Augusta National Golf Club, home to the venerable Masters Tournament, is the spiritual seat of American golf.
Its spectacular Southern beauty and charm accommodates ghosts of golfing legends, past and present, whispering through the tall pines and bright azaleas that define Augusta as the greatest and loveliest setting of the golf world.
Co-founded in the 1930s by prim and proper Wall Street financier Clifford Roberts and popular American golf icon and champion Bobby Jones, Augusta National took less than 70 years to become the world's most popular and enchanted venue of golf. A home away from home for three hundred of the richest and most reclusive power brokers in America, Augusta also is renowned for the Masters, the first of four major championships contested every year.
Augusta is where Gene Sarazen in 1935 secured his spot in golf immortality by holing the double eagle heard around the world. It is where Sam Snead defeated Ben Hogan in a memorable 1954 playoff; where Arnold Palmer hitched his pants to engineer the merger of the previously divergent worlds of television entertainment and golf; and where Jack Nicklaus won six green jackets, including his spine-tingling victory at age forty-six in 1986, thanks to a back-nine 30.
In I Remember Augusta, dozens of golfers - including past Masters winners such as Nicklaus, Larry Mize, and Ben Crenshaw - and other golfing experts look back on the reverential Augusta National and its Masters Tournament. They offer fresh insights and remembrances that together comprise an oral history of a unique club and tournament representing golf at its finest.
Author Mike Towle is a veteran sportswriter and author whose previous books include True Champions and The Ultimate Golf Trivia Book. A former newspaper reporter, he has covered golf for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and The National. Towle has also written numerous articles for Golf World, Golf Shop Operations, Golf Journal, and Golf Illustrated magazines. He is president and publisher of TowleHouse Publishing, based in Nashville, Tennessee, where he lives with his wife, Holley, and their son, Andrew.