around a pasture with a stick, and he just shook his head. But when the bug got him, he stayed bit. First round ever, he astonished his partners by carding a 94, and on an average day on a good course he shoots in the low 80s. As the proprietor of Golf Tee and Learning Center, a roadside driving range way out in Grovetown, 12 miles southwest of the city and seven miles off the Bobby Jones Expressway, he sees what passion the game arouses in Augusta. Curious young soldiers from Fort Gordon, just across the road, wander into his place without ever having held a four-iron. Low handicappers come by to work out their problems, maybe do a little video analysis. Duffers duff. The winter crowd interests Carswell most. "People come out here in November and December and hit buckets of balls in the rain and the sleet - sometimes when it's snowing. They're going to play Augusta National, and they want to be ready. They definitely do not want to embarrass themselves. Not up there. Because for any golfer, it's heaven."

Actually, that's Gary Player's view too. "When I think of Augusta, I think of great beauty," he once said. "I don't know of a golf course where you have such tremendous beauty anywhere in the world. And I've always said that if they have a course like this in heaven, I hope I'm the head pro there one day."

Carswell doesn't want to be pro; he would just like to get a round in. He has played Forest Hills and Goshen Plantation and Cedar Creek and Jones Creek and other local courses, but never the National. "I know a couple of members, but I don't know if I'll ever be invited," he says.

Carswell will always remember the afternoon he saw another Augusta boy win the Masters. It was 1987, and Carswell was selling used cars at the time, so he watched the final round in the office over at the dealership. And when Larry Mize sank a 140-foot pitch on number 11 - the hole they call White Dogwood - to beat Greg Norman in the playoff, the Augustan in Jackson Carswell was moved. "It was a special moment," he says. "Local boy." The day after winning the Masters, Mize honored a commitment to play an exhibition for the soldiers at Fort Gordon, something Carswell and the rest of Augusta have never forgotten. A few weeks later the city had his picture painted on the side of a downtown building in a suitably heroic pose. The gesture befitted a player whose origins were not much grander than Carswell's. As a boy Mize played golf with his father, a marketing manager for the phone company, not at Augusta National but at Augusta Country Club. Charles Mize was a two handicapper, but by age 13, Larry was beating him regularly. As if in preparation for a great moment to come, father and son used to pitch golf balls to each other, front yard to back, over the roof of the Mize house. Larry's mother, Elizabeth, sensed something special right there. "They never broke a window - not one," she says.

But Larry was breaking par, and his father remembers the days when the two of them would walk together up the 9th fairway at Augusta Country Club, which adjoins Augusta National's 13th tee. "I can still see him," Charles says. "He would look through the fence, wishfully, and he'd say, 'I'm gonna play there some day, Daddy.'"

Mattie Devoe has been gone for 18 years now, and Dr. Teabeaut hasn't had the Traditional Brunch in 10, since the big, corporate Masters parties that now dominate Augusta started to look like "TV commercials," and since complete strangers began walking out of his garden with unopened half-gallons of his liquor under their arms. For the first few years that didn't stop the guests: Dozens of them still showed up at his house, expecting an Irish coffee or the sight of Mattie bursting from her egg, until it finally sank in that the party was over. For the last three years the doctor has been sick - heart, kidneys, some other vital organs wearying in the battle with time and habit - and it irks him every time the truck from Poteet's Funeral Home passes in front of the house. But Tbo says he will revive Augusta's most famous Sunday party next spring. "I don't have much time left," he says without rancor, "so we better get on with it. We will do it again, the correct way."

As Tbo points out the homes of various Barretts and Phinizys and Clays - impressive manses all - he remembers his first Masters. It was almost 40 years ago, and the young doctor had just moved to Augusta from North Carolina to take a teaching post. "I didn't know anyone here, really," he says, "but I started meeting people, going to parties. And I went to the tournament that year. I remember it was a beautiful spring day. A man who was later to become governor of the state came up to me at the golf course and asked me to come by his house for a drink the next morning. But first, he tapped me on the shoulder, looked me up and down and said, 'Robert, you're a little short there.'" Tbo immediately went home and put on long trousers. "Always, the code has been maintained - and gently so," he says. That's the way it will be in the end, too. The last sight on our rain-sodden tour of The Hill is Summerville Cemetery, which is enclosed by a wall of red brick and stands directly across the way from Dr. Teabeaut's house on Montrose Court. Because he lives within boundaries established in 1824, the doctor is eligible for Summerville Cemetery, and he has already selected his plot. He has also ordered workmen to cut a gap in the dense green hedge surrounding his house and to install an iron gate facing the street. That way, guests will not be inconvenienced as they make their way from his funeral to one last party in his sun-dappled garden.