One of the most recognizable gathering spots at Augusta National during the Masters is under the ancient branches of a sprawling live oak tree on the back lawn of the clubhouse and overlooking golf’s most famous piece of property as it trundles from the nearby first tee down to Amen Corner and Rae’s Creek. The tree, estimated to be at least 175 years old and sentinel of the 1850s-erected manor house before it was a golf course clubhouse, is held in place by cables attached to long, low-hanging and thick branches, and its base is secured by cement placed in a hole in the trunk years ago. This place has shaded nearly a century of golf gatherings among players, celebrities, worldwide golf officials, members, and media.
Similarly, but in a completely different context and time, there is another prominent set of trees in a historic neighborhood just two and a half miles by road from the back lawn of Augusta National. Out of the pearly front gates at Magnolia Lane, hang a left on Washington Road. After passing the Augusta-logoed water tower on the left, take another left on Berckmans Road moving through the expansive grass and gravel lots where circa 1950s homes once rested but now hold a wide-open vista where free parking is offered during the Masters. Then enter neighborhoods and cross Rae’s Creek as it flows into the Augusta National property at the thirteenth tee before winding up to Surrey Center on the right with its numerous restaurants and shops packed with Masters attendees. Sand Hills surrounds you here.
Pappy, Iron Man, Carl Jackson, Jariah Beard, Johnnie Frank Moore, Leon McCladdie, Eddie McCoy, Marion Herrington, Joe Collins, Hop Harrison, Jim Dent, and many others who carried in multiple Masters were all from here.
The Sand Hills lot with the non-Augusta National trees is to the left down Wheeler Road, across from the Sand Hills Community Center at the corner of Fleming Avenue and Wheeler Road. The large trees shade the empty lot and a half dozen picnic tables, circular tables, and surrounding chairs and benches scattered about the sandy yard. The barren street corner has been a centralized gathering spot for Sand Hills residents for decades, similar to the more revered trees on site at Augusta National. Today, the area is usually reserved for the older and mostly male set, all Black, with many being current or former Augusta National or Augusta Country Club caddies or workers. Opinions flow freely and loudly here. A No Drugs sign is affixed to a tree in the center of the sitting area with smaller type reading: Cooling out by the tree. Best caddies in the world. Uptown – Sandhills.
Next door, across Fleming Avenue, is an old building that still wears the faded painting of an Augusta National caddie carrying a golf bag, viewed from behind to display the green cap, uniform, and name plate of the player. The model for this image was Tommy Bennett, a son of Sand Hills and the first caddie for Tiger Woods at the 1995 Masters.
The entire Sand Hills community, known more simply by locals as “The Hill,” earned its name because of the sandy and hilly terrain different from the usual red clay composition of most Georgia soil in the region.
Summerville, a historic summer retreat for prominent white Augustans and northerners more than a century ago and still a bastion of large homes and the well to do, abuts Sand Hills in the Walton Way periphery as one of the area’s highest geographic points. The residents, from some of Augusta’s most prominent white families, once owned the Sand Hills land.
Soon after the Civil War ended, many Black families, some of them previously enslaved or close kin of the enslaved, settled in the area, primarily toiling as laborers and domestic workers at the nearby larger homes in Summerville, which they could easily reach by foot. Many prominent white families deeded small tracts of land in Sand Hills to Black families to closely position butlers, maids, gardeners, carpenters, and other workers to their own homes.
“Most of our parents worked as domestics in Summerville,” said Gwen Clayborne, who grew up in Sand Hills between the Beard family and the family of Eddie “E. B.” McCoy, who caddied for Gary Player in 1974 and 1978 Masters victories. “We were poor, but we had fireplaces in the living room and bedroom as our only source of heat. Our friends played and worked on the course at the Masters. We were poor, but we never knew it.
“We lived in a community where we loved each other. That sums up what it was like.”
Lawrence Bennett, whose late father Freddie was the longtime Augusta National caddie master, said most of the single men in the neighborhood who didn’t have full-time jobs worked as caddies or held other jobs within the two clubs. Many of those who did have full-time jobs found a way to caddie on the side at either course to earn extra money and a chance at notoriety, especially in the spring around Masters time. Those who worked night shifts would leave work at daybreak and find their way to Augusta National in time for the 8:00 a.m. start of the caddying rotation, a routine that Beard followed for years.
“Back in the 1950s when I started caddying, you could make three dollars, four dollars, five dollars a day at Augusta Country Club, and that was pretty good back then,” said Beard, who won with Fuzzy Zoeller in 1979. “And for two weekend days at Augusta National, you could make twenty-five dollars, thirty dollars, or forty dollars, and that was really good.”
The path to both courses was a short walk from Sand Hills. The neighborhood rests just south of the border of Augusta Country Club, which was founded in the late 1800s as Augusta’s first golf course.
At golf’s infancy in Augusta around the turn of the twentieth century, there was a prominent mention of caddying and its connection to the Black community in Augusta. Under the headline, “Golf Club Reorganized,” in the October 3, 1900, Augusta Chronicle, plans were being prepared to sort out the new sport in Augusta at the recently built Bon Air Golf Club, a smattering of holes designed in 1897 with browns (sand) instead of greens near the Bon Air Hotel, in proximity to where today’s Augusta Country Club course sits and just more than one mile from Sand Hills. Augusta was so entrenched as a winter retreat prior to Florida’s emergence that English golfer Harry Vardon made the Bon Air course one of his many national exhibition stops in early 1900, therefore bringing more luster to Augusta and golf.
Toward the end of the October 3 article was a note about how to incorporate some of the younger workers, many of whom held labor jobs at Bon Air. That one paragraph stated: “Col. Phil North, the eminently practical city treasurer, has a good idea for a connection with golf. He says that while the rage is on to teach negro boys useful accomplishments by which they can earn a living it might be a good idea to add a ‘school of caddies’ on to the curriculum of the negro schools. Caddies are in demand and the more prevalent golf becomes the greater the demand for caddies will become.”
This thought possibly set forward a mindset among the Black youngsters that caddying could be a profession where they were accepted – at least in some regard.
It was a natural progression for young men to wander next door to Augusta National for work, much like kids in the Bronx growing up in the shadow of Yankee Stadium.
The sixteenth and seventeenth holes at Augusta Country Club run parallel to Fitten and Gardner streets, and severely sliced shots can end up in the neighborhood. Jackson said he would walk from his home to the dead-end Weed Street and enter Augusta Country Club. A pathway skirted Augusta Country Club’s eleventh and tenth holes near the Westover Cemetery at Berckmans Road to form a shortcut to Augusta National. A sizable hole in the fence from the woods adjacent to Augusta National’s thirteenth tee provided an entryway to the grounds, a route now long gone behind sturdy fencing and security.
(Originally published in The Legendary Caddies of Augusta National: Inside Stories from Golf’s Greatest Stage, Durham, NC: Blair, 2024. To order, click HERE.)
Ward Clayton, the former sports editor at the Augusta Chronicle and director of editorial services for the PGA Tour, wrote Men on the Bag: The Caddies of Augusta National (2004) and produced the 2019 documentary "Loopers: The Caddie’s Long Walk." He has been a contributor to Global Golf Post, owns Ward Clayton Communications and resides in St. Johns, Florida.