Captain Don, The Rainmaker, and the 5-Wood that Won the 1976 Masters
- David Stone
- 2 days ago
- 17 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
Raymond Floyd strode down Augusta National's second fairway during the first round of the 1976 Masters Tournament. Known as Pink Dogwood, the par-5 2nd was the course's longest hole, both for pros and members, but played shorter than its measured 555 yards. With his drive safely clear of the fairway bunker on the right, Floyd meticulously examined his lie, surveyed the wide, shallow green over 220 yards away and the two deep bunkers guarding it on either side, and asked his caddie, Fred "Hop" Harrison, to hand him the 5-wood.
At the time, few PGA pros carried a 5-wood in the bag. Sportswriter Dave Nightingale called it an "old man's club." "They used to have them in ladies' sets," Floyd told the Palm Beach Post's Craig Dolch years later, "but nobody out here used them." In previous years, Floyd might have reached for a 1- or 2-iron, but this year would be different. With his characteristic inside-and-over motion, Floyd sent his second shot high into the air, then watched as it landed on the green and rolled to a stop about 20 feet from the pin. Moments later, a two-putt birdie put him at 1-under for the round.
He used the 5-wood again at the par-5 8th and got close enough to chip to four feet and hole that putt for another birdie. He used it twice more on the second nine, at the 13th and again at the 15th, reaching the green in two and two-putting for birdie each time. Floyd torched Augusta's par-5s on Thursday, making birdies on all four during an eight-birdie performance--marred only by a 3-putt bogey at the 12th--that gave him a 7-under-par 65 for the day and a one-stroke lead over 26-year-old Masters rookie Andy North. "I'm just tickled to death with that club," Floyd said of the 5-wood after the round. "I'm starting to get that 'Augusta feeling.'"
The Masters was the first tournament Floyd recalled watching as a boy. Cutting his golfing teeth at the Fort Bragg course where his father was head pro, his daydreams often revolved around the moment he would sink a crucial putt to claim the coveted Green Jacket. It was the tournament he wanted to win more than any other, yet he had never quite found his rhythm at Augusta. By his own admission, it was the par-5s that held him back. It wasn't the distance that hindered him, but the sand-based Bermuda greens that, as Floyd put it, were "harder than your head." He couldn't hold the green with a 3-wood or 1-iron shot when he went for the greens in two. This was particularly bothersome at the 15th, where the biggest danger was the water over the green rather than the pond in front of it.
In eleven appearances starting in 1965, his scoring average was a mediocre 73.67, and his best finish was T7 in 1968, the year before he won his first PGA Championship. Since winning the PGA in 1969, he had missed the cut twice at Augusta and finished outside the top-20 every year except '71, when he finished T13. However, since his marriage to Maria Fraietta in 1974, Floyd had settled down and begun taking a more mature approach to his game. He rediscovered the joy of playing golf, and with a renewed perspective, he set his sights on winning the tournament he fantasized about in his youth--a dream that now seemed within his reach.
Floyd broke a six-year winless drought in 1975, winning the Kemper Open in June, and finished the year 13th on the money list. In November, as the season drew to a close, he took a hard look at his past Masters performances and had a revelation. Typically a 1-iron hitter, he had rarely used the club at Augusta. "By my count, I'd used the 1-iron only four times in the eleven Masters I'd played before this year," he shared in Golf Digest. Even then, he had only used it off the tee at the 7th, at the time a short par-4. He needed a club that would carry the distance on the par-5s, but would allow the ball to approach at a higher trajectory and land more softly on Augusta's notoriously firm, lightening fast greens. After careful consideration, he concluded that the club he needed was a 5-wood.
Nowadays, when a pro on the PGA Tour needs a new club, he works directly with manufacturer's representatives at an on-site tour van or specialized fitting center. Club specialists use launch monitor data from Trackman and special tools and software to customize shaft, weight, grip, loft, and lie specifications, to ensure the club performs exactly as required. In November 1975, when none of that existed on tour, Raymond Floyd picked up the phone and called a former charter boat captain from Hollywood, Florida, named Don Boyd.
