Golf Central

On this day in 1893, a small but tough man who would become one of golf's toughest administrators and one of the founders of Augusta National, Clifford Roberts, was born in Morning Sun, Iowa.

Roberts grew into a wizard on Wall Street and having made his fortunes in finance before the Great Depression, helped the golf legend Bobby Jones select the property which is now Augusta. Along with Jones, who served as "the good cop" to Roberts' "bad cop", they built the great golf club into what it is now, and personally handled the invitations for their landmark event: the annual Masters tournament ...

Often called "a benevolent dictator", Roberts ran Augusta until his death from a self-inflicted gunshot on Augusta's par-3 course in 1977. Augusta firmly denied admission to women during Roberts' reign and continued to do so under successor Hootie Johnson, and although Roberts allowed Lee Elder to become the first black to play the Masters in 1975, resistance to change was one of his legacies ... Then again, so is the wonder that we call the Masters ...

It was also on this day in 1994 in Ojai, California, that 50-year-old Jay Sigel shot a 62 in the final round of the GTE West Classic to come back from 10 shots down to catch Jim Colbert for the largest comeback in Senior Tour history. Sigel, who had just turned pro after a distinguished amateur career, won the tournament in a playoff.

In the real world: Fierce resistance was the theme on this day in 1836, when the 189 Texas volunteers were finally defeated after a 13-day siege by the 3000-man Mexican Army in the Battle of the Alamo in San Antonio ... and in 1933, a rare bank holiday was declared in US history by president Franklin D. Roosevelt, in order to stop anxious customers from withdrawing all their money from the banks ...

Strangely enough: And on this day in 1899, the patents office in Berlin registered the brand name of Aspirin for acetylsalicylic acid for the pharmaceutical company Friedrich Bayer & Co., turning a pain-killing chemical once found in the bark of willow trees into a household item ...

In sport: On this day in 1902, a group of Spanish fans formed the Madrid Foot Ball Club, which of course today is known as Real Madrid FC, the most successful European football club of the 20th century ...

So it's deiz-ha-bloaz laouen deoc'h!, as they say in Breton, to the Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez (81), writer of Love in the Time of Cholera; to Supremes vocalist Mary Wilson (64); to Pink Floyd guitarist and singer David Gilmour; and to 7-foot-1, 23.2-stone NBA basketball star Shaquille O'Neal (36), otherwise known as Shaq Diesel or The Big Aristotle ...

It also would have been a birthday for the great Renaissance artist and engineer Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (b. 1475), whose The Last Judgment decorates the Sistine Chapel in Rome, had the writing not been on the wall for him in 1564 ... 'Til tomorrow! ...