Six black boys, especially recruited from The Terry, the poorest neighbourhood in Augusta, climbed through the ropes with boxing gloves on their hands. Each one was then blindfolded before the bell rang to signal it was time for them to start flailing wildly at each other. As the wealthy white men whooped and hollered and gambled on who might be the last boxer standing, the combatants fell and faltered around the ring, chasing shadows. Sometimes, the participants would have one hand tied behind their backs in order to prevent them from defending their faces from punches. A little touch to enhance the spectacle.

"I'd be out there stumbling around, swinging wild and hearing people laughing, " wrote one of the kids. "I didn't know I was being exploited. All I knew is I was getting paid a dollar and having fun."

The author of that quote was James Brown, just one of the dozens of Augustan children who turned a buck for the amusement of the (mostly) Northern gentlemen who came south every Spring to play golf in Bobby Jones's new club up on the hill.

The only difference was that Brown went on to greater things than most of them, and his demeaning experience at the hands of the men who made The Masters merited a footnote in his autobiography.

"They hit air, ring ropes, ring posts and each other, " wrote Curt Sampson in a more lengthy dissertation on battle royals in his seminal book 'The Masters;

Golf, Money and Power in Augusta, Georgia. "Last one standing winsfThe white men laugh and gamble and watch the black boys blindly beat the shit out of each otherfThe private exhibitions indicated the taste some of the early members had for raising hell at night after a day of golf. Most of them were far from home, unencumbered by spouses, in an unfamiliar, almost exotic locale.

Picture college boys on spring break, but with more worldly tastes and a whole lot more money."

Apart from thieving Augusta of its second most famous product, Brown's death on Christmas Day offered a revealing glimpse of the town's shameful past and troubled present, a view at odds with the idyll foisted upon us by the golf world every April.

Forty-two years after his performance at the Bell Auditorium integrated that venue for the first time, this is a small city so divided along racial lines that the local paper recently ran a 14-month series about racism that asked a lot more questions of residents than it answered.

Brown belonged to the dilapidated downtown, the part of Augusta that never seems to feature on the television broadcasts in which commentators lose the run of themselves, gushing about blushing azaleas and, holiest of holies, Amen Corner.

Far removed from the one that abuts Rae's Creek, the corners Brown knew best were down on Twiggs Street where he worked as a hustler for his aunt, Handsome Honey Washington, or at the junction of Broad and Ninth where he once ran a shoeshine stand.

Following the end of his parents' marriage, he had moved to Augusta at the age of four and before he was even a teenager, his main job was persuading passing men that his aunt's brothel contained the finest women and the best illegal hooch in town. When he deviated into even more illegal behaviour, he ended up in jail and was, for a time, banned from even setting foot in his old neighbourhood.

In a town where "The Terry" was shorthand for Negro Territory, the Augusta of Brown's childhood was a place in which the Ku Klux Klan used to regularly march through the streets to remind one half of the population of their existence.

Lately, the KKK emerged again as a counter-protest to the ill-fated 2003 attempt to embarrass Augusta National about its exclusion of women members. In all the brouhaha about the lack of a distaff membership at that year's Masters, the fact an estimated seven African-Americans . . . none of whom are locals - belong to a club situated in a town containing over 100,000 black people continues to be ignored.

Brown finally got his due from the town to which he had returned in recent years to run radio stations and other businesses.

They christened a street in his honour, built a statue (not too far from the larger monument remembering the Confederate dead), and even introduced an annual music festival bearing his name.

For all that, his body was brought back for his funeral yesterday to a rather strange and divided city. An estimated twenty per cent of the residents live in the sort of poverty that pockmarked Brown's own childhood yet the golf club on Washington Road boasts a membership roll containing 300 of the richest men in America. At least they don't have battle royals anymore.