Hello, and welcome to the Frida Egg Podcast on Garrett Morrison. Today we're talking a little Master's history with the prolific author Kurt Samson. But first, this episode is brought to you by the Frida Egg Pro Shop. It's at proshop dot, Thefrida Egg dot com, and right now you will find some new hat styles in stock. We've got a navy mesh back hat. We've got a yellow performance hat and it is a really cool looking yellow trust me, and not one but two styles of bucket hat, a classic
bucket and a big bucket for ultimate sun protection. I suppose you know. I think Joel Damon, recent PGA Tour winner, has really proven the virtues of a good bucket hat. So it's time to get yourself one. Summer's on the way. So that's pro shop dot, Thefrida Egg dot com. We have apparel, we have prints, we have accessories and of course headwear. Check it out. So the genesis of this episode is an essay that Kurt Sampson, my guest today,
wrote for Golf Digest during last year's COVID postponed November Masters. Basically, it's about the strange experience of being in Augusta during the Masters, finding the town very quiet and not going to the tournament, and he wonders whether it could be the first quote unquote bad Masters since nineteen sixty eight, and that props Kurt to mention in the lead of this article a book that he wrote about that nineteen
sixty eight Masters, which is called The Lost Masters. Some of you will know that tournament as the Scorecard Masters, where after seventy two holes, Roberto Davi Senzo and Bob Goldby were tied, but Davey Senzo signed an increct scorecard, so there was no playoff and Golby was named the champion, and a lot of fans were pretty angry about it.
Kurt Sampson's book digs deeply into that Masters and the contentxt around it, and I just found it totally fascinating, not least because I saw all of these uncanny parallels between nineteen sixty eight and twenty twenty. And I'll let you find some of those for yourself in the conversation
that we have here. But for me, the big question is this, when the world is in disarray, what role, what responsibility even do sports have, and particularly golf, particularly the Masters, which so many people treat as an escape from modern life. What happens when that promise of escape is really put to the test. So with a proper Spring Masters coming up next week, I thought it was a good time to dig into these issues without further ado. Here's Kurt Sampson.
I miss a green, for example, I'm already upset. When I find my ball in the bunker, I'm really upset. And when I find my ball in a brid egg Friday egg, the dreaded Frida egg Frida, egg Frida egg egg Frida egg bride egg Lie, I'm about ready to run off with the humport scheme.
Why don't we just get get right underway? Are you ready to get into it?
Let's rock?
Okay, all right? So Kurt, you are at the WGC match play at Austin Country Club. I understand right now. How has that been going.
I'm actually late breaking news. I am not there. I'm in Austin to play in a Hickory golf tournament, the Onion Creek Hickory Tournament. We members of the golf's lunatic fringe who like to make a hard game harder, play with antique golf clubs, and we wear plus fours and it's quite a parade.
What a delightful surprise. So that's going on in Austin at the same same time as the match play.
That's right, had a preliminary thing yesterday and the first round of the competition is this morning.
How long have you been into Hickory golf?
Quite a long time. A friend in Texas got me into it, off and on. I'm very serious about it. I'm on the US team in a US versus Europe Ryder Cup competition, have been on the US side for five or six iterations of that. And if Covid lifts were playing in Saint Andrew's in October for the next match against those hated Swedes and Brits and Scotts, got them this time.
So what do you like about Hickory golf?
The modest scale? Really, it does annoy me when the TV announcer murmurs, Dustin's got one hundred and eighty four yards looks like a little nine, you know, And no, that's not the way it's supposed to be. One eighty four is a a pretty good four iron. So it's it's kind of a reaction against the current game and clubheads that are as big as a canned ham, and it does salute the history, which is a good thing. These guys really do care about the history of this sport.
What I've heard some people say about hickory golf, Now, I haven't played hickory golf very much myself. I have some hickory clubs that I've been given by a friend, and their amazing objects. Really, I mean, they're they're just beautiful. For one thing, I haven't really played like a full round with a full set of hickory clubs. But what I understand about it is that the walk to your next ball, the walk to your next shot, is you use the word scale earlier of a different scale. It
just feels different. The game feels different. It feels like it's going quicker. That's That's what I've heard people say, is is that kind of what you find?
Yeah, it's like playing in Fenway Park versus I don't know, but pick some giant open expanse. It's it's this little jewel box game and we play. Admittedly, the courses are about six thousand yards long, so it's it's it's just fun that way. You can really rip a drive. If you're over you know to ten to twenty thirty with roll you've you know, that's that's muscle time.
