He was a native of Augusta. He was a graduate of Kalb West High School. He spent most of his adult life working at the Augusta National Golf Club. He moved to Aiken when he retired.
Survivors include his wife, Dorothy (Jones) Eumont; three sons, Jay Anthony Eumont of Savannah, Paul Michael Eumont of Dallas, Texas, and Samuel George Eumont of Atlanta. He is also survived by six grandchildren.
Immediately, I noticed that this obituary related to another former employee of Augusta National. Other than that, though, I didn’t have a clue what it meant.
Of course the obituary came with another note. It was just as cryptic as the first. All it said was, “He knew about it, too. So did Stedman.”
That got my attention. Stedman seemed to refer to Beau Stedman, the great player befriended by Robert T. “Bobby” Jones Jr. As almost every sports fan knows, Bobby Jones was arguably the greatest golfer of all time. Although he was a career amateur, the young man from Georgia with movie star looks dominated the world of golf during the Roaring Twenties, winning five U.S. Amateurs, four U.S. Opens, three British Opens, and a British Amateur—all in a span of eight years. His greatest triumph, of course, came in 1930, when he won all four of these major championships—what sports-writer Grantland Rice dubbed the “Impregnable Quadrilateral” —in the same competitive season. Sensing that there were no worlds left to conquer, Jones shortly thereafter retired from competition at the ripe old age of 28.
Jones was something of a Renaissance man. In the midst of all his golfing exploits, he also managed to acquire an engineering degree from Georgia Tech and an English degree from Harvard before spending sufficient time studying law at Emory to pass the bar and become a lawyer. He then entered the practice of law at Butler & Yates, where he was a partner for virtually his entire career.
Jones’s achievements in the golfing world continued after his retirement from competitive play. In 1932, he began construction on the Augusta National Golf Club. It was a monumental task, coming in the midst of the Great Depression, and only someone of Jones’s stature could have pulled it off. Shortly after the club opened, he organized a spring invitational tournament to be played there. The event became known as the Masters and today is recognized as one of the four major modern championships of golf.
This remarkable man’s connection with Beau Stedman began when Stedman was a young caddie at East Lake Country Club in Atlanta, where Jones had been a member since childhood. Upon seeing the then-teenaged Stedman’s obvious gifts for the game, Jones made him his protégé and began grooming him to be his successor as the next great golf champion.
Unfortunately, not long after venturing out into the world of competitive golf, Stedman was falsely accused of murdering the wife of the manager of a club where he was working. Jones, who knew Stedman to be innocent, eventually arranged for his young friend to play matches against the greatest players of the day under various aliases. Over a period of several decades, Stedman beat all comers, and Jones had carefully recorded his phenomenal string of victories in private files at his law office.
Stedman’s story remained tucked away in those files until the summer after my first year of law school at Tulane, when I accidentally discovered them while clerking at Butler & Yates. I had been given what I thought to be a routine task of cataloguing what remained of Jones’s old files. Piece by piece, I put together the remarkable story of how Stedman managed to meet and beat virtually every great player in the game over a span of some 30 years without ever being exposed. I then spent the better part of the next two years working to get this unknown champion the recognition he deserved. Through an extraordinary chain of events, we were ultimately able to clear Stedman’s name and bring his story to light.
Not surprisingly, my Stedman adventure had created quite a stir in most golf circles. As a consequence, I had gained something of a reputation as a golf historian/sleuth. It was more than I deserved, but it earned me a number of speaking engagements before various golf associations and historical societies. And, of course, it didn’t hurt my standing with the firm, either. Anything that celebrated the life and times of Bobby Jones scored lots of points with the powers that be at Butler & Yates. I felt pretty certain that the fanfare surrounding my discovery of Beau Stedman had as much to do with my being invited to join the firm as any of the legal work I had done as a law clerk. That was okay with me; I like to think that what I did with those files showed good lawyering instincts.
All of that aside, I could not fathom what it was that Stedman and Eddie Eumont supposedly knew or how it had anything to do with me. It occurred to me that someone might have just been having a bit of fun with me. It wouldn’t have been the first time, and jerking a lawyer’s chain probably appealed to lots of folks.
But if this was a practical joke, it was pretty original. And if the idea was to arouse my curiosity, it was working. After a week or so, I had been able to put the first note out of my mind, kind of like the odd piece of junk mail you get every now and then that makes no sense. But the second letter made it clear that the first was no accident. Someone was communicating with me in a deliberate way. And he either gave me a hell of a lot more credit than I deserved for figuring out his message, or he wanted me in the dark. I figured it was the latter.
I didn’t have a whole lot of time to give it much more thought than that, though. I was getting a steady flow of new files from the bank, and it was all I could do to keep up with my paperwork. In fact, even though I was arriving early and staying late, it seemed that I was making painfully slow progress in mastering what even Gloria probably thought was pretty routine stuff.
They say the toughest year of marriage is the first. I don’t know about that, but it’s certainly true about the first year of law practice. So I didn’t have the luxury of pondering what these mysterious letters meant because I was too busy trying not to be overwhelmed by my new job.
