This Masters marks the 40th anniversary of a decision that changed the lives of the club's predominantly Black caddies. Many still haven't gotten over it.
Two-time Masters champion Ben Crenshaw is one of the few golfers to keep their original Augusta National caddies, Carl Jackson, after the Masters changed its rule to allow players to bring their own. Jariah Beard won the 1979 Masters, and if you don’t believe that’s true, just ask the man who actually slipped on the green jacket at“It was like a blind man with a seeing eye dog,” Fuzzy Zoeller said.
Beard, his friends said, never got over the snub. “They threw us away at Augusta National,” he said in 2019, and when he died last month after a battle with cancer, more than 600 people came to the funeral services. He was celebrated as a father, as an athlete, and yes, as one of the best caddies to walk among the Georgia pines.
Johnson is relaxing in a backroom playing a card game called barracuda with friends. He is 82, has a pacemaker and needs dialysis three days a week, but he still loves being around the sport that was such a big part of his life. Caddieing became an entry point to a different world for many of them. They taught the men playing the course the famous advice from Pappy Stokes, the man regarded as the godfather of the caddies who shared in five Masters titles by four men, that all putts break toward Rae’s Creek. This was long before technology change the sport, and the players leaned on the local knowledge.
“Willie never read a green for me. Willie never picked a club out of the bag, but Willie sure was enthusiastic,” Nicklaus said last year. “The putt I made in ‘75, Willie started waving his towel, and when he started waving it, he waves it right down as the ball went in the hole and he missed the ball by about .Before Gary Player won in 1978, his caddie Eddie McCoy sat him down and told him bluntly: “Man, I need a roof on my house.
On Nov. 12, 1982, club chairman Hord Hardin announced that it would begin allowing players to bring their own caddies the next spring, explaining that Augusta did not have enough elite caddies for the 80-player field. Only a handful of the returning players kept their caddies — one of them, Crenshaw, folded into Jackson’s arms after his emotional second victory.
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