So last year in November, you were at a very different kind of golf tournament, the November Garrett. That was I'm a professional here. You know you were at the November Masters. Tell me about your experience at last year's very strange Masters.
Yes, my essay and golf digest, which I think you read, Garrett, was off the course. Because we were all off the course, I couldn't gain entry to the grounds. It was a weird situation to be there, not why golf in person and you know, soaking up that atmosphere, which is so great.
So I kind of wandered around the city asking people what the heck they were doing there, why, what they thought about all this, and how the lowercase Masters was affecting them, And it was kind of fun talking to how florists and hostesses out front at a empty restaurant and so forth. Surprisingly, I have some friends. I've been
going there for so long. I know a lot of locals, and these friends from North Carolina who came to visit a golf pro in fact, and he brought his three assistants to not watch the tournament, to sit at a friend's house, have some beer gallons of it and watched the event, maybe play some cards. So the momentum of reunion there was still strong, but I don't know how if it was a complete shutdown again this year, it'd
be damaging for all concerned. I guess they're allowing a limited number of spectators.
You know, in your essay you seem to be capturing something about the feel of the town during this very you know, kind of almost eerie type of Masters.
Was that?
What was that feeling that you were going for?
I don't know if I achieved it. I guess the disorientation. Who was ever gone made a point of going to a place for a golf tournament to not watch the golf tournament. I can't think of a precedent. So it was. It was so odd. Caterers are going broke, and ticket brokers and you know, probably quite a bit about the economy there, the economy of the thing. The one major that stays put things are it's a unique ecosystem.
Ecosystem either one, I think, but it's very dependent on Augusta is very dependent in many ways on the Masters. In other words, the town of Augusta.
That's so true, although I should say since my nose is close to the ground there. What with the club expanding outward like Germany in nineteen thirty three, there's some resentment nobody makes. They're once a year buck for parking cars in their yards. Doesn't happen anymore. There's you've seen it,
one hundred acres of free parking. The prediction by some of the cynical locals is that they're even going to the club intends to take away their their house rental income by having more and more on campus housing at at Augusta National. I can see them doing.
That because that's a big thing, right, is that some people rent out their homes for that week and earn, you know, pretty good money from from the very wealthy PGA tour stars who are who are renting homes.
As well as the many. There's the Irish Tourist Board. There's the I don't know, Toro or USGA or other big golf industry types that would come to town, entertain a lot and need a big house with that caterer and that florist and the cleanup crew and so forth. It's an interesting economy there once a year.
Yeah, so I can hear it a little bit in the in the way that you're describing the relationship between the course and the town or the club in the town. Like many golf writers, you have complex feelings about the Masters. Unlike many golf writers, you've actually been willing to write about them and talk about them. So I'm curious what are your earliest experiences with the Masters? What comes to mind when you think of the Masters and your childhood if anything?
Oh, my goodness, my childhood. That's it was such a big deal. I grew up in the in the northeast near Boston, and then later in northern Ohio. Oh my gosh. We just were counting down the minutes until there was that little tinkle of piano music or whatever it was
back then. It's guitar now, but you know, the screen would come up and there would be I guess it was Pat summerl was the first voice you'd hear, and then they do the little, the little There's Frank Glieber on sixteen and Vern Lundquist, who is I'm going to meet later today. He's handing out an award at this at Onion Creek for this Hickory event. So they introduced the announcers, and you know, it was, like they say, the US the first sign of spring, the first sign
that golf season was really underway. And I was just a kid imitating golf pros Arnie's mannerisms and the way Ken Ventury put his golf club on the bag. And you know, I even smoked for a couple of weeks when I was age twelve, trying to do it Arnie style. Right, So a big deal. A Master's has always been huge for me. It's probably for you and others listening in.
Yeah, I mean it's it's something akin to a shared national experience, which are you know, more and more rare these days, right, there's you know, so you know, over the years, you know, I mentioned that there's some complexity to the way that you have written about the Masters. How did your opinion of the Masters as an institution, as an American institution evolve over the years and what caused it to evolve?
