Augusta National Golf Club: The Full History and What Actually Makes It Different

Augusta National Golf Club hosts one tournament a year and is closed to everyone else the rest of the time. That single fact explains most of what follows. The club has roughly 300 members whose names it does not publish, a course that shuts down for the Georgia summer, a television partner operating on a handshake renewed annually, and a sandwich that has cost $1.50 since 2002. It is the most watched piece of ground in golf and one of the least understood.

This is the history of the place and the institution built on it: how it was founded, how it nearly failed, where the traditions came from, and the parts of the record the club spent decades not discussing.

Before the Golf Course: Fruitland Nurseries

The land was a working plant nursery for roughly seventy years before anyone hit a golf ball on it. In 1854 Dennis Redmond bought a tract on the western edge of Augusta, Georgia, built a manor house, and called it Fruitland. The property is commonly described as having been an indigo plantation before that.

In 1857 a Belgian aristocrat, Louis Mathieu Edouard Berckmans, bought in, and his son Prosper took full ownership shortly after. They built Fruitland Nurseries into one of the first major commercial nurseries in the American South, shipping fruit trees, grape vines, and ornamentals by catalog, and propagating the azaleas and magnolias that now define how the property looks on television every April.

Two features survive intact. Magnolia Lane is the entrance drive lined with magnolias the Berckmans planted. The plant collection is why every hole carries the name of a plant: Tea Olive, Pink Dogwood, Golden Bell, Firethorn, Nandina. The nursery wound down after Prosper Berckmans died in 1910, and by 1930 the land was available.

Bobby Jones, Clifford Roberts, and a Club Founded at the Worst Possible Moment

Bobby Jones retired from competitive golf in 1930, at 28, immediately after winning the U.S. Open, the U.S. Amateur, the Open Championship, and the British Amateur in the same calendar year. That Grand Slam has never been repeated and cannot be in the same form, since two of the four are now amateur events the best players alive no longer enter.

Jones wanted a private retreat where he could play without a gallery, on a course built to his ideas about strategy. His partner was Clifford Roberts, a New York investment man and the more consequential figure in the club's actual operation. An Augusta businessman, Thomas Barrett Jr., pointed them toward the old Fruitland property. Jones later described walking it and recognizing that the course was already there in outline.

They acquired the 365-acre property in 1931 for a reported $70,000. The timing was terrible. The country was two years into the Depression, and the plan required a national membership of wealthy men willing to travel to Georgia in winter. Roberts set a target of 1,800 members and chased it with tens of thousands of solicitations, traveling salesmen, and purchased membership lists from other clubs. After three years, Augusta National had 76 members.

The club was chronically short of money through the 1930s. It did not pay its architect in full, and it raised cattle and turkeys on the grounds during World War II, when the course closed in late 1942 and the tournament was suspended through 1945. That it now reads as the embodiment of unlimited resources is a function of the last fifty years.

Roberts ran the club as chairman from 1931 to 1976 and the tournament from 1934 through 1976. By every account, including sympathetic ones, he was autocratic and unwilling to delegate. He standardized nearly everything patrons now associate with the Masters: the scoreboards, the pairing sheets, the bleachers, the vocabulary. On September 29, 1977, in failing health after a stroke and a cancer diagnosis, Roberts died by suicide on the club grounds near Ike's Pond.

MacKenzie's Design and the 1933 Opening

Jones hired Alister MacKenzie, a physician by training, born in England to Scottish parents, whose work at Cypress Point and Royal Melbourne Jones admired above anyone else's. The two agreed on principles that were contrarian in American golf at the time: wide fairways, very little rough, few bunkers, enormous contoured greens, and difficulty concentrated at the hole rather than off the tee. The goal was a course an average member could get around without losing a ball and that the best players alive could not overpower.

MacKenzie routed it across the property's natural fall, which drops from the clubhouse ridge to the low ground along Rae's Creek and climbs back. Construction ran through 1932 and the course opened in January 1933. MacKenzie never saw a tournament played on it. He died of heart failure on January 6, 1934, in Santa Cruz, California, roughly two months before the first Masters, and he never received his full fee. His contract called for $10,000; the club was broke and paid only part. In his last months he was writing to Augusta asking whether they might send something toward the balance. He died with the debt outstanding.