Ads in the Hollywood Sun-Tattler proclaimed him a Doctor of Golf-ology, but Don Boyd's initial entry into the golfing business was driven by the need to fill an economic void. Boyd was born on Long Island and grew up in the historic town of Sea Cliff, New York, where he learned to fish the waters off Montauk. His first job was at a gas station, where he learned the value of hard work, and he proudly served his country as a hospital corpsman in the United States Navy. Sometime around 1950, his life took an unexpected turn when his father, James Boyd, developed a heart condition. When a physician recommended that he move to Florida for the milder climate, the elder Boyd packed up his belongings, bought an Airstream trailer, and moved with his wife to Hollywood Beach, Florida. Don followed soon after.
An experienced fisherman from his days in Block Island Sound, Don brought his boat down with him and put in near Haulover Inlet. He opened Reel Easy Charters, and ran guided fishing excursions up and down the East Coast and over to Bimini out of Hollywood and Pompano Beach. Business was great during the winter months, but in the summer, his profits dried up. "In the wintertime, he would make buckets of money," recounts his son, Scott Boyd. "He was booked all the time, but when summer came, there was nobody down here. Everybody went North and it was like a ghost town." He decided he needed something to supplement his income until the snowbirds returned. One day, while talking to his friend Jim Harris about his plight, Harris suggested that, since he was a pretty handy guy, maybe he should consider fixing golf clubs.
Boyd didn’t consider himself much of a golfer--he played a little, not a lot--but he decided to give it a go. In June of 1958, he and Harris, a frustrated business machine salesman, bought the necessary tools and set up shop in the garage at Boyd's home at 1219 Lincoln Street. As fate would have it, future World Golf Hall-of-Famer Cary Middlecoff lived just three blocks down the street. The two-time U.S. Open and 1955 Masters champion would walk in through the front door, grab a cup of coffee from the kitchen, and head straight to the garage, where Boyd and Harris were busy at work. "They'd be piddling, fixing clubs, checking weights and lengths and grip sizes and all kinds of things," Scott Boyd recalled. Those early days with Middlecoff and a few other visiting pros proved invaluable, as Boyd soaked up knowledge about what the pros were looking for in their equipment. Like most clubmakers of the day, he learned to watch the flight of the ball, listen to the sound the club made when it struck the ball, and watch how the player responded to the club. "He was learning from the professionals at the time," Scott noted. "He found out what made their swings tick, and he just kind of built a business around it."
What began as a casual interest evolved into a venture that would intertwine Boyd's life with the world of professional golf, all sparked by a simple decision to try something new. Boyd's days started at 5:30 a.m. on the fishing boat and stretched into the night as he repaired golf clubs until midnight. In their first month, he and Harris grossed about $195. Middlecoff was so impressed with the quality of their work that he took some of their clubs on tour. When word of mouth spread, Boyd was soon earning more in four or five months of the summer than he did in the other eight months on his fishing boat. By August 1959, Boyd and Harris relocated The Club Shop to a larger space on North Dixie Highway, partially because an anonymous neighbor complained about the smell of lacquer emanating from Boyd's back yard, but mainly because their business had now out-paced the capacity of his 12 x 12 foot garage.
With business booming, Don gave up his charter business in May 1960 and devoted his full attention to the Club Shop, which became a true mom-and-pop operation when Don's wife Dottie got involved. Delores "Dottie" Boyd was raised by Mennonite parents on a farm in northern Indiana. Shortly before she and some girlfriends decided to move to Florida, her mother had warned her to steer clear of anyone from New York and anyone driving a convertible. She took a job at a diner near the beach in Hollywood, and early one morning, Don happened in for breakfast on the way to his boat. "He asked her on a date," said Scott, "picked her up in his convertible, and during the evening told her he was from New York." They were married for 65 years.
By the time the shop moved to its permanent location at 510 North Dixie Highway in the summer of 1964, Dottie was a full-time member of the crew. Don's mother, Irene, kept Scott and his sister Sharon, while Dottie donned cut-off blue jeans and joined Don at the store. "I couldn't wear a dress out here," she once laughed, "not with all the painting, sanding, and the dust." Dubbed by a Miami Herald reporter as the "Queen of Clubs," Dottie Boyd was the only golf club repair-woman outside of a factory. She specialized in re-finishing woods and helped organize the operation with a military precision. One day Buck White, a sometimes-gruff PGA pro, was giving her some static in the shop, and she would have nothing of it. When she popped right back at him, he remarked that she ran the place like a master sergeant. It stuck. From then on, all the pros who frequented the shop, including Lee Trevino, called her Sarge. "They'd walk in the door," Scott fondly recalled, "and they'd say 'Hey Don, hey Jimmy, hey Sarge,' and they'd move right on through, and it was just natural. Mom was that kind of gal. She was something else."