On top of that, I had to study for the Georgia bar exam, which was coming up in early August. There were various preparation, or “cram” courses offered, and I signed up for the one that Emile Guidry recommended. Classes met for three hours a night from Monday through Thursday for three weeks in July. I usually went straight from the office to class, sometimes eating a sandwich in my car on the way.
It was right toward the end of the course, at this most hectic time of my life, that I found another letter in my morning mail with the unmistakable earmarks of the earlier notes. I suppose I was equal parts irritated and intrigued when I saw the same postmark, same handwriting, and same lack of a return address. I tore it open, wondering what stranger’s obituary would be inside.
However, there was no obituary this time. Only a note that said, “I’m the last living soul who knows, and I’m old. Don’t let the secret die with me.”
I put the note down. What secret? Was someone just teasing me, or was this a genuine plea for me to expose some dark mystery? If I really was supposed to reveal a secret of some kind, why was my correspondent unwilling to reveal his identity?
I didn’t share these musings with anyone. I mean, what could I have said about these strange little notes? I didn’t know what they meant, who sent them, or why. I just figured it was better not to discuss any of this with people in the office, who were just getting to know me. While I wasn’t quite sure what they thought of me, I had managed to make a fairly positive impression based on the way I handled the Stedman affair. I didn’t want them thinking I missed the attention and had manufactured a new controversy just to regain the spotlight.
There was one guy that I could talk to about it. Ken Cheatwood. Cheatwood had clerked at Butler & Yates with me the previous two summers. He had received an offer to join the firm as an associate, too, but elected instead to take a clerkship in Miami with Judge Wayne Lee Shoss on the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. My buddy just couldn’t turn down a year in South Florida with lots of beaches and lots of golf.
Unfortunately, Cheatwood wasn’t supposed to start at the court until Septe
mber 15, which was still a couple of months off. He would be out of pocket until then, probably hanging out at a golf course somewhere. My buddy had been an All-American in golf at Oklahoma State during his college days and even played the minitours for a couple of years before law school. He wasn’t just a good player, either. Cheatwood dearly loved the game’s history and traditions, and he had played an important role in helping me with the Beau Stedman story. That’s when I discovered that he had great instincts for pulling seemingly unrelated facts together. This was just the kind of challenge he relished.
I needed to talk with him, but it would have to wait until he surfaced. In the meantime, learning how to be a lawyer was enough to occupy my time.
Chapter 3
I HADN’T EXPECTED to be taking any depositions as part of my collection work, but I was glad to get the opportunity when it came. It was in one of my larger cases where the amount involved justified the expense. In answers to interrogatories, a defendant who owed the bank some $45,000 denied that he had signed the promissory note that formed the basis of the suit.
At first I didn’t know what to do. No one had ever said that they hadn’t signed the note. Like most nonsensical things I encountered for the first time, it stopped me in my tracks.
By this time, I had just gotten the news that I had passed the bar exam. Now that I was considered a real lawyer, I tried to avoid running down the hall to get Emile Guidry’s input on every little problem. But I was at a loss about what to do, so I went to see him.
“Why don’t you take the guy’s deposition? Put a copy of the note in front of him and ask him if that’s his signature. If he denies it, ask him if he knows who did sign it. Ask him to name his closest friends and family.”
“Why would you ask that?”
“Because they’re most likely to recognize his signature. Unless he’s part of a real den of thieves, they’re not all gonna lie for him. Sooner or later, one of them will acknowledge that it is his signature.”
“And if they don’t?”
He laughed. “Then we’ll have a handwriting expert compare the signature to all of his signed checks and testify that they match. Won’t cost us a thing, because the court will tax the expert’s fees as court costs when we get a judgment against the guy.”
Guidry had a way of explaining things that made them seem so obvious. It always left me wondering why I hadn’t thought of it on my own. I had to remind myself that he had been practicing law 30 years longer than me.
After I returned to my office, I realized that I didn’t even know how to set up a deposition, much less go about taking one. Gloria patiently explained the process to me. Once the other side agreed to a date, she would arrange for the court reporter.
“What if the other side won’t agree to any date?”
She smiled at what she no doubt thought was a stupid question but answered patiently, “Then we pick a date, send out a notice, and serve them with a subpoena.”
That made sense, of course. Like her boss had predicted, she had already begun to save my ass.
I called the other lawyer. He seemed a little surprised that I wanted to depose his client. However, he eventually agreed to a date. Gloria prepared the notice, arranged for the reporter, and put it on my calendar.
I sat down at the computer in my office to begin preparing my questions. While Emile Guidry could have taken this deposition off the top of his head, I needed to prepare for it. I opened the word processing program and began to type out my questions. After a couple of hours of drafting and redrafting, I had everything down exactly as I wanted it.
I was printing it out when the next letter from my mysterious pen pal arrived. There was still no return address on the envelope or signature on the note. The scribbling hand was the same. All the note said was, “Jones did what Greeley said. I’ve seen it in the moonlight.”
This time, I became genuinely irritated. Enough of this game playing, I thought. If someone wanted something from me, why couldn’t they just come out and say so?