The Tournament That Became the Masters

The original plan was to bring the U.S. Open to Augusta. The USGA declined, largely because the Open was a summer championship and Augusta in July is unplayable. So Jones and Roberts invented their own event, a March invitational, and Jones came out of retirement to play in it. The first tournament ran March 22 to 25, 1934, as the Augusta National Invitation Tournament. Horton Smith won. Jones tied for 13th, which settled whether he could still compete.

Roberts wanted to call it the Masters from the start, as a reference to the masters of the game invited to play. Jones objected that it was immodest: he was the public face of the event and did not want anyone thinking he had named a tournament in his own honor. He won that argument for five years. The press used "the Masters" anyway, and the club adopted it officially in 1939.

In 1935 the nines were reversed, so the holes originally played as the back nine became the front. The usual explanation is that the low ground held frost later into the morning and delayed play. The added benefit, which Jones recognized, was that the swap moved the water holes and the reachable par 5s into the closing stretch. Every dramatic Masters finish since exists because of it.

In that same 1935 tournament, Gene Sarazen holed a 4-wood from roughly 235 yards for a double eagle 2 on the par-5 15th, erasing a three-shot deficit in one swing and forcing a 36-hole playoff he won by five. Christened the shot heard round the world, it gave a two-year-old tournament at a nearly bankrupt club the one thing it could not buy: a legend.

How the Course Has Changed

The MacKenzie routing is intact. Almost nothing else is. Modifications have been continuous, and they accelerated sharply after Tiger Woods won the 1997 Masters by twelve shots.

In 1999 the club introduced what it calls the second cut, a narrow band of longer grass along the fairways. Purists noted that this was rough, that MacKenzie had deliberately built none, and that calling it something else did not change what it was. In 2002, the year after the solid-core ball reached the tournament, Tom Fazio directed the largest single change of the modern era: nine new tees adding about 285 yards, with the 11th stretched to 490. More back tees followed, and by 2006 the card had reached roughly 7,435 yards. The 2026 scorecard listed 7,565 yards, par 72.

The other change is harder to see on television and matters more. The club planted trees heavily, along the 11th and 15th in particular, narrowing corridors MacKenzie had deliberately left open. A course designed around width and angles has been converted into one that also demands accuracy. Whether that is preservation or contradiction is the most legitimate architectural argument in golf.

Some things the club could not control. The Eisenhower Tree, a loblolly pine on the left of the 17th fairway that President Dwight Eisenhower hit so often he formally asked Roberts to cut it down, was removed in February 2014 after ice storm damage. Eisenhower was a member from 1948 to 1969 and kept a cabin on the property. He lost that argument while sitting President of the United States.

Amen Corner and Where the Name Came From

Amen Corner is not a club term. Herbert Warren Wind coined it in a Sports Illustrated article dated April 21, 1958, covering Arnold Palmer's first Masters win over Ken Venturi. Wind later explained that the only phrase he could think of containing the word "corner" came from a jazz record he had heard as a student at Yale, "Shoutin' in that Amen Corner," written by Andy Razaf. It stuck so completely that most people assume it dates to the 1930s.

Wind's definition was narrower than the one in common use. He meant the second shot at the 11th, all of the 12th, and the tee shot at the 13th, the portion of those holes sitting in the low ground along Rae's Creek. It is where the tournament is most often decided, and where the wind behaves least predictably, because the trees and the creek bottom create a swirl that cannot be read from the tee.

The Traditions and Where They Actually Came From

The Green Jacket

The jacket predates the champions. Members began wearing green jackets in 1937 for a practical reason: so patrons who needed help could identify a member at a glance. It was a uniform, not an honor. In 1949 the club presented one to Sam Snead after his win, making him the first champion to receive a jacket, then issued jackets retroactively to every previous winner.

The rules now are strict and genuinely enforced. The champion may take his jacket home for one year. At the following Masters he returns it, and from then on it lives at the club, available whenever he visits. It is not supposed to leave the property.

The story most often told about the exception involves Gary Player, who won in 1961, flew home to South Africa with the jacket, and did not send it back. As the story goes, Roberts telephoned to ask for it, Player suggested he come to Johannesburg and get it himself, and they settled on an arrangement under which Player kept it provided he did not wear it in public. Player has told versions of this himself, and the details shift in the telling.

