David Barrett with The Story of the Masters. Photo by Dave Donelson
Award-winning Westchester golf writer David Barrett details every championship in his captivating book, The Story of the Masters.
David Barrett’s latest book, The Story of the Masters, reveals the inside story of golf’s most iconic tournament during every year it has been played since the first in 1934. Barrett, a veteran golf journalist, drew on an immense amount of source material including his own reporting to detail the dramatic exploits of Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, and the many other great champions that made the Masters such a compelling sporting event.
“The Masters is everybody’s favorite golf tournament,” according to the White Plains author. “It’s the most watched for many reasons, but mostly because it produces more drama than any other major.”
Barrett covered the tournament for well over two decades including six years as a reporter for the Augusta Chronicle and nearly 20 as senior editor of Golf Magazine. He supplemented his own notes from interviews with every important player in the game with extensive research from other contemporaneous sources. The result, according to two-time Masters champion Ben Crenshaw, is “a distinctly thoughtful and different look at the history of the tournament.”
What makes this book so different? “I wanted to write a unique history of the tournament action,” Barrett says. “Most other books, including the first one I wrote about it, tell the story of the founding of the Masters. I wanted to tell the story of how the tournament has been played every year.”
From 1934, when Bobby Jones came out of retirement to compete in the inaugural event, to 2020, when the tournament was played for the first time in November due to the coronavirus pandemic, Barrett plots every year’s action with a spot-on eye and ear for details that make the drama come alive on the page. It’s sports history at its very best.
The Story of the Masters is Barrett’s eighth book. In 2010, his account of Ben Hogan’s gritty comeback triumph, Miracle at Merion, won the prestigious USGA Herbert Warren Wind Award for the best golf book of the year. The Story of the Masters was published by Tatra Press, Croton-on-Hudson, and is available from Amazon or other booksellers.