Lanny Wiles Still Hasn't Played Augusta National

What’s A Guy Gotta Do To Play A Round At The Fabled Course? For President Ronald Reagan’s Advance Man, Not Even Being Taken Hostage By A Gunman In The Pro Shop Can Secure A Tee Time.

- Adam Schupak

During the 2015 Masters Tournament, Lanny Wiles did what any other visitor to Augusta National Golf Club would try to do:buy himself a souvenir to commemorate his trip to a place most golfers spend a lifetime vainly dreaming of going. Wiles, hoping to avoid the crowds at the merchandise pavilion, approached the pro shop near the clubhouse. A bored security guard at the shop’s entrance stopped him and asked to see his patron’s badge—the coveted token that would ensure his entry.

“Sorry, I don’t have one,” Wiles told the guard.

“Then you can’t go in,” the guard replied, probably for the hundredth time during his shift.

Unlike many of the other visitors to Augusta National that day, however, Wiles had been in this particular pro shop once before. In October 1983, he took time off from his job running a Jacksonville Bojangles’ franchise to help his former boss, President Ronald Reagan. The Old Man, as Wiles still calls him, was headed to Augusta to play a round of golf with a Republican donor and members of his cabinet. Wiles, a Republican political operative who had worked for Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign handling the balloon drop at rallies, was serving as advance man for Reagan’s entourage, which had set up shop at the Eisenhower Cabin. For his loyalty and hard work, Wiles was promised a round on the famed course, playing in a foursome just ahead of Reagan’s.

Wiles never got his reward. Instead of playing his way through Tea Olive and Flowering Peach and eventually around Amen Corner, Wiles found himself in the pro shop, a Smith & Wesson .38 pointed squarely between his eyes by an unemployed millwright wearing a baseball cap embroidered with the words “Heaven is a Lot Like Dixie,” and smelling a lot like vodka.