Not only could Don and Dottie repair golf clubs, they knew how to swing them as well. In the early days, Don took some good natured ribbing from his friends for his ability to build golf clubs and inability to win tournaments, but that all changed in 1963 when he won the Hollywood Fraternal Order of Police tournament and a trip to the Bahamas. Don, a 4 handicap when he was able to play regularly, won multiple club championships at Hollywood Lakes Country Club and enjoyed playing in pro-ams with Middlecoff, White, and Julius Boros. Dottie, who carried a 7 handicap, won just about every type of women's tournament in the Sebring area for a few years, including the club championships at Golf Hammock and Sun 'n Sea Country Clubs. "Club championships, member-guests, ladies' four-ball events," said Scott, "you name it, she was on the podium." Their shared passion for the sport served to strengthen their bond and enhanced their reputation within the local golfing community.
Don Boyd was not just a craftsman; he was an innovator at heart. He built his own spray booth, his own air evacuation system, and other tools, such as the one he used to re-whip persimmon woods. Together with Jim Harris, Boyd was among the first to harness the power of epoxy resin inserts on the faces of drivers and was an early adopter of advanced materials, embracing graphite and Tru-Glass shafts that would revolutionize the game. They also established a pick up and delivery service to most of the 65 golf courses dotting the landscape from Miami to Jupiter and Palm Beach. Boyd would make the rounds in his trusty station wagon, returning with what seemed like 300 clubs in the back tagged for re-gripping, re-shafting, and a variety of other repairs. He had a 48-hour turn-around on shafts and approximately a week for refinishing. Soon he was handling about 90 percent of the golf club repair business in Broward County.
This level of service caught the attention of touring pros, who began sending their clubs to Boyd, since at the time, he could do the work faster and more efficiently than the big companies could. Scott Boyd estimates that around 80% of the touring pros visited his dad's shop when the when the PGA made its swing into Florida for tournaments at Inverrary, Bay Hill, and Doral. Many players would stop by to see Don for various needs—whether it was to have a putter reworked, a new shaft installed, or simply to get a fresh grip. The shop was always abuzz with activity, and it wasn't unusual to walk in to find Lee Trevino holding court, cracking jokes while perched on an upside-down garbage can. Boyd built or repaired clubs for players including Gay Brewer, Gibby Gilbert, Andy Bean, Calvin Peete, and Chi Chi Rodriguez, as well as icons like Trevino, Sam Snead, and Jack Nicklaus. He also did work for Raymond Floyd.
Because Floyd lived less than 20 miles away at Miami's Palm Bay Yacht Club, he came by more often than some, and when Floyd visited the shop in November 1975, he had a special club in mind. As Scott Boyd tells the story, "He says, 'I can't stop a 2-iron or a 1-iron on those greens (at Augusta National) and I need that from some places.'" The club Floyd sought was a 5-wood, a club with a loft of about 19 degrees, which was comparable to a 2-iron. The advantage of the 5-wood lay in its larger wooden head, which would make it easier for him to get the ball airborne, a crucial factor in challenging the firmness of Augusta's greens. Floyd specified that he wanted the face to be square to open, and he wanted the shaft to be the length of a standard 4-wood in order to boost clubhead speed and potentially increase his distance. "And that was kind of what Dad went to work on," Scott recalls, "and he put the thing together." Boyd charged him $28, wholesale cost, for the job.
To long-time North Carolina club-maker David Bass, Floyd's specifications made perfect sense. Having previously done club work for pros like Floyd and Chip Beck, Bass noted that Floyd's arms were relatively short for a man of his stature and that he liked his irons about an inch to an inch-and-a-half longer than standard. It was only logical that he would have liked his woods the same way. A slightly open face, Bass said, would make the club "eye square," meaning that the face of the club would appear square to the ball at address. Given the increased axial rotation of smaller persimmon woods compared with today's larger clubheads, the open face would also make it more difficult to hook the ball left.