Well, I think, on the one hand, I haveciated it more and more over the years. What they do, the Swiss watch way they run the thing. Every other tournament, including US Open, seem amateurish to me like they're scratching their heads. We need more gallery marshals on whole thirteen, or the trash bends are overflowing in the halfway house on number four. That's not going to happen at Augusta National. Those guys are such prosy. They're fully staffed, anticipate every need,
extremely polite. But then there was, you know, uneasy. I was uneasy about the place. Having done lots of research for my book The Masters, and fully understanding who the Pinkertons were and their history. I think back then when I first started going to the Masters in the late nineties, they were not oppressive, but you know, they were like bouncers. They let you know that this is not a place where you can run between shots if you're following excitedly
some group. No running, no yelling, no allowed displays. Reminded me. I mean, as I've learned more and more that both Cliff Roberts and Bob Jones had military backgrounds at least during their wars the Great War and then World War Two. For Jones, very much a controlled thing that was nothing wrong with it, but seemed rather strict, seemed contributed a little to the church like church like atmosphere there, right.
Yeah, do you think that that competence that you mentioned earlier, that ability to really run a golf tournament and do it well year in, year out and do all the ancillary things better than everybody else, seemingly including the media portion of it, the website, the app, the you know, all that modern stuff. You think the Masters as an old traditional institut wouldn't be very good at it, but in fact they're much better at it than everybody else and are leading the way on all that kind of stuff.
So there's there's that real level of competence that you're talking about. It seems like that might be part and parcel with the less attractive sort of control that those two, you know, sort of must go together in a way.
It could be. Garrett, Yeah, I think that's a good point. From repeated, constant not constant, but I go almost every year and have great friendships there. I can hardly buy a drinker or a dinner there, believe it or not. I got to see the Masters and Augusta National more from their point of view than from the once a year visitor who only goes and watches to them. It was Yankees taking over to some degree Yankee influence, the
corporate influence. It seems to become to them more and more controlled by some faceless, powerful people who weren't really Augustin's who really weren't getting it that people like to park their cars over there, they liked the old freelance style, that this was our community golf tournament. It became less and less. It has become less and less that and more thing in itself. I think you'd agree, Oh, yeah, for sure.
So just you know, thinking about your lifelong I guess relationship with the Masters, how did you get interested in
writing about the nineteen sixty eight Masters specifically? You wrote a book in two thousand and six called The Lost Masters, And it came to my attention because I read your piece in Golf Digest last year about the twenty twenty November Masters, and in the lead of that piece you mentioned the sixty eight Masters in your book The Lost Masters about it and draw some parallels between those two years and those two tournaments. And we can get into
some of those parallels. But just thinking about the genesis of that book and your will to write about that particular masters, where did that come from?
Well, by then, I had already written my book, The Masters, an imaginative title, but it was a good book with a.
Good subtitle too, Can you tell us the subtitle?
The subtitle was Golf, Money and Power in Augusta, Georgia.
There you go.
So I wrote about the town, and the tournament and the club, all three, noticing what a sweetheart press the institution had had over the years, when seldom has heard a discouraging word. I don't know. I write to keep myself awake and hopefully entertain a reader and inform him or her, although I hardly I don't think I've myself his way out there just by writing what I perceived
to be true facts was possibly slightly controversial. My take on this beloved institution for the regarding the sixty eight Masters and my book The Loss Masters. I just reflected that there had only been one bad tournament. They whiffed exactly once, and they've been having tournaments there since nineteen
thirty four, I think, except for Wars correct. And it was so vividly part and parcel of a country that was sliding into the abyss, that was feeling like a banana republic, so divided and so unhappy and at War. My father was a WW two combat vet. And remember my brother coming home from his first year at Ohio State and his formerly crew cut second son now had
blonde hair down to his shoulders and a mustache. Pops hit the roof, and you know, meanwhile, you know, he's seeing Vietnam War protests on TV and here comes his son looking like that. It was things like that I think happened in lots of households. Nineteen sixty eight was a very bad year and a very bad year for the masters.
Could you say a little more about what was happening in America in April nineteen sixty eight.