The Champions Dinner

Held on the Tuesday of Masters week, the Champions Dinner was Ben Hogan's idea. The first was on April 4, 1952, after Hogan proposed a private club consisting only of Masters winners. Formally the Masters Club, it is attended only by past champions and a few club officials.

The custom most people know, in which the defending champion selects the menu and pays, developed over time. There is no reliable record of what was served in 1952, and the practice of the host choosing a personal menu is generally traced to Bernhard Langer in 1986.

The Honorary Starters

The ceremonial opening tee shot began in 1963 with two Scottish-born professionals, Jock Hutchison and Fred McLeod, neither of whom won a Masters. Hutchison continued through 1973 and McLeod through 1976, then the custom lapsed. It resumed in 1981 with Gene Sarazen and Byron Nelson. Sam Snead joined in 1984, and that trio opened the tournament through 1999, the year Sarazen died. Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Gary Player, Lee Elder, and Tom Watson have served since.

The Par 3 Contest

Played Wednesday over the nine-hole par-3 course that opened in 1958 (the contest itself began in 1960), this is the one genuinely informal thing that happens at Augusta National. Players use their children and grandchildren as caddies. No player has ever won the Par 3 Contest and the Masters in the same year. That streak is real, and players joke about it openly, though whether anyone plays badly on purpose is not something anyone can prove.

The Vocabulary

Roberts imposed a house language the club still enforces. Spectators are patrons, not fans. The longer grass is the second cut, not rough. Controlling the words is part of controlling the presentation.

Race and Gender: The Record

Augusta National was founded in 1931 in Georgia and operated for decades under the conventions of the segregated South. The specifics matter more than the generalization.

From the first tournament in 1934, players in the Masters were required to use Augusta National's own caddies, and the club's caddie corps was entirely Black. That was the arrangement for nearly fifty years. Chairman Hord Hardin lifted the rule by press release in November 1982, effective for the 1983 tournament, and 63 of the 81 players in that field brought their own caddies. The last club caddie to carry for a winner was Carl Jackson, who worked for Ben Crenshaw in 1984 and 1995.

Clifford Roberts is frequently quoted as saying that as long as he was alive, the golfers would be white and the caddies would be Black. That quote has never been traced to a verifiable source. It appears in secondhand accounts, including from Charlie Sifford, who believed Roberts said it, but no documented instance of him saying it in public or in writing has surfaced. The club's policies under Roberts are documented and not in dispute. The specific quote is. Sifford, who broke the PGA of America's Caucasian-only clause, was never invited to the Masters.

Lee Elder became the first Black player in the Masters field in April 1975, forty-one years after the first tournament. He earned the invitation by winning the 1974 Monsanto Open, which under the criteria of the time guaranteed a spot. He received death threats beforehand and rented two houses in Augusta that week, moving between them. He missed the cut.

The membership question came to a head in 1990, and not because of Augusta. That June, Hall Thompson, founder of Shoal Creek in Birmingham, Alabama, host of that year's PGA Championship, said publicly that his club did not admit Black members and did not intend to. Sponsors withdrew advertising, civil rights groups planned demonstrations, and Shoal Creek admitted a Black member before the tournament. The PGA Tour, the PGA of America, and the USGA then adopted policies against holding championships at clubs with discriminatory membership practices.

In September 1990, Augusta National admitted Ron Townsend, a television executive who headed Gannett's broadcasting division, as its first Black member. Hord Hardin said Augusta had been searching for a Black member for the previous year. Townsend said Shoal Creek may have accelerated the timing but was not the cause. Both can be true. Tiger Woods won the Masters in 1997 by twelve strokes, the largest margin in tournament history, twenty-two years after Elder first played it.

On gender, the club had no women members for its first eighty years. In 2002 Martha Burk, chair of the National Council of Women's Organizations, wrote to chairman Hootie Johnson asking that Augusta admit a woman before the next Masters. Johnson's public response included the line that the club would not be pressured to change "at the point of a bayonet." Rather than expose its television sponsors to a boycott campaign, Augusta released them from their commitments and ran the 2003 and 2004 broadcasts without commercials. Burk's protest outside the gates in 2003 drew a few dozen people.

