Augusta's Bon Air Hotel had been a vacation destination since its founding in 1889, and its managers cemented Augusta's position as a tourist center when they opened the Bon Air Golf Club in 1897. By 1926, a group of men came to be known as "The Conversation Club." It had twenty or twenty-five members at any one time, almost all Northerners. They came from differing backgrounds, from academics to banking, railroading to politics, baseball to law. But they had two things in common: an interest in the game of golf and plenty of wealth - enough to finance an extended winter vacation in Augusta, where the game could be played all year.
Legendary amateur golfer Walter J. Travis was the "King" of the Conversation Club. Travis also influenced the great amateur golfer of the next generation, Bobby Jones, whose career would soon eclipse his own. In March 1924, while he was the reigning U.S. Open champion, Jones played an exhibition match at the Augusta Country Club with his partner Perry Adair against the team of Arthur Havers, the British Open champion, and Jimmy Ockenden, the French Open titleholder. Travis, a spectator in the gallery, afterwards gave Jones a putting lesson in the locker room that helped turn his career around. According to Jones: "It was mainly missing little putts that ruined me up to that point in my career because I wasn't giving them their due importance, and the tips I received that day from Mr. Travis changed me from a terrible putter into a fairly good one."
The Augusta National Golf Club had its beginnings through the Bon Air Hotel, where Wall Street banker and winter tourist Clifford Roberts had met Bobby Jones while staying there to play golf in the mid 1920s. For the whole article beyond these excerpts, see "The Conversation Club and the Early Years of Golf in Augusta" by Thomas Heard Robertson, Jr., The Georgia Historical Quarterly, Spring 2005.
Comments