America's Gift to Golf by Wind Herbert Warren;

Author:Wind, Herbert Warren;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

The New Yorker

May 26, 1980

FROM LINKSLAND TO AUGUSTA

THE NEW YORKER—1981

Exactly fifty years ago, Robert T. (Bobby) Jones, Jr., having retired from competitive golf at the age of twenty-eight, started work on the eighteen holes at the newly founded Augusta National Golf Club, in Augusta, Georgia—the dream course that he had long looked forward to building and that later became the home of the annual Masters tournament. Jones chose Dr. Alister MacKenzie to be his co-designer. MacKenzie, who was born in Yorkshire of Scottish lineage, was an experienced golf-course architect and a very good one. He had recently built two superb courses—Royal Melbourne, in Australia, and Cypress Point, on the Monterey Peninsula, in California. Jones’ selection of MacKenzie was based primarily on the deep impression that Cypress Point had made on him when he played it in the summer of 1929 during a trip he made to California to participate in the United States Amateur Championship at Pebble Beach—which, like Cypress Point, is on the Monterey Peninsula. In an era in which many successful golf-course architects made it a practice to saturate their acreage with bunkers placed with almost the geometric precision of the rectangles in a Mondrian abstract, MacKenzie believed in staying with the natural features of the land and using them to their best strategic advantage. Jones, loving the Old Course at St. Andrews as he did, also had a soft spot for MacKenzie because it was MacKenzie who, in 1924, had drawn the wonderfully detailed, accurate, and evocative map of the Old Course which became so popular that framed copies of it soon occupied—as they still do—places of honor on the walls of dens, studies, and offices of devoted golfers the world over.

One other reason Jones sought out MacKenzie was that although he would be building an inland course on clay soil and not a seaside course on sandy linksland, Jones wanted the holes to have, to whatever extent was possible, the flavor and playability of the holes at British linksland courses, such as St. Andrews, Hoylake, Muirfield, Carnoustie, Lytham St. Annes, and Sandwich, all of which he admired and enjoyed. Linksland, it should be explained, is the sandy waste thrown up by the sea in past eras when it receded from the shore. The wind tossed this new land into sand hills, rippling terrain, and natural sites for tees and greens—or, at least, this was the opinion of the early Scottish golfers, who felt that linksland was the ideal place to play the game. There are few, if any, trees on an authentic links, and so the heavy wind off the sea becomes a major concern. Taking their cue from St. Andrews, Jones and MacKenzie constructed the largest and most undulating greens that had ever been built in this country. These worked out well at the Augusta National, for the proportions of the course were on a heroic scale, and many of the fairways rolled like the North Atlantic in winter. Jones and MacKenzie also made a

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