The Man Who Built the Masters
He created the most revered event in sport - and one of its most troubling legacies. The complicated genius of Clifford Roberts.
The Masters is a bit like a black tie wedding.
I recently received a wedding invitation, but when it arrived in the post and I saw it was black tie, I rolled my eyes - I didn’t own a tux.
I set aside time on a Saturday afternoon three weeks before the wedding, dragged myself to whatever shop it is that sells tuxedos, and after going through the fitting experience I cringed to myself when the shop assistant told me the price.
Do these friends of mine not know I’ve got better things to be doing with my money and time than paying for a tuxedo for their bloody wedding that I’ll maybe use twice in my life!
The day of the wedding rolls around and you make sure the car is clean.
You drive to the ceremony, get out of your car, and look around at everyone else.
Ah, this is kinda cool I suppose.
It feels special. Like we’re all part of this little club for the day.
The men in their tuxedos, the ladies in their beautiful dresses.
You stand a little taller.
You hold yourself to a slightly higher standard.
You act like the gentleman you could be a little more often in your daily life.
You compliment the beautiful people around you.
You don’t rush.
You take your time.
The black tie rule feels silly and annoying at first, but then when you see it all come together, it just works.
Patrons, Not Fans
I haven’t been to the Masters yet, but I get the impression it’s a bit like that. You look at all the silly little rules and roll your eyes.
No running?
No phones?
No backpacks?
No asking for autographs?
No selfie sticks or signs?
But do they not know that this could be the only time I go to the Masters! What do you mean I can’t ask Rory McIlroy for an autograph!
Why call them patrons? Just call them fans!
Why not call the second nine the back nine like everyone else? (FYI, this is in case the commentators say “back side” by mistake.)
But then you see it all come together.
And it’s possibly the best sporting event in the world.
Ah, I get it now.
Look at the Crowd
Look at the moment below, when LeBron James broke the NBA scoring record. What do you see?
Of course, it’s a legend doing his thing. An iconic moment.
But look at the crowd. Look at the phones.
They were all there for one of the most iconic moments in sports history, but they all missed it because they were watching it through their phones.
Now look at Tiger on Masters Sunday in 2019, one of the greatest moments in golf’s history.
Look at the crowd.
Immersed.
I bet those people walked away from Augusta National that Sunday evening in April 2019 and whispered to each other: “we just witnessed something special.” They’ll never forget what they saw with their own eyes that magic day.
That moment with Tiger didn’t happen by accident. The environment was created over many years and many small decisions.
I’ve heard Rory McIlroy say that he tries not to watch highlights of his first Masters victory. He wants to remember how it felt as the man in the arena, rather than carving the memory into his brain through a screen.
How do the Masters manage to bring this all together so well?
How do they go about creating such an iconic sporting event?
Of course, there have been many men in green jackets responsible for making the Masters the Masters - but there was one man who was maybe more responsible than anyone else.
And this man had one of the most tragic and unusual endings to his life that you might not be aware of.
Clifford Roberts
Cliff Roberts was born in Iowa in 1894. Like the vast majority of people in America’s midwest at that time, Cliff grew up poor.
But Cliff made a life for himself. He started his career as a travelling salesman selling clothes, and by the early 1920s he had become a stockbroker on Wall Street.
Cliff must have had a certain charisma because he managed to build a relationship with Dwight Eisenhower, managing the president’s financial affairs.
He also built a relationship with a certain golfer named Bobby Jones. The same Bobby Jones (he actually preferred Bob) who won the Grand Slam in 1930 - all four majors in one year, a feat that hasn’t been accomplished before or since.
(The four majors at the time were the Open Championship and the Amateur Championship in Britain, and the US Open and US Amateur Championships in America.)
After this incredible feat, Bob Jones retired from competitive golf and had a vision to build a beautiful golf course in Georgia. He partnered with Cliff Roberts and together - with the help of Alister MacKenzie - built a course in America’s deep south called Augusta National.
A part of the world where manners mean something, and where, when asked if you like peach cobbler, you’d better say yes ma’am or yes sir.
