The Masters with the Crazy Gang

The car glided silently through the Georgia darkness, stopping outside the Augusta National clubhouse. It was a Sunday evening in April 1981, my first visit to the Masters, and I was benefiting from generosity begun a couple of decades earlier by Bobby Jones, Clifford Roberts and Jones’ great friend Charlie Yates. Jones loved golf in the United Kingdom and was much loved in return. His presence in golf events in the 1920s guaranteed huge numbers of spectators and many inches in the broadsheet newspapers. Needing publicity for the Masters in Augusta, a speck of a town in Georgia, in the 1950s and 1960s, they made a proposition to some of the leading golf journalists in the UK. In return for transmitting accounts of the Masters to our newspapers and magazines back in the United Kingdom, we were billeted free of charge in houses on a nearby street where a resident chef made us breakfast and dinner and a car was put at our disposal. I remember the scramble to get into the houses and find one of the few single bedrooms. The late Dai Davies...