After practicing with the club from January to April, Floyd phoned Boyd and told him, "I think this is going to work just fine." Not only was he able to get more air under the ball, his shots were carrying the desired distance, landing softly, and sitting down nicely. Although there was no rough to speak of at Augusta National, Floyd also found that there was enough mass behind the clubhead that he could get through heavier rough with it and hit it from trickier lies. Driving to Augusta after shooting 66 in the final round of the Greater Greensboro Open, he was brimming with confidence. His putting was coming around, and his ball-striking was on point. After a couple of practice rounds at Augusta, Floyd chose to shelve his 1-iron and replace it with the 5-wood, a move that Craig Dolch would later compare to uncovering "golf's equivalent to black magic."
After his stellar first round 65 on Thursday, Floyd continued his ownership of the course's four par-5s on Friday, playing them in an astounding 5-under-par. This included an eagle at the 520-yard 15th after his 5-wood shot came to rest just three feet from the cup. Floyd finished the day with a 6-under-par 66, which gave him a then-record 36-hole score of 131, 13-under for the tournament, and a commanding 5-stroke lead over defending champion Jack Nicklaus. In Saturday's round, Floyd fought the urge to play too defensively. He was still firing at pins, though many--including CBS commentator Ken Venturi--thought he was crazy for doing so. The two times he played conservatively, he wound up losing three strokes to par, first when he bogeyed the 5th and again when he hooked it into the water at 11 and made double-bogey. At the 13th, he pushed his drive to the extreme right of the fairway, giving himself an awkward side-hill lie underneath a tree. Still smarting from the double-bogey at 11, Floyd needed a birdie to regain some momentum, and as he said later, "You don't make birdie laying up." He decided to gamble.
With the ball sitting above his feet and 215 yards to clear Rae's Creek, Floyd took aim for the bunker left of the green, gave a mighty swing with the 5-wood, and watched as it drew right-to-left toward his target and landed in the trap. "That was fine, that was part of my plan," he explained afterward in Butler Cabin, "but when the ball hit the sand, I was very surprised, because I thought I had hit it well enough to carry over that sand trap." From there, he blasted out to three feet and made the putt for birdie. "The second shot on 13," he told reporters in the press tent afterward, "that was my round." After the 5-wood set up another two-putt birdie at the 15th, Floyd punctuated his round with a 6-foot birdie at the 18th to finish with a 2-under-par 70. Then, carrying an eight-stroke lead over Jack Nicklaus into Sunday's final round, he put together another workman-like 70, besting runner-up Ben Crenshaw by eight shots to become only the fourth wire-to-wire winner in Masters history.
Fifty years later, only a handful of fans--primarily the guys playing the senior tees--talk about what a dominating performance Floyd put together in 1976. His four round total of 271 tied the tournament record set by Jack Nicklaus in 1965, and his margin of victory still stands as the third largest in Masters history. Not only did he match Nicklaus's 72-hole record (broken by Tiger Woods in 1997), he set the mark for lowest scores after 36 and 54 holes, which stood until Jordan Spieth surpassed him in 2015. He set the record for largest 54-hole lead, also broken by Woods in '97, and still shares the record for largest 36-hole lead with a group of golfers that includes Nicklaus, Spieth, and Scottie Scheffler. Don Boyd's 5-wood helped Floyd play the par-5s in 14-under-par that week, setting a standard that would remain on the books until Greg Norman went minus-15 in 1995. Always humble, Boyd took no credit for Floyd's performance. "The way Raymond was swinging," he told Golf Digest's John May, "he could have won with a set of two-by-fours."
The 1976 Masters was the only time Floyd used the club at Augusta. Later that year, he cracked it, and he donated it to Augusta National, where it is displayed in a trophy case in the men's grill room. Fortunately, Boyd liked what Floyd said about the club so much that he made him three more just like it for free. When Floyd returned to defend his title in 1977, he used one of the replacements, but when they lengthened the par-5s for the 1978 tournament, he was forced to transition to a 4-wood.