From memory a couple of things that shockingly there was that freaking North Koreans hijack one of our ships sailing according to US in international waters, the Pueblo, and they hold the captain and crew for publicity and propaganda purposes for a long time. And it was tortuous, it seemed wrong, and it seemed like our diplomacy and power were so defanged that we couldn't do anything about it. So we had to live with this every day. It was like
the hostages hostage situation. Years later Vietnam War, of course, and some of the leaders in our country saying we shouldn't be there. So I was sixteen and I didn't know which way to go. Where's my father, who was my country right or wrong? And my brother who got to smell tear gas near the campus. Then the assassinations. The big thing in terms of that Masters was seven days eight days before the first round, Martin Luther King Junior was assassinated in Memphis, and city or not the city,
the entire country went into lockdown. There was a day of mourning on the Sunday of the Greater Greensboro Open, I think was the event before the Masters, So that golf, you know, is so trivial in the big picture, but important to us. Golf got extended. That tournament finished on a Monday. Crowds at Augusta were tiny and quiet. Everybody
was chastened. I think it was a weird atmosphere. And then, you know, as I wrote, and I think it's true, we were probably looking for a pick me up from the Masters that it had always delivered, and instead we get another bomber. It was just a terrible finish there with you know, a parallel between our government being clueless and not powerful like it had been in the face of changing crazy circumstances. We the Augusta National people, they whiffed,
they blew it. It was a horrible result of bad a difficult situation that could have been could have been not nearly so bad that could I think it really could have been resolved in five minutes and then they could have had a playoff. But we'll talk about what actually happened in a moment.
Maybe we could set that up with some of the some of the characters who are involved. Put some people on the stage here. You know, first of all, we have that old guard at Augusta, the legends of that club, including Bobby Jones. So where is Bobby Jones at in nineteen sixty.
Eight, Poor Bobby critically ill with serringo mailia. I believe it's pronounced this terrible wasting neurological disease he had that attacks the spine and made him brittle as a leaf, and he was wheelchair bound by nineteen sixty eight, had a cath that are in permanently. And then you know he was got the flu there at home in Atlanta. But he was looking for rejuvenation like everybody else. So he had told the chauffeur that we're going anyway. So he and I think missus for a while at least
made the annual drive east to Augusta. So there's Bobby in his cabin with the flu and very ill.
So yeah, and to be clear, here's an American legend, right here is the and the representative of the Masters, at least publicly, and he and he is ailing quite severely at this point in nineteen sixty eight, which has some sort of symbolic resonances about, you know, how the tournament's doing.
Right, and then at the end in its way and one telling the result came down to what decision made by him? Right, this guy who's what some small portion of the man he had been. I can't tell you for sure there was mental decline, but from what he wrote, he was just so miserable. I just don't think he could have been as sharp as he had been.
So alongside Bobby Jones and the leadership of Augusta National was Clifford Roberts, also an older man at this point, and you know, in the last what ten years of his life I suppose by nineteen sixty eight, So tell me about Clifford Roberts. You know who was he and who was he? By nineteen sixty eight.
Cliff had been a major. Came from poor circumstances, but worked his way up through hard work and guile, with not giving every detail. He finds himself a stockbroker with a great clientele in New York. And he was the organizer of the club the first one hundred members. This is almost exactly correct. Of the first one hundred members, ninety nine or ninety eight were from New York City and the other two were Bob Jones and his father. So Augusta National was a New York social club all
the way for a number of years. That's what it was. And Cliff was the dictator, a benign dictator, benevolent or not, depending on your point of view. Very quirky, using quirks. I think Steve Melnick was described. Remember Steve, who was a good golfer, one of USAM and was an announcer. He described a conversation with Cliff Roberts, who had such broad spaces between his words that you weren't sure you
were still in a conversation with the guy. So that was Cliff, and Cliff had declared by then by sixty eight that Bob Jones isn't going to do the Butler Cabin Meet the New Champion ceremony anymore. The year before he drooled a bit and he looked like hell, I mean, no other way to put it. The poor guy was terminal, I mean no insult to him in that, so that the power dynamic had changed completely. It was Bob Jones was now had was just ceremonial and it was all Cliff.
So two main players, obviously in this drama, two main golfers. We have Bob Golby and we have Roberto Davi Senzo. And I believe your book actually taught me how to pronounce his name. Is that is that right? That I get that?
That is? I had Roberto say it over and over that I want to get this down. It's the Brits called him.
Vicenzo, Vicenzo. That's what I've heard a lot without.
The day in between and the American Ish Dave d Visenzo or something he had for him.
It was day da Visenzo and the v the visa. You getting all those valels right is actually kind of tricky, But maybe we can start with Bob Goldby this this book taught me a lot about who Bob Golby is, and in fact he is. He is still kicking around. So Bob Goldby, what kind of a character was he? In nineteen sixty eight.
