Errie Ball, 103, golfer who played in first Masters

[Bob Of Burleson]

By WILLIAM YARDLEY
The New York Times

It was late March 1934, a spring Sunday in Augusta, Ga., the last round of the first Masters golf tournament. Errie Ball stood on the edge of the third green. He had traveled farther than most to get there.

He was a Welshman whose great-uncle, John Ball, had won the Open Championship in England in 1890, using a deliberately minimal set of clubs. None of those newfangled niblicks for him. In 1926, Errie Ball was playing in the Open, as a 15-year-old amateur, when he saw the sweet swing of one of the United States’ most dazzling players, Bobby Jones.

Eight years later, after Jones had helped him find work in the United States and membership in the Professional Golfers’ Association, Ball attended the new tournament in Georgia that Jones had co-founded. The Augusta National Invitational Tournament, it was called at the time.

Ball, who was 103 when he died on July 2 in Stuart, Fla., was the last survivor of the 72 players in that first Masters. He also held another distinction: After he competed in 1934, 23 years passed before he played in the tournament again — tied for the longest stretch between appearances.

(In the 1934 tournament he finished 25 strokes behind the winner, and in 1957 he missed the cut.)

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