Клиффорд Робертс: Гольф администраторы және «Мастерс» турнирінің құрылтайшысы

American investment dealer, golf administrator
the golf personality

Clifford Roberts (March 6, 1894 – September 29, 1977) was an American investment dealer and golf administrator.

Born in Morning Sun, Iowa, Roberts had a financially troubled family life as a boy. He and older brother, John Darious Roberts, left school before graduation after beating up the school's principal. He worked as a successful, traveling clothing salesman, then as a promoter of speculative oil and gas leases and production. A large commission in the oil and gas industry, made in 1921, provided the financial means to become a Wall Street stock broker. He became a partner at Reynolds & Company in the late 1920s, a position he held for the remainder of his life.

In 1932, Roberts and Bobby Jones co founded the Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Georgia. Roberts served as chairman of the club from 1931 through 1976. Roberts was named "Chairman in Memoriam" after his death. According to The New York Times, another comment attributed to Roberts is: "As long as I'm alive, all the golfers will be white and all the caddies will be black." The club had long standing policies of hiring only black caddies and requiring their exclusive use at all times, including at the Masters tournament. Masters participants were not permitted to use their own caddies on Augusta National grounds until several years after Roberts' death. The Masters Tournament, an invitational event, excluded black players for four decades, with Roberts once quoted as saying "to make an exception would be practicing discrimination in reverse." Roberts was finally forced to relax this stance late in his career, and Lee Elder became the first black participant in 1975. In 1997, Tiger Woods became the first person of color to win the tournament. It was not until 1990, thirteen years after Roberts stepped down as chairman that Augusta National admitted an African American member, Ron Townsend. The first woman, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, was admitted in 2012.

Roberts received many awards and honors during his lifetime, including: service on the PGA Advisory Committee from its inception in 1943 until his death, appointment by the United States Golf Association to serve on the Bob Jones Award Selection Committee, and election to the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1978. Roberts was the subject of a book titled The Making of the Masters, Clifford Roberts, Augusta National, and Golf's Most Prestigious Tournament by David Owen, published in 1999. His mother, Rebecca Scott Key Roberts, a niece of the author of the U. S. national anthem, Francis Scott Key, had taken her own life by gunshot wound in 1913. Several weeks later, a bronze plaque in his honor was unveiled at the clubhouse entrance.