By Bob Jones IV
When the great artist Michelangelo was asked how he sculpted his magnificent statue of Moses, he replied,
“Simple, I get a good block of marble and carve away everything that isn’t Moses.” 
This amusing story highlights a truth, all great things begin as ideas. To Michelangelo, the idea of Moses already existed inside of the nondescript block of marble. Other ideas come about in different ways, yet they also yield masterpieces. The Augusta National Golf Club course is a similar example and the genius who saw the “Moses in the marble” was my grandfather, amateur golf legend, Bobby Jones.
By the summer of 1926, Bub (the name we used for our grandfather) already stood at the top of the golfing world. He had just completed “The Double,” winning the Open championships of both Great Britain and the United States in the same year.
Two years previously, he had married his childhood sweetheart, Mary Rice Malone and they had one child, my aunt Clara, with another, my father, on the way. Bub was ready to assume a more normal pace to his life and give up the pressured existence of the fishbowl that was tournament golf. His thoughts were turning to the future and what he would do when he no longer had to endure the pressure of championship golf.
It was about this time that two things emerged in his mind. First, he wanted to complete his career as a player by winning all four national championships in the same calendar year, a feat so audacious that he refused to discuss it with anyone except my grandmother. Although it would eventually be called, “The Grand Slam,” there was no name for such a feat because no one, save my grandfather, even thought it possible. He completed that task on September 27, 1930, when he defeated Eugene Homans to win the United States Amateur at Merion Cricket Club outside of Philadelphia.
His second goal was to build a club to entertain friends in relaxed privacy, a privacy that wasn’t even available to him at his home, the Atlanta Athletic Club’s East Lake Country Club. As the marble began to be chipped away on this project, some objectives became clear. He wanted a course that was aesthetically beautiful and captured the eye. He also wanted a course that could solve a seemingly impossible task: it had to satisfy the average golfer and challenge the expert at the same time.
To Bub’s logical mind, there were three questions to be answered. First, where to build this golf course? Second, how to finance it? Third, which of the great architects of the day would work with him to design it?
The answer to the first question was pretty simple. Bub always felt that the ideal place to build a golf course was Augusta. He knew that the financial burden of a club could be born by a membership that was national in scope. Many of the members could be drawn from the Augusta area, since it was already a major rail stop for business leaders. They already spent a large amount of time golfing each winter at nearby Palmetto Golf Club in Aiken, South Carolina, and Augusta Country Club. The Augusta area the perfect climate for winter golf, much more so than Bub’s native Atlanta.
To reach and develop that membership and to finance the project, Bub needed a partner, who had business savvy and he turned to a new friend, Clifford Roberts. The two had been introduced by Walton Marshall, the hotelier who controlled the Vanderbilt Hotel in New York and the Bon Air Vanderbilt in Augusta.
In the beginning, Roberts and Bub hit it off beautifully, although their relationship would sour and rupture in later years. Tom Barrett, who would later be the mayor of Augusta, took the two men to a property he felt would be perfect for Bub’s golf course: Fruitlands Nursery located on Washington Road. 
Fruitlands had been a prosperous nursery and had been the largest indigo plantation in the country. Some of the original indigo plants still grow next to the clubhouse, which also holds the distinction of being the oldest poured concrete structure in Georgia. The Fruitlands property had always had commercial value and was at one time optioned to Commodore Perry Stoltz, the owner of the grand Fleetwood Hotel in Miami Beach. Stoltz’s plan was to build a series of hotels of equal splendor throughout the southeast, with one to be constructed on the old Fruitlands Nursery site in Augusta. When a hurricane blew the Fleetwood Miami Beach into the sea, Stoltz’s dreams of a hotel empire went with it, much to the relief of rival hotel owners in Augusta.
Barrett brought Roberts and Bub to see it in the late fall of 1930. Standing on the lawn near where the big oak stands today, Bub looked out over the property and said,
“To think that this land has been here all this time waiting for a golf course to be laid out on it.” The question remained, who would build it?”
One of the more prominent golf course architects of the time was A.W. Tillinghast, on whose Winged Foot golf course Bub had won the 1929 United States Open. Tillinghast’s designs were formidable for the expert and intimidating for the average player. Tillinghast’s philosophy was not ideal for what Bub had in mind.
Another great architect of the day was Donald Ross, who had redone the East Lake course when Bub was younger. Bub loved Ross’s style and was instrumental in selecting Ross to develop, what is now Highlands Country Club in Highlands, North Carolina. A myth developed that Bub had considered Ross for the Augusta project, but rejected him. The legend further claims that Ross was so perturbed that he later built Pinehurst to show Bub what he could have done with Fruitlands. It’s a lovely story that has little basis in fact. Neither Tillinghast nor Ross were ever seriously considered for the job as Bub had known for several years who was going to collaborate with him on what would become Augusta National Golf Club.
The architect that Bub wanted was Doctor Alister Mackenzie, a surgeon, who had become a noted golf architect after being injured in the Boer War. Mackenzie and Bub had struck an acquaintance by the mid-1920’s, spending long hours discussing golf courses and their design. Mackenzie and Bub shared a love of Saint Andrews and Mackenzie’s line sketch of the Old Course would hang in Bub’s office for the rest of his life. Mackenzie and O.B. Keeler, golf writer for The Atlanta Journal, walked together following Bub at the Walker Cup matches at the Old Course in 1926 and the following year at the British Open in Saint Andrews. Doctor Mackenzie had given Bub a copy of his slim book on golf architecture in 1927 that Bub read several times.
In 1929, Bub had played an exhibition at Mackenzie’s new course, Cypress Point, days before the United States Amateur. Inexplicably he lost in the first round and with no matches to play for the rest of the week, he spent hours talking about golf courses and golf architecture with Mackenzie.
On the Monday following the conclusion of play, Bub played an exhibition to mark the grand opening of one of Dr. Mackenzie’s finest works, Pasatiempo Golf Club.
There was only one choice to help him bring the Moses out of the marble and that was Alister Mackenzie. Only Mackenzie had the eye for natural beauty and golf strategy that matched Bub’s. In a world where golf courses could be stern and unforgiving things, only Mackenzie shared Bub’s desire for a course that could be played in a variety of ways, safe ways to satisfy the average player, and challenging ways for the expert.
While much about Augusta National has changed since its opening days, much of what is truly beautiful remains and continues to captivate golfers around the world. Every April, the entire golf world turns their attention to Augusta National and the Masters Tournament.
When I was twelve attending my first Masters, I stood on the steps of the Jones Cabin by the tenth tee very early one morning gazing over the property awestruck and tears began to flow down my cheeks, 
“I realized that all of this had existed in my grandfather’s mind before the first shovel had turned over the first dirt.”
Although he and I would never talk about it to any length, I could only marvel at the genius of my grandfather, who had carved, not a Moses out of marble, but one of “Golf Greatest Masterpieces” out of the sandy soil of Fruitlands Nursery.
This article appeared in the July/August 2018 issue of James magazine and is reprinted in Ohio Golf Journal with the permission of Robert Tyre Jones IV, Psy.D.
