Augusta National was more than a golf club for Eisenhower -- it was a second White House. He visited so frequently during his presidency that the club built a cabin for him on the grounds. The relationship between the president and the club ran deep enough that, in November 1952, when President-elect Eisenhower needed to be briefed on the most sensitive information in the American arsenal -- including confirmation that the first successful hydrogen bomb test, Ivy Mike, had been detonated -- the meeting took place not at the Pentagon or the Oval Office, but in the manager's office at Augusta National. The world's most consequential secrets were discussed within earshot of the putting green. Against that backdrop, a president's frustration with a single pine tree on the 17th fairway seems almost endearing.

The tree did not just frustrate Eisenhower. It shaped the Masters Tournament for decades. Tommy Aaron once hit his tee shot on 17 directly into the pine's thick canopy, where the ball vanished. Officials gave him a drop. The next day, playing the same hole, Aaron watched in disbelief as a ball dropped from the branches -- presumably his from the day before, finally dislodged by wind or gravity. Jack Nicklaus offered dry commentary: "I'm not sure I believe it." In 2011, the tree claimed a more serious victim when Tiger Woods, playing a shot from beneath its branches, slipped on pine straw and damaged his left knee and Achilles tendon. The injuries kept him out of competition until August 2011 and sent his world ranking plummeting from the top ten to 58th. The tree was impartial in its mischief -- presidents and world number ones alike fell under its spell.

On February 16, 2014, Winter Storm Pax draped the Georgia Piedmont in ice. The loblolly pine that had stood sentinel on the 17th fairway for well over a century -- some estimates placed it at nearly 125 years old -- could not bear the weight. The ice storm caused catastrophic damage to the tree, and Augusta National announced its removal the following day. The golf world mourned. Jack Nicklaus called the Eisenhower Tree "such an iconic fixture and symbol of tradition at Augusta National" and said it would be "sorely missed." A remnant of the tree was donated to the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas, where it sits on display, a piece of sporting history preserved alongside the artifacts of a presidency.

The story might have ended with an ice storm in Georgia, but the Eisenhower name carried its own kind of rootstock. At Dalmeny Golf Club near Edinburgh, Scotland, another tree bears the president's name -- an oak planted by Eisenhower himself during a 1946 visit to receive the freedom of the city. When news of the Augusta tree's death reached Scotland, Dalmeny offered to send an acorn from their Eisenhower oak to Augusta National, so that a new tree might grow on Georgia soil from the legacy of the old president's own planting. The gesture connected two golf courses across an ocean, both marked by a man who commanded armies and lost battles with trees. The 17th fairway at Augusta National looks different now, its strategic character altered forever, but the story of the tree that defied a president endures in the fabric of the game.