Jones Still Rules Augusta 25 Years After His Death : Golf history: Something good governs play at Augusta, the perfect course planned to be that way by the perfect player--amateur Robert Tyre Jones Jr.

There is an eerie sense of history at Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Ga., an unseen intrusion of the past on the present. How else do you explain what happens there?

From Gene Sarazen’s double-eagle in 1935--in the second Masters--through Ben Crenshaw’s teary victory last year, it has been as though the winner’s swings were made on a more perfect plane, his shots guided by a higher hand.

Something good governs play at Augusta, the perfect course planned to be that way by the perfect player--Robert Tyre Jones Jr.

Time after time, the Masters produced a perfect winner, almost as if willed by Jones, the Southern gentleman who won 13 major championships in seven years, ending with the Grand Slam in 1930.

The 60th Masters that begins on Thursday is the 25th since Jones died, but somehow his memory still drifts through the tall Georgia pines, his goodness shines like the brilliant dogwoods and azaleas back in Amen Corner and his respect for the game remains as enduring as the course he left behind.

“The events that seem to happen at Augusta--including mine--there are some things that happen over there that can be unexplainable at times,” Crenshaw said, thinking back a year to his emotional victory.

“Jack Nicklaus in 1986 was something out of this world,” Crenshaw said about the last regular-tour tournament won by the man with 18 professional major championships.

Truly, it was. At age 46 and playing poorly coming into the tournament, Nicklaus was five strokes behind after eight holes on Sunday then played the last 10 holes seven under par to finish with a 65 and the title.

“It had all the elements of drama that anyone could hope to see in a golf tournament,” Crenshaw said. “It was just magical.”

It was the perfect winner, the perfect end to a great career.

“The year Freddy Couples won, how could his ball possibly stay up on No. 12?” Crenshaw said about the 1992 Masters when Couples’ ball was kept from rolling back into Rae’s Creek on Sunday by the slimmest of grass blades.

“So many things happen over there that are up to fate,” said Crenshaw, a golf historian who contributed an essay to the new book, “The Greatest of Them All: The Legend of Bobby Jones.” ’It seems to produce drama after drama each year.”

What will the drama be this year? A sixth major championship by Nick Faldo? A disappointing eighth runner-up showing in a Grand Slam event by Greg Norman?

A breakthrough victory in a major by Phil Mickelson, Davis Love III or Colin Montgomerie? The third leg of the career Grand Slam by John Daly?

Or will Nicklaus, at age 56 and 10 years past his last major championship, reach back in time, grab hold of a miracle and squeeze four days of golf out of it?

If it can happen, it can happen here, on the course where, in 1967, a 54-year-old Ben Hogan shot a 66 on Saturday-30 on the back nine-to thrill the gallery with the last great round by one of the greatest players ever.

If it can happen, it can happen at Augusta National, the ingenious design by Jones and Alister Mackenzie, the famed Scottish golf course architect.

“Jones dreamed of building his ideal course,” said Sid Matthews, author of “The Life and Times of Bobby Jones.”

“He thought about it, talked to other people about it. Augusta was not an impulsive thing. Jones had been planning to build his perfect golf course for a number of years.”

Jones sought out Mackenzie in 1929 after losing to Johnny Goodman in the first round of the U.S. Amateur at Pebble Beach, going to Cypress Point, the magnificent Mackenzie design on the Monterey Peninsula, to speak to the Scottish architect.

Jones took Mackenzie to Augusta and showed him several hundred lush acres of what was the largest nursery in the South. Together they planned a course in the Scottish concept: wide open fairways, devilishly undulating greens, a premium on position and a precision short game.

The first Masters was in 1934. The very next year it produced its first unbelievable event when Sarazen holed a 4-wood on No. 15 for a double-eagle that forced a playoff with Craig Wood. Sarazen won the next day.

Fifty years ago, in 1946, Herman Kaiser won when Ben Hogan missed a 12-foot birdie putt on the last hole for the victory and blew the 30-inch follow that would have forced a playoff.

Three times in four years--1987, 1989 and 1990--the tournament was decided in a playoff.

And last year’s finish was as dramatic as they come. Ten days before the Masters, Crenshaw received one last putting lesson from Harvey Penick, the 90-year-old golf teacher who had worked with Crenshaw since Ben was a child.

The day before the Masters, Crenshaw returned to Texas again, this time to be one of Penick’s pallbearers. Back at Augusta, Crenshaw was perfect on the treacherous greens, never three-putting in 72 holes and rolling in huge putts on Nos. 12, 16 and 17 on Sunday.

Whatever drama Augusta National has in store this year, it will likely be another fitting tribute to Jones, a man who dominated his era like no other.

In addition to his great golf career, which he ended as a competitive player at age 28, Jones was a scholar who graduated with a mechanical engineering degree from Georgia Tech at age 18 and earned an English degree from Harvard at 21. At 24, he passed the bar exam after only three semesters at Emory University Law School.

Once, when praised for calling a two-stroke penalty on himself when he was the only person who saw his ball move, Jones said: “You might as well praise a man for not robbing a bank.”

He played his last round of golf on Aug. 15, 1948. Until he died Dec 18, 1971, Jones had to use a cane, a walker and finally a wheelchair after being afflicted by syringomyelia, an extremely painful degenerative disease of the spinal cord.

Until the last two years of his life, Jones was a fixture at the Masters, in his wheelchair or a golf cart. He is still there in the guide to spectators he wrote, one that is still handed out. And he is there in the great golf course and compelling tournament he created.

He is also there in the spirit of competition and fair play he left behind.

“The most acute and yet most satisfying recollections I have are the tournaments won by triumphs over my own mistakes and by strokes played with imagination and precision when anything ordinary would not have succeeded,” Jones wrote.

That’s exactly the kind of golf course Jones left behind. And that’s exactly the kind of tournament he left behind.

When Crenshaw finished his final-round 68, he said “It was like someone put their hand on my shoulder and guided me through.”

He was talking about Penick, but he could have been talking about Jones as well.