What Hootie got right

By Ron Whitten
Illustration By Mike Keefe April 2008

We were powerless to stop it.

All we could do was rant and rage.

We, a self-appointed, self-righteous cadre of architecture purists, were convinced that the original design by Dr. Alister Mackenzie and Bobby Jones at Augusta National Golf Club needed to be reinstated, not further obliterated. Over the past nine years, each time bulldozers sliced into Augusta National's sacred turf, we were certain they were gouging out another chunk of irreplaceable character, ripping up not just its sod but its soul.

Some blamed architect Tom Fazio, but he was merely an agent of change. Most of us focused our anger at the mastermind behind the makeovers, Hootie Johnson. OK, Hootie wasn't yet chairman in 1997, when Golf Digest/Golf World writer Tim Rosaforte, after Tiger Woods set a Masters record with a score of 18-under-par 270, suggested that maybe the course ought to be "Tiger-proofed." Jack Stephens was chairman then, and he orchestrated the first massive remodeling that occurred a year later, in the summer of 1998, two months after Mark O'Meara's victory.

That's when Hootie became the chairman and club spokesman, and he insisted the changes had been contemplated long before Tiger came along.

To us, Hootie seemed haughty. Asked if players or architects were consulted before any course changes were implemented, he answered, "No, no players were consulted. Only Tom Fazio. We didn't consult him; we worked with him."

We blamed Hootie because, by reading between his lines, we could tell he was directing that holes be stretched to excess, trees planted in unprecedented numbers, and bunkers relocated and deepened. Because of him, the Masters, which used to come alive on the back nine on Sunday, seemed to grind to a halt on the final nine.

What we purists found particularly galling was that Hootie justified repeated radical remodelings as faithful to the memory of the original designers.

"As in the past, our objective is to maintain the integrity and shot values of the golf course as envisioned by Bobby Jones and Alister Mackenzie," he said in 2005.

At the time, those seemed like fighting words. Today, almost two years after Hootie stepped down, replaced by Billy Payne, they seem like a pretty accurate summation of Hootie Johnson's tenure.

Yes, this purist has experienced an epiphany.

Hootie got it right. Mostly.

I base this not on the fact that the past four Masters have been thoroughly engaging -- two wins by Phil Mickelson sandwiching Tiger's playoff victory over Chris DiMarco, punctuated by last year's surprise, Zach Johnson, who outplayed Tiger on the final nine.

No, I base it on a lot of research into what Mackenzie and Jones intended with their design of Augusta National, and particularly on three long-forgotten Augusta Chronicle newspaper articles Jones wrote in early 1951, a most enlightening and persuasive series describing the reasons for many of the changes that he and then-Masters chairman Clifford Roberts approved and implemented between 1937 and 1950. (During research for a project on Augusta National, I'd discovered that articles from 1951 were missing from the online archive but found the series on microfilm during a visit to the Augusta library.)

Yes, as we've documented through the years, Augusta National has been a constantly evolving golf course. But what we've discovered explains why the much-vilified changes made in the past decade were really in keeping with the long-standing strategic vision for the course.

So Hootie wasn't blowing smoke when he said in 2001, "Throughout their tenure, Cliff Roberts and Bob Jones made improvements to complement the changing state of the game. We have continued this philosophy."

Was the doctor on the course?

Very little of Alister Mackenzie has survived at Augusta National. Everyone agrees with that premise. But I'm no longer sure how much Alister Mackenzie ever existed at Augusta National.

The man visited the site only twice in 1931, in July and October. Once construction started in February 1932, he spent part of March and April contouring the greens, then left, never to return. (Perhaps the fact that the club owed him $3,000 of his $5,000 design fee influenced his decision.) The course was playable by September 1932 and officially opened in January 1933. Mackenzie died in January 1934, two months before the first contestants teed it up in an invitation tournament that would become the Masters. (It was contested in late March that first year.)

Purists have latched onto a single article about Augusta authored by Mackenzie in the March 1932 issue of The American Golfer magazine. (It was later reproduced by the club in a booklet titled "Description of the Bobby Jones Golf Course.") That article, written at the start of construction, and a couple of routings and preliminary hole-by-hole green diagrams, are the only surviving expressions of Mackenzie's design.