2 weeks Ago
Maybe it’s the time when Secret Service showed up, looking for their lost President Eisenhower at the old Squeaky’s Tip Top on Central Avenue. The president had taken off from Augusta National with the club’s general manager at the time, needing an escape from the security detail. Maybe it was watching Arnie Palmer, “the constant gentlemen,” drive that Cadillac up Magnolia Lane for the 1974 Masters Tournament, parking it in front of the clubhouse and recording GM-sponsored welcome.
It could be that September morning in 1977 when he took a phone call at home: Clifford Roberts couldn't be found; would he wake his father and send him over to Augusta National? He did. And it was his father who found Roberts there at Eisenhower Pond. Then again, maybe it was more simply being perched on Granddad’s shoulders around the age of four and staring down No.
4 or peeking around a door to see his own pops working two telephones and typing faster than anyone. Phil Wahl, Jr., has a lot of memories of the club – this was what Augusta National Golf Club always was to him, “the club.
” His father was Philip Wahl, Sr., general manager of Augusta National from 1961 until 1978. Incidentally, these are two years when Gary Player made two of his three Masters Tournament wins.
Phil, Jr., or “little Phil,” as some of the players would call him while he was a club runner at the National, had a whole box of memories to share April 16 when he was the Augusta Museum of History's guest for its monthly Brown Bag lecture series . Philip, Sr.
, came on as general manager in 1961, 30 years after Augusta National co-founders Bobby Jones and Clifford Roberts began bought Fruitland Nurseries for just $70,000 and, a year later in 1932, opened it as Augusta National Golf Club. Philip Wahl, Sr., was the "best club manager Augusta National ever had or expects to have," at least to ANGC co-founder Clifford Roberts.
The Wahls were living in Sandusky, Ohio, when Phil, Sr., helping manage the Catawba Beach Club there, was encouraged to apply at Augusta. He did.
He waited a month. He heard back – come down to Augusta, we have a question for you. Never mind the heavy snowstorm there in Sandusky, down he went.
Little Phil recalled that his father was offered the job on the condition that he start the next day. So, just before Christmas in 1961, the memory box got its first deposit. By 1963 and at 28 years old, Phil, Sr.
, found himself in a position of defending Augusta against the commentary of New York Herald columnist Jimmy Breslin. Breslin had just written this barb, “How Augusta, Georgia, could have anything is beyond us. Staying in this town is just like serving a sentence.
” Wahl, according to the Augusta Chronicle's coverage of the incident at the time, responded “calmly and succinctly, ‘If you want to go to a big city,’ said Wahl, ‘go to New York. But if you want to see golf, you come to Augusta.’” The Augusta Chronical in 1963 covered the barb aimed at Augusta from New York Herald Tribune Columnist Jimmy Breslin - and Augusta National's Philip Wahl's quick response.
Wahl worked to bring live coverage of the Masters Tournament to the Asia-Pacific, picking up in the process a marketing deal with Suntory Whisky and filming a commercial at the club. “I imagine if I was asked what really makes the Masters great it would be difficult if I had to find just any one thing, it’s really an impossible situation,” Wahl says in that commercial, after the ice clinks in the glass. He decides it’s more a combination of the players, the course and the excitement: “the impossible seems to happen.
” That commercial was filmed not long before Wahl’s death in a car accident on Berckman’s Road, just outside the National, in 1978. Philip Wahl, Sr., stands at left, just behind Jack Nicklaus, in this photo from Nicklaus' first Masters victory in 1963.
Phil Wahl, Jr., has a lot of memorabilia to go with the memories. Letters and envelopes addressed to Augusta National Golf Club, photos of his father with Jack Nicklaus the year he won his first Green Jacket.
And the golf balls of two US. Presidents and one vice president: Eisenhower’s own Spalding DOT 1 mounted above Gerald Ford’s and Spiro Agnew’s. And the handwritten note from Clifford Roberts to his father: “For Philip R.
Wahl, the best club manager Augusta National ever had or expects to have.”.