I grew up ultimate around Firestone Country Club, which was really a hive of professional golf because there was this thing filmed in the fall called the CBS Golf Classic, which was two versus two format that they'd play all winter. They taped them in the fall, and my father, bless
his heart, would say to me. He'd look at me at breakfast and say, you have anything big at school today, and I'd always say no, And he would play hooky and I would play hooky, and we would go a lot to watch the taping of the CBS Golf Classic, So you know, I was intimate with Bob Goldbi's game as well as you know, twenty other guys. And there was also the Tour event, and there was also the World Series of Golf, which was the four major winners.
Enough about Firestone, Goldby what a guy? I mean? Also from a book, he was America's football Here I was in a bar with him and the and it sounds like a made up scene, but some guy recognizes him and said, you remember that passed you through in fifty six to beat East Saint Louis and Bob, you know, Good Nations, and that was a good game for me, you know. I think we won by two touchdowns or something.
He was a high school football hero sports, a very good athlete who eventually sort of grudgingly came to golf, and he brought up sort of football players style to the game. He played mad and divot Scarett. That guy gouged the turfit Firestone like I was expecting the superintendent to come around to protest, like a right handed uppercut. Imagine that as a golf swing. That was Bob's style. Very straightforward guy. Two years in the military I think
affected him. He was the hard ass. Guys like Tony Jacqueline and others just coming to play here from overseas were not welcomed by Bob Goldby and his friends. He was the guy who would tell the rookie tuck in your shirt or you need a haircut, so we don't like this out here. He was that guy, and they kept putting him in charge of things. He was don January. What did he say, He's a good thinker and a doer.
He was a key ended up being a key player in the formation of the PGA Tour or the modern PGA Tour in sixty eight I suppose it was late sixty eight.
Yeah, people younger than us don't know that PGA Tour broke away and it was quite painful and lots of anger. The tour broke away from PGA of America, and Goldbi would have been one of the leaders.
You describe this sort of group of players who idolized Ben Hogan and liked to hang out with Sam Snead and Goldbie. I guess was one of those players.
Yeah, a little Click. There were just a couple of them. I think Doug Ford was another. Goldbi was very palatable to Hogan, and Goldby took a knee to Ben Hogan treasured each practice around that they they played at the same time. Goldby was in the Snead Click played lots of golf with with Sam and Bob amusingly told me that about the differences between playing with the two different guys who were stylistically and temperamentally so different. But Goldby,
you know, he fit in. He was a very good player and respectful to his uh.
These two elders, Roberto, Davis, Senzo, tell me about tell me about this man. I don't know where. I don't know where you start. But what a legend.
Yeah, I think we should say Sam Snead and Kathy Wentworth. You can just go to Blaze's. Roberto is the winning as golfer of all time. He won more tournaments, professional tournaments. How big they were always you know, you could argue that about Sneed's record too, but they were. Does it count when he wins the Switzerland Open and the Portugal Open and the Spanish Open. Yes? I think Roberto was a world traveler and his game traveled. He put more time in a DC three than a pilot, I guess.
Just a lovable guy. Always, always was unassuming. I'd love this about him too, almost always, And he did it at Augusta. On the first tee, he would throw a ball down and hit it. He wanted to hit a driver or a brassy off the deck to start the day. Nice, really good player, very strong, short swing, kind of a beak like nose, bald, unassuming, very very nice man. When he won the nineteen sixty seven British Open, it was his first and what would turn out to be his
only major. Was it unleashed lots of warm feeling for him, you know, at last Roberto is one.
Yeah, so he was. He was loved. I've seen clips of that of that open that that he won, and the crowd seems thrilled. It's almost like, yeah, an Englishman or a Scotsman has won. It's you know, he was. Roberto was was really widely loved, and including in America.
Yeah. Ben Wright told me he was interviewing Jack at the time, Nicholas. Of course, Roberto hold out for the win, and Jack had tears in his eyes, along with many other people there. So Goldie wouldn't get that. Goldby was respected, but he wasn't loved like Roberto was.