Floyd went on to win 15 more times on the PGA Tour, including two more majors: the 1982 PGA Championship and the 1986 U.S. Open. In a career defined by resilience and longevity, he collected 22 Tour victories, four major championships, and $17 million in career earnings. His competitive drive earned him the nickname "the Rainmaker," a testament to his ability to thrive under pressure, especially with money on the line. He is one of two men--Sam Snead is the other--to have won PGA tournaments in four consecutive decades and in 1992, became the only player to win tournaments on both the PGA and Champions Tours in the same year. For most any golfer, that is the dream.
But if we only measure success in wins and financial gains, we miss a bigger part of the story. Throughout his career, Floyd's efforts contributed to the commercial growth of golf by helping attract sponsorship, increasing television viewership, and making golf more accessible and appealing to a broader audience. As an international ambassador for the game, he competed in eight Ryder Cups and served as captain in 1989. He has authored instructional books, designed golf courses across the country, and helped bridge the era of the 1960s to the 1990s, mentoring younger tour players, including his sons Raymond Jr. and Robert, both of whom played professionally. In 1989, Floyd was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame, and in 1994, the Floyd family was honored as the PGA of America's Golf Family of the Year.
Likewise, Don Boyd lived a dream of his own, dedicating himself to the art of golf club repair for over 33 years, sharing the journey with the woman he loved until his retirement in 1991. Boyd welcomed everyone into his shop, from seasoned professionals to the rankest of amateurs. Whether he was re-shafting a club for a weekend warrior or crafting a wood for a touring pro, each job brought him equal satisfaction as he helped two generations of Floridians elevate their golf game. His partnership with Dottie flourished in business and in life, creating a bond that was as strong as the clubs he built, and their legacy lives on through the cherished memories the two created with their family.
Boyd’s son Scott, who went on to play collegiate golf at the University of South Florida, remembers going to work in his dad's shop when he was eight or nine years old. "I hated it at the time, but looking back on it, it was probably the greatest thing he ever did for me," Scott reflected. "He gave me a work ethic, I learned a lot about the game, and the guys I met were just amazing." Scott happily recalls the time he and Chi Chi Rodriguez made a doughnut run in his old '64 Falcon before a rare Sunday morning club repair session, and the time Lee Trevino took Dottie inside the ropes to walk a hole with him at the Doral Eastern Open. There was also a family trip to Scotland for the 1973 Open Championship at Royal Troon, and their 30-round U.K. golf marathon in the weeks that followed. Scott stuck with golf, and for a time after college served as a club pro at a course in Coral Springs, but when life got busy and his family started to grow, he decided to hang up his cleats.
Working with Don, Scott learned about more than just the technical aspects of making and repairing golf clubs. He developed appreciation for his dad’s love of the game and for his customers and their stories. For old school clubmakers like Don Boyd and David Bass, this is what fuels their passion for the craft. "It's the deep, personal stories behind the clubs," says Bass. "That's what gets me out of bed every morning." They are the stories that give the clubs lives of their own, a sentiment that resonates powerfully at Augusta National, where past and present converge to preserve the rich traditions of a game that we love as it continuously evolves.
While there is no official museum at Augusta National, its clubhouse serves as a shrine to the visionaries who founded the club and the glory of past Masters champions. Within its walls lie a treasure trove of golf history, including "Calamity Jane," the putter Bobby Jones used during his Grand Slam in 1930 and the 4-wood Gene Sarazen used to make his historic double-eagle in 1935. Modern artifacts include Tiger Woods's driver from 1997, Jordan Spieth's pitching wedge from 2015, and the wedge that Larry Mize used to break Greg Norman's heart in 1987. Among the collection, a persimmon 5-wood rests unassumingly, commemorating the golden anniversary of its lone Masters appearance. This "old man's club," made by a former fishing boat captain from Hollywood, Florida, was used by a former Army brat from Fayetteville, North Carolina, to win one of the most prestigious titles in all of golf. It remains as a shared legacy between the two men, both of whom were masters of their trade. "The 5-wood was certainly part of, if not THE reason, for the onslaught on the par-5s," Floyd said after being fitted for his Green Jacket in 1976. "It was one of those weeks that obviously don't come around very often in a career."
Indeed, they don't.
