Masters barely a minor 80 years ago
Horton Smith got $1,500 from the first purse
The first winner of the golf tournament we know as the Masters sank his decisive 10-foot birdie putt on the 71st hole, 80 years ago today.
Horton Smith’s one-stroke victory over Craig Wood on March 25, 1934, was worth $1,500 from a total purse of $5,000.
In two weeks, the media will descend on Augusta, Ga., in the hundreds — TV and radio reporters and crews, golf writers, photographers, columnists and bloggers — to watch Adam Scott attempt to defend his title in the season’s first major, having won $1,440,000 for his 2013 Masters victory from the $8 million purse.
Bobby Jones, the lifelong amateur who once described the typical professional golfer as “an uneducated servant,” would roll over in his grave at the magnitude of their wages today.
Dr. Alister MacKenzie, the Scottish-born architect who didn’t live to see the golf course he designed play host to its first tournament, who died before he ever received much of the $5,000 he charged for his magnumopus (he had already cut his fee from $10,000), simply would not believe the Augusta National Golf Club could ever be this solvent.
Eighty years ago, the Masters not only wasn’t a major, it was barely a minor.
It wasn’t even the Masters. Jones, the club’s co-founder, thought that name was too presumptuous — as late as the early 1960s, he was still calling it “the so-called Masters”— so the program for the first five years read “Augusta National Invitation Tournament” until Jones’s partner, Clifford Roberts, finally got his way.
It had taken a gargantuan effort of wheeling and dealing to get the big northern papers to cover the inaugural tournament, and it only happened because the sportswriters were on their way home from baseball spring training. The New York Times didn’t send anyone to cover it.
But Jones, the club’s cofounder and the greatest player in the game’s history to that point, was friends with the most influential sportswriter of the day, the New York Herald’s Grantland Rice.
So when the Monday papers came out, Horton Smith no doubt had to do a forensic search of the accounts of the tournament to find any details on his triumph, because all Rice or anyone else wanted to write (or read) about was how Jones — by then four years past retirement from competitive golf, playing as a favour to Roberts in hopes of drawing a crowd — had finished 10 strokes off the pace.
All of this history is contained in two remarkable books, neither of them new: David Owen’s The Making of the Masters (1999) and Steve Eubanks’ Augusta (1998). But even the Reader’s Digest version is stunning.
That first year, gate receipts for the week were $8,011, based on ticket prices of $1.10 for a practice round, $2.20 for a tournament round and $5.50 for an all-week badge — and the event lost money.
Hell, everything Jones and Roberts touched in the early years, trying to build a worldclass golf course in the Great Depression, lost money.
Just to get the project started required appeals from Roberts and Jones to William Watt of the United Drug Company and Alfred S. Bourne, son of the founder of the Singer Sewing Machine Co., who put up the lion’s share of the $70,000 it cost to option the land, which had been an old indigo plantation in the early 1800s and then the Fruitlands Nursery — and to hire Mackenzie to design the course.
Rice chipped in a little of his own money. Roberts put up a little. Jones put up none, but lent his name and reputation to it, and had specific ideas of the kind of golf course he wanted.
But when they cleared the trees, they couldn’t sell the wood. When they tried to bring in moneyed clients to try to sell memberships, or property, it was cold and wet and nobody was buying.
“At the present moment, the trees are covered with ice and we might just as well be in Canada as far as playing golf is concerned,” Roberts wrote.
As late as January 1934, Augusta National was in deep financial distress. Income on a good day might be $48 from green fees, unless it rained. Roberts’s accounting of debts at the time included everything from grass seed and rope to $5.85 for toilet paper and $1.37 for hose nozzles. MacKenzie kept pleading for Roberts to send him money, but there was no money to send.
Roberts had to write creditors begging them not to foreclose before April 15, 1934, by which time the first Masters would have concluded.
The tournament wasn’t a success, though, and by its fifth year, what had been a 72-player event had dwindled to 46. But the economy eventually improved, and by the time the tournament resumed after a three-year hiatus due to Second World War, the rising tide had lifted all boats, Augusta’s included.
It was MacKenzie who hated rough and wanted a golf course that didn’t have any, a feature that lasted until the new millennium. Jones also liked the Scot’s idea of “even fours” — a course on which a good score on any hole would be four: the parthrees difficult and the parfives birdieable — and that is still the Augusta National trademark.
Jones had reversed the nines for the debut tournament, against MacKenzie’s advice, so in the newspaper stories you see references to players hitting into the water at the 145-yard third hole (the 12th today) or Jones finding the ditch at the fourth (now the 13th).
He switched the nines back to MacKenzie’s original design the next year.
But on March 22, 1934, on a 6,700-yard course, it was off what is now the 10th tee that the first tee shot was struck in a “Masters,” by one Johnny Kinder.
Jones shot 76-74 the first two rounds. His rusty short game deserted him, and having donated his legendary putter, Calamity Jane, to the Royal & Ancient Golf Club in St. Andrews after winning the Grand Slam in 1930, his work on the greens at Augusta was awful.
All this, we know about Jones.
Of Horton Smith, the Chicago pro, there wasn’t much.
The Associated Press wrote: “Smith, leading from start to finish of the four-day battle over the beautiful Augusta national course, rose to the emergency with his chances at stake, by holing a 10-foot putt on the 17th green for a birdie and won the tournament from blond Craig Wood of Deal, N.J., by a one stroke margin.”
The hole where he made the putt is, of course, now the par-five 8th. The weather was bitterly cold and raw. And his scores were 72-7072-70.
Even 80 years later, that’s pretty good playing.