Fast forwarding to the tournament, the sixty eight Masters, there's all this stuff going on in America, some profoundly hard things going on for Americans. The Masters is supposed to be this escape, as I think it's supposed to be every year, but especially in nineteen sixty eight, and in fact especially last year in twenty twenty. It was supposed to be this moment when we could just think about something else for a change. The tournament plays out, but
really the important things happen late on Sunday. Gary Player was in the lead at the beginning of the day, but Golby and Davey Senzo. Golbie I believe, was one back, Daviy Senzo was two back, and they end up tied. Their scores are the same score at least at the end of the round. Maybe you could tell me what happens from there, and maybe start with what the scorecards signing setup was behind the eighteenth green at the time.
Of first I'll say how emotional the day was, although the leading men like Player Palmer Nicholas weren't involved at the end. Here is Roberto and it's his birthday and he hits his driver off the ground on one in a nine iron right in the hole, and people are singing happy birthday to Roberto. When he comes to each green, you know, and he's making birdies and he waves and he was affable. Goldbie's playing great too.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's at this point it's almost like the promise of what the Masters could be in this year was being fulfilled. That that moment on number one with Roberto holding out and everybody's singing happy yeah, absolutely, I agree.
Yeah, it was very exciting, and there was a third guy in the mix, just this very vivid figure. To me, I watched him play a lot. Bert Yancy, the West Point dropout, who was a manic depressive and who was so obsessed by the Masters. He made molds of each green and he kept them under his bed, and Augusta, I guess, brought him out. He palpate the surface to maybe get a better feeling of how to read the
putt from above the hole. On number eight or whatever it was, he I can't remember, shot sixty five or sixty six the last day, and it was he was Captain a Hab and that was his wail there, lived to win the Masters and didn't quite do it. To cut more to the key moment on National TV, Roberto made a great birdie on seventeen. His playing partner Tommy Aaron wrote four on the card, and I don't blame Aaron.
Mistakes happened. If you played in tournaments, you know, you put down the wrong score sometimes and you check at the end. So he wrote down the four. Roberto makes a hard breaking bogie on eighteen, and it looks like he is going to lose By one or time, maybe up in the air, pretty informal checkout procedure there at Augusta. Then a little umbrella table and a couple of chairs
right by the green with the fans around you. And Roberto had done had been paired with Goldbi, interestingly the day before, and Goldby said, well, he just doesn't check his card. He especially that that day after that final round seventy second hole bogie where you know, just had his head in his hands and he looked at it blankly and signed and then he was off signed it with the four correct score, but a wrong number on
the whole. Here is where I should say rulings had been made at Augusta in the Masters in the past, that we're not letter of the law, USGA, RNA rules. The Masters is a thing unto itself. It's not PGA Tour or PJ of America or any of the other big organizations. They could and did let equity prevail. And I point out some different examples, one involving tau Finsterwalden, a couple with Arnold Palmer. So Roberto gets up and he signed an incorrect scorecard. Equity says, you know, with
this level of confusion and administrative lack of oversight. Maybe we could call him back and let him take credit for the three that we all knew he made, and it became an emergency. Within three minutes, Roberto had wandered off. I think they wanted him in the Butler cabin to be the runner up or possibly the new Masters champ, depending on what happened in the final few holes, and then Goldby finishes and it looks like there's a tie. But then Summer All doing his very first anchor job.
He's got a vamp for about fifteen minutes, and you know, you couldn't tell what the heck was going on when you were watching it on TV. Finally, after about halfway through that, I think he used the words there seems to be a problem with Roberto's scorecard, and you know, cooler heads did not prevail. They took it to Jones.
Since Jones would have been watching on TV. I don't think he had ever met Roberto, and who was decided with Ike Granger, who was the USJA guy, the rules guy in charge, and Jones and whoever else was in the room that yes, we're going to make him take the score. He didn't actually have, and instead of there being a playoff tomorrow, we have a new champion, mister Goldby, and a disconsolate, weeping runner up in Roberto.
So so many directions we could take from this. It
is an incredible piece of television. First of all, if if people haven't watched the video that is available on YouTube through the Master's channel of that final day broadcast, go watch it because it's pretty incredible how it plays out, and the sort of palpable confusion that hangs over the last minutes of that broadcast, from the moment that Summer all seems to realize what's going on, or somebody in his headset is telling him what's going on, to the
Butler Cabin ceremony, which is tremendously awkward, not made any less so by the fact that Clifford Roberts, as a public facing figure, was simply not up to that moment.