Impulsively, I wadded up the envelope and paper and threw both in the trashcan. But one of the first things that Gloria had taught me was to file everything. She said that any paper you threw away could turn out to be the most important document in the case. She was certainly right about that; I had learned the truth about Beau Stedman from otherwise meaningless scraps of paper scattered in some of Bobby Jones’s old files. For that reason, I knew that discarding the note was a mistake almost as quickly as I did it, so I retrieved the whole thing, smoothed it out, and placed it with the earlier ones. I had a feeling I would need all of the pieces if I was going to solve this puzzle.
Chapter 4
THE WORLD is full of people who believe pro wrestling is real but the moon shot was fake. I tried to keep that in mind as I struggled to decipher the bizarre notes I was receiving. I had to be careful, I told myself, not to take this stuff too seriously. I could have been trying to make sense of something that had no sense to it to begin with.
By now, though, I was becoming more and more distracted by the whole thing. Every few days, I pulled out all of the notes and placed them in front of me. I guess I thought reading them together would reveal their meaning in a way that reading them one at a time had not. But nothing ever came to me.
I then changed their order, moving the notes around like a carnie in the midst of a shell game. That didn’t help, either. Nothing.
For all I knew, they could have been written by Ernest T. Bass, the Mayberry village idiot from the “Andy Griffith” television show. Telling myself that the notes probably meant nothing at least allowed me to put them away.
Unfortunately, my curiosity wouldn’t stay put. Sooner or later, I’d have to dig them out and lay them in front of me all over again. I tried to remind myself that, just because my curiosity about Beau Stedman had been rewarded didn’t mean there was a great mystery to be solved behind every odd circumstance.
I suppose that, to a normal person, my inability to let go of this might be difficult to understand. But the truth is that the need to make sense out of what appears to be senseless is part of being a lawyer. If you’re not that way initially, law school will make you that way. For three years, every exam question consists of a confusing scenario of various facts that bring two or more parties into conflict. Each of these complicated problems has been created by a law professor who finds a good deal of amusement in testing your ability to distinguish between what’s relevant and what’s a so-called “red herring.” Unless you can figure out the difference, you can’t solve the problem.
This exercise is repeated on a daily basis after graduation, when lawyers are required to sift through confusing and conflicting stories from their clients. This time, however, the process was in reverse. Unlike law professors, clients aren’t terribly interested in how the law applies to their situations. They just want to win, and their lawyers must find facts in the tangled webs they’ve been given that can somehow be used to reach that result. To quote an old saw, ask a lawyer what’s 2 + 2, and he’ll ask you: “What do you need it to be?”
For that reason, when a lawyer gets any kind of information, his or her first instinct is to analyze it from every angle. So when I received the next note, immediately I noticed that its tone was more direct than the others. In the same awkward hand, my anonymous tormentor had written: “What if the National had another course?” And there, for the first time, was a signature: “Moonlight.”
Given the Augusta postmark, I quickly surmised that “the National” probably referred to the Augusta National Golf Club. During my search for Beau Stedman, I had learned that the locals there referred to Augusta National as “the National,” partly to distinguish it from the Augusta Country Club, which was simply called “the country club.”
It took me a while, but I eventually also recalled that the word “Moonlight” had appeared before. An earlier note had mentioned seeing something “in the moonlight.” Was it coincidence? Or was there some hi
dden meaning in the repeated use of the word?
I didn’t have any more time to think about it. Gloria burst into my office and breathlessly exclaimed, “Have you forgotten? You’ve got five minutes to make your ten o’clock pretrial with Judge Welsh!”
I bolted upright. I had forgotten all about the conference scheduled for that morning. Grabbing my coat and the file out of Gloria’s hand, I sprinted down the hall to the elevators.
The state courthouse was three blocks away. If I ran, I could just about make it.
No lawyer wanted to be late for an appointment with a judge, least of all Judge Harold R. Welsh. The joke was that his breath smelled bad because he was always chewing on someone’s ass. He was also a man unable to distinguish between mortal and venial sins. The slightest breach of his rules often provoked a blistering and humiliating dressing-down.
According to reputation, Judge Welsh’s bad temperament was matched only by his mediocre intellect. It was a deadly combination. Although I hadn’t personally experienced the sting of his whip, all the lawyers in the firm considered him to be ill-suited for the bench.
I briefly wondered how someone with such an unappealing disposition could ever get elected to the bench in the first place. Judges like him were Exhibit A in the argument for merit selection. It seemed to me that having the public elect judges made about as much sense as having Playboy pick All-American football players.
Judge Welsh’s propensity for bad humor weighed heavily on me as I bounded out of our building onto the street and headed west toward the courthouse. I was sweating profusely by then, and it wasn’t from the summer heat reflecting off the pavement beneath me. I couldn’t help thinking that there I was, with the ink not yet dry on my law license, and I was already in trouble. And all because of those damned, distracting letters.
I ignored the light that flashed “Don’t Walk” at the intersection and only broke stride in order to avoid a red convertible. Its driver yelled a curse at me which was probably a preview of what Judge Welsh had in store for me. I didn’t even look back.
The Greatest Course That Never Was Page 2
