The 120-year-old tree stays

Dwight D. Eisenhower made a career out of overcoming obstacles.

He was able to break out of small-town drudgery and poverty, earning a Congressional recommendation to attend West Point, where he showed remarkable ability. There, he was the academy’s running back (he once tackled Jim Thorpe) and was considered the best card player on campus.

After graduation, he and his fellow graduate George S. Patton once reverse engineered a British tank — taking it apart and putting it back together again. He went from the infantry to the rank of Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force and is credited with staging the largest amphibious military assault in world history. He was elected president of the United States. He built the Interstate highway system. He warned us of the military-industrial complex, but in the end, there was one obstacle that Ike could not get around: that damned tree on Augusta National’s 17th hole.

That tree, a 120-year-old loblolly pine, is located a little more than 200 yards from the Master’s tee, just left-center of the fairway. The 17th hole is challenging enough (as are all holes at the Master’s) without having to navigate around the umbrella-like visage of that tree. Eisenhower would hit the tree almost every time he traveled to Augusta (which was a lot … his friendship with Clifford Roberts, co-founder of the club and one of his chief political fundraisers, earned Eisenhower a membership to the club) and his complaints started to take on a new edge with every round.

Now this would seem like a minor matter — it’s not uncommon for a golfer to have a repetitive issue with a hazard at his or her favorite course — but Eisenhower was not just “another member” of the club. This was a guy who could order around Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill, a guy who rebuilt the roads of the nation.

By 1956, Eisenhower had had enough, and he made the trek from his personal cabin on the club’s grounds (built to Secret Service guidelines after his election victory) to the clubhouse, where he sat in on a meeting of the club’s board of governors. There, he quite seriously proposed cutting the tree down. Richards, legend has it, politely ruled the request out of order and adjourned the meeting so as not to be in the position of telling a sitting president “no.” (The club did take another of his suggestions and dammed a stream, creating the three-acre “Ike’s Pond” on the course’s eastern side.)

Today, they’ll fiddle with the tees at the tournament, and they’ll move the holes around the greens. They might even build you a pond or name a bridge after you if you ask nicely — but the tree on the 17th stays.