No, no, he wasn't, never was, and the awkwardness piled up. They felt so bad for Roberto, even though that to my point of view, they hadn't treated him well. Arnold or Jack couldn't have walked away and they and the mistake would have been allowed to stand. In my opinion. Can you imagine them denying a green jacket to Arnie because of a clerical error. I mean, we golfers, we get it. I mean, we're very strict with ourselves and
about our rules. But as I was saying, equity had prevailed and fairness had prevailed in the past, and it could have in this case at any rate, it's always the player who suffers, and never the administrators. They can just say sorry about that. Roberto, so I was saying, they piled up the awkwardness by inviting him to dinner that night. As you may know, you win the Masters, it's protocol for you to have dinner with the members at the club that night. They invited the runner up too. Oh,
and nobody knew what to say. They made a sort of second champion take home trophy for Roberto. It was very through the looking glass, the only bad Masters ever.
Yeah, So you know, in our collective memory in golf, if I if there's such a thing, it seems to me that the story of this sixty eight Masters, of its ending, the scorecard incident that we've sort of focused on. Roberto made a mistake, and poor Roberto, we feel sorry for him because he's such a sympathetic figure. And gold By, well, well he won it, but a lot of people don't
remember that. And we can talk about the treatment that Golby received from the public afterwards, which was horrible, and he certainly didn't get to enjoy what a champion of the Masters typically gets to enjoy. But I feel like we don't remember that that Augusta National Golf Club, that Cliff Roberts, or that Bobby Jones might have any culpability in this incident. I feel like what we remember is that a rule was broken. This is golf, It had to be this way, which, come to think of it,
is part of the myth making of Master's history. Right. That is a very friendly to Augusta National Golf Club way to remember these incidents. But what you're bringing to the surface here is a different decision could have been made, and in fact that the players got a raw deal here. And if you're going to sign fault anywhere, it would have to be to the administrators of the tournament.
That was pretty much where I came down. I know that's not a gospel that reasonable people can disagree and do and did rules or rules idea, and you know, It's part of what makes golf different from other sports. I remember, you know, I played basketball, and if I stepped out of bounds and the REP didn't see it and I had the ball, I would never stop games. Mister you missed that I was out of bounds. The other team gets the ball. Football, you know, wide receiver
pushes off or something, and then catches a pass. He's not going to say, well, well, we're not going to take that was ten yards because I actually breached a rule. Golf's different. You call penalties on yourself. You could cheat a hundred times around really, but no you don't. That's just Jones was famous for saying he didn't cheat for the same reason he didn't rob Banks. The aftermath was
so bizarre. Goldbie was blamed. People were saying and writing that he cheated Roberto, although he wasn't even in the same group. It was impossible. He got death threats, he got horrible letters. He came back as a defending champion year later, and he got booed. Holy mackerel booing the defending champion. Meanwhile, Roberto got all the sympathy he won the next turn on the tour. He was very much in demand. He said it was the best thing that
ever happened to him. In a way. He suggested a way for Goldby to have settled the whole thing, which would have been to say what it was the title of the last chapter. No kiero la copa. I don't want those I don't want the trophy. We tied. We're playing off tomorrow. I asked Goldby about that. He said he didn't consider it. The rules were strict and black
and white, and they were adhered to. He wasn't embarrassed about the way he won, but he's privately very bitter about the negativity that surrounded him.
Understandably, Uh, do you think the Do you think the public was ready to be mad at somebody and that Bob Goldby was a convenient target for that anger.
Yeah, LBJ and Bob Goldby. I guess back then, Bob, as I I pointed out earlier, I think he played the game mad. He was not a fuzzy teddy bear like Roberto was. Bob glowered. You had block like face, very handsome man, but geometric, and he fired a lot of caddies, played a very intense style. Yeah, he was set up. He was in position to be the symbolic bad guy in this drama.
So overall, what kinds of connections do you see between nineteen sixty eight and twenty twenty. When you were writing that essay last year from the November Masters, what made you include a reference to this tournament in the lead of your piece.
Well, I was saying about, you know, since I've written a book about the only bad Masters. Not that the twenty twenty version was bad, but I think, as we're finding from watching basketball and other sports, football without fans, the air is out of the there's no jam, there's nothing. The excitement is muted at best. No fault of Augusta National or the Masters. Of course Dustin Johnson's golf was exciting, but the tournament wasn't You got to have those yells
out there and the echoes and so forth. I guess that was maybe the twenty twenty was the second worst Masters, but second by many miles. Still, you know, meticulously run and a worthy champion and so forth, but you know, a victim of COVID and lack of fans and not pleasing. Ultimately, I didn't feel uplifted by it.