Bob and Cliff wanted to host an event at this new golf club of theirs, so they set up an annual tournament they called the Augusta National Invitation Tournament.
After a few years, they changed the name to the Masters.
Because of Jones’ stature in the game, they attracted the very best players in the world to come and play in the annual April tournament, and it grew legs in the years that followed and, well, you know the rest.
The Man Behind the Curtain
But what you might not know is that it was Cliff Roberts who was the real driving force behind the many traditions and rules we see at the Masters each year.
In the early years, he helped bring the club back from financial ruin. There was actually a period when Augusta National very nearly ceased to exist. The club was on the edge of bankruptcy.
When Alister MacKenzie designed the course, he presented the bill to Roberts - and instead of payment, MacKenzie received a notice of debt.
Apparently things were so bad at Augusta in those early years that there wasn’t the money to buy toilet roll.
Unimaginable today.
But Roberts held it together.
As you know, the Masters grew into one of sport’s greatest events, and Augusta National is now one of the most powerful institutions in American sport. Almost every tradition you now think of as quintessentially Masters - the patrons, the pristine conditioning, the control over every last detail, the refusal to bend to television or commercial pressure - traces back to Roberts.
To his admirers, he was the visionary who created the Masters and made it what it is today. A genius organiser who believed that magic comes from discipline.
The Side That Can’t Be Tidied Away
But there’s another side to Clifford Roberts that can’t be tidied away, and it would be dishonest if I glossed over it.
To some, he was known as a benevolent dictator - someone who took things too far.
The same iron control that made the Masters beautiful also enforced something ugly. Roberts once said that as long as he was alive, the golfers would be white and the caddies would be black - and for most of his life, that’s exactly how Augusta National operated.
This wasn’t an unfortunate quirk of the era, separate from his genius. It was built into the institution he created.
Augusta National didn’t admit its first black member until 1990, thirteen years after Roberts’ death. It didn’t admit a woman until 2012. The exclusivity that gives the place its mystique and the exclusion that shamed it for decades came from the same source - a man who believed, absolutely, in his own authority to decide who belonged.
You can hold both of those things at once. Roberts built one of the most extraordinary sporting institutions in the world, and he built prejudice into its foundations. The Masters spent the decades after his death slowly, reluctantly reckoning with that - and some would say it still is.
Which makes the end of his story a complicated one to sit with.
The End
As the years went on, Roberts’ health failed him. By 1977 he was gravely ill - a stroke had weakened him, and he’d been given a diagnosis of cancer he wasn’t going to recover from. That year, for the first time, he was too unwell to attend the tournament he’d spent his life building.
One morning that September, Clifford Roberts walked out to the edge of Ike’s Pond, on the par-3 course at Augusta National, and took his own life. He was 83. He left a note for his wife.
There’s something sad in the fact that he chose Augusta itself - the place he’d poured everything into, the one thing he’d built and controlled and loved - as the place to end things. The man who controlled every detail of the Masters made a final decision, in the one setting that was entirely his.
I’ve read quite a lot about Bobby Jones, the other man behind the Masters, and although - like every human - I’m sure he had his flaws, he seemed like a genuine sporting icon of the era. People like Babe Ruth come to mind when I think back on that time in sport.
Cliff Roberts was the driving force in creating something iconic. Someone we can both admire and view through a lens of caution.
The Masters has a flawed history, but it has also caught up to the modern era.
I think it’s possible for both of these things to be true.
How you feel about it all is entirely up to you.
If anything in this piece has stirred something up for you, please don’t sit with it alone - reach out to someone you trust, or a support line near you. Help is there.
A quick note before you go
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The Read: The Grand Slam: Bobby Jones, America, and the Story of Golf
The Caddies Line: There's a tree on the 17th hole at Augusta that was known for years as the "Eisenhower Tree." The president - whose finances Roberts managed - hit it so often he lobbied to have it cut down. Roberts refused. The tree outlived them both, until a storm finally took it in 2014.
Dont forget that book I recommended Curt Sampson's The Masters, Golf,Money & Power in Augusta,Georgia. Lifts the lid on Masters early days.