The car glided silently through the Georgia darkness, stopping outside the Augusta National clubhouse. It was a Sunday evening in April 1981, my first visit to the Masters, and I was benefiting from generosity begun a couple of decades earlier by Bobby Jones, Clifford Roberts and Jones’ great friend Charlie Yates. Jones loved golf in the United Kingdom and was much loved in return. His presence in golf events in the 1920s guaranteed huge numbers of spectators and many inches in the broadsheet newspapers. Needing publicity for the Masters in Augusta, a speck of a town in Georgia, in the 1950s and 1960s, they made a proposition to some of the leading golf journalists in the UK. In return for transmitting accounts of the Masters to our newspapers and magazines back in the United Kingdom, we were billeted free of charge in houses on a nearby street where a resident chef made us breakfast and dinner and a car was put at our disposal.
I remember the scramble to get into the houses and find one of the few single bedrooms. The late Dai Davies, then of the Birmingham Post, got to Augusta the week before to make sure he had the bedroom he wanted. The rest of us shared, two to a room, and did our best to maintain our decency when billeted with a colleague who had a stentorian snoring habit. Or had to get up three or four times in the night.
The next year, I arrived at Magnolia Lane just after the Falklands conflict had started. I stopped my car at the gate and waited as a portly security guard waddled out of the gatehouse to examine my credentials. He took a cigar as thick as a sausage out of his mouth and stared at the pieces of paper I had handed to him. Finally, he clapped me on the shoulder and sent me on my way with a ringing instruction: “So you’re from Britain, are you? Man, don’t you let those Argies give you no s**t.”
The next morning, I explored the clubhouse and saw a barber shop. I recounted this story in The Times a few years ago. “Wandering in, I sat in a chair and had a good old-fashioned Southern haircut,” I wrote. “It lasted for months. Some years later I saw Sam Snead in the same chair having his hair cut. The barber shop has gone now. So has Snead’s hair. And so has Snead.”
The British journalists who first received this hospitality were known as the Crazy Gang. There was Henry Longhurst from the Sunday Times, later to become a television star. Longhurst was of medium height and had slicked-down black hair and a parting that looked straighter than Augusta’s seventh hole. Longhurst wrote simply and nearly always wore a club tie and sports jacket. “I am paid to do what I want to do, which is to write about golf,” he used to marvel, peering at his shoes through the bottom of a glass of gin. Later, his world got even better when he was paid to talk about golf on television as well as write about it.
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