Yeah, it was muted, and Dustin Johnson is a very sympathetic champion. I think, you know, has become even more so as he's gotten older, and I was happy to see him win. But there there has been something very different about sports in general, including golf, in the past year. And I mean there's the obvious part of it, which is that there haven't been any fans, and and that that electricity that comes from the presence of fans is
certainly missing from the broadcasts and the events themselves. But it seems like when we were in that period last year of about two months or so March April, a little bit of May where there were no sports and you know, really no live sports were on TV. We didn't really have anything. Everybody got excited about a documentary about Michael Jordan because there is sort of so desperate for something, and I think that people assumed that when
sports came back, oh man, won't it be great? Want to be a wonderful distraction from all of this and that, and that's really how people assume that sports should operate a distraction from what's going on in the world. And the Masters might be the ultimate example of it, because what is more different from the real world than this kind of magical, little green bubble.
That's a good point. Yes, yeah, it is a little eten, isn't it.
Yeah, And yet that idea of sports as a distraction or an escape seems to fail at key moments. You know, it failed at the nineteen sixty eight Masters. That it may it may be it may have been failing for the past year or so. So do you think that maybe sports as a distraction, sports is an escape, that that's maybe not the right idea about sports? Is there another way for us to view them? Or do we have to evolve our thinking about that? In some way?
You saved the toughest question for the end, didn't you get I'm sorry, I don't that's a thinker. I don't know. It's a sports watching and still playing to some degree, at least with golf so much a part of who I am. Heck, I've been writing about sports for thirty one something years. Geez, I'm getting old. It still seems vital. It'll take a while of pandemics for me to start looking elsewhere, to classical music or skateboarding or something. I don't know where I'll go without a good show of
the NBA Finals or MLB playoffs. And golf. I don't want to think about it, and I'm sorry you brought it up.
So we're not going to look into the abyss quite yet. So you have a number of wonderful books. I'm sure that many listeners are familiar with them. But what's your most recent book.
The most recent came out after Tiger's stunning win in the twenty nineteen Masters. Instant nostalgia for that, and A had another Tiger bio. It's called Roaring Back, The Fall and Rise of Tiger Woods, and it sold well. It's a good book. I hope people will bye bye bye. Seriously, it was a fun tournament to think about again, that mind blowing combination of failure by five out of the
six best players in the world. I think it was who dunked the ball on number twelve in the final round, Kepka, Fena, Poulter, Molinari, Molinari most of all, who had the lead and looked like a timex that would never stop ticking. He'd been kicking Tiger's ass for a couple of years and this looked like another example, and he just cracked and Tiger was there. Tiger played smarter and better the last seven holes.
Yeah, that's something we haven't talked about so far with regards to the twenty twenty Masters, and it's the the odd feeling around. It had been immediately preceded by the twenty nineteen Masters, one of the most glorious editions of the tournament ever.
Nuts. As you know Tiger, it's always been popular. But after his you know, various outside the ropes difficulties, his reputation had sunk quite a bit. And then he won the twenty eighteen Tour Championship. The kids ran out as they as they do, and there was great love and amazing outpouring rediscovery of how great Tiger is, I think, how emotionally involved people are. And then here it happens again in April. It was vivid.
Can you mention any topic that you might be working on right now for a book.
I have a proposal. I think it's we're about to sell it. I'll be cryptic. It's about the first great American golfer. He won two US Opens And you don't know his name, huh, Unless you know, you could amaze me by telling me who that was. And it wasn't Francis we met.
That was the first name that came to mind, but I was assuming that you were talking about somebody different.
So yes, yeah, this is a deep dive and a very hidden story. It's time to tell it.
Wonderful Okay, well, thank you, Kert, appreciate it.
It was great, Garrett, thanks for having me on. I really enjoyed it too.
Kurt Sampson is the author of Roaring Back, The Fall and Rise of Tiger Woods, The Masters, Golf, Money and Power in Augusta, Georgia, The Lost Masters, Grace and Disgrace in sixty eight, and many other books. If you've been enjoying the Friday Podcast, please leave a rating and review in Apple Podcasts or whatever you use. That really does help us out. Thanks for listening.