In August 2012, chairman Billy Payne announced that Condoleezza Rice and Darla Moore had accepted invitations to become the club's first women members. Virginia Rometty, then IBM's chief executive, became the third in 2014. IBM had sponsored the Masters for years while its previous four chief executives, all men, held memberships.

Since then the club has funded work in both directions. It launched the Augusta National Women's Amateur in 2019, with the final round played on the course and televised nationally; Jennifer Kupcho won it. It has hosted the Drive, Chip and Putt National Finals for juniors since 2014. And in 2021, when it named Lee Elder an honorary starter, it endowed scholarships in his name at Paine College, a historically Black institution in Augusta, and funded a women's golf program there. Elder was too frail to hit a shot that morning. He died that November.

What Actually Makes the Institution Different

It controls its own broadcast, and it pays for the privilege. CBS has carried the Masters since 1956 under an agreement renewed one year at a time, with no long-term contract. The club charges CBS no rights fee and charges ESPN nothing for Thursday and Friday coverage; industry estimates put the money forgone at well over $100 million a year. In exchange, the club sets the terms. Commercial time is capped at roughly four minutes per hour, a fraction of a normal sports telecast. Augusta approves the announcers and has removed them: Jack Whitaker in 1966 for describing the crowd at the 18th green as a mob, and Gary McCord in 1994 for saying the greens looked bikini waxed. CBS produces the tournament under the club's editorial direction. In 2026 it added coverage on Amazon Prime Video without loosening control.

It refuses to price at what the market will bear. The pimento cheese and egg salad sandwiches have cost $1.50 since 2002. Sandwiches run $1.50 to $3 across the menu, and beer and wine cost $6. For 2026, cookies rose to $2 and blueberry muffins to $2.50, and those increases were reported as news, which tells you how rare they are. Adjusted for inflation, food at the Masters is cheaper now than it was in 1934. It signals that the club is not trying to extract maximum revenue from people on the grounds, and it buys goodwill no advertising campaign could.

It enforces patron behavior absolutely. No mobile phones on the grounds during tournament week, at all, for anyone. Enforcement means ejection and permanent revocation of the badge, which for a Series Badge holder cannot be replaced at any price. No running. Badges may not be resold for profit, and the club investigates and revokes when it finds them on secondary markets. The result is the only major American sporting event where nobody watches through a phone screen.

It discloses essentially nothing. Augusta National does not publish its membership roster, its financials, its initiation fee, or its dues. Membership runs about 300 and is entirely by invitation, with no application process. Reported cost estimates contradict each other, ranging from tens of thousands to several hundred thousand for initiation, and none are confirmed. Even the calendar is a form of privacy: the club closes for the Georgia summer, so for nearly half the year there is nothing to observe.

How a Normal Person Can Actually Attend

The lottery. This is the honest answer. Anyone can create a free account at masters.com and apply during the annual window, typically about three weeks in June for the following April's tournament. Applications for the 2027 Masters were open June 1 to June 20, 2026. Practice rounds are Monday through Wednesday, with up to four tickets per day; tournament days are Thursday through Sunday, limited to two. Selection is random. Recent face prices have run around $100 per practice day and $140 per tournament day, with an increase announced for 2026.

The club does not publish selection rates. Outside estimates put the odds of drawing a tournament day well under one percent, with one widely cited figure around 0.5 percent. Practice days, particularly Monday, are meaningfully easier to draw than Sunday. There is no cost to enter, and people who eventually get in are the ones who apply every single year. Treat it as a multi-year proposition, not a plan for next April.

The Augusta National Women's Amateur final round. This is the underused answer. The ANWA final is played at Augusta National on the Saturday before Masters week, and the club has distributed tickets to it free through an online request process. Demand is a small fraction of the Masters lottery, and you walk the same property.

Series Badges. These are the lifetime passes covering all four tournament days, held in many cases by the same families for generations. The 2026 price was $375 for the week, less than a single day's value on the open market. They transfer only to a surviving spouse. The waiting list closed in 1978, briefly reopened, and closed again in 2000.

Everything else is the secondary market: hospitality packages, corporate allocations, brokers. These run into four and five figures per day and carry real risk, because the club works to identify and cancel badges resold for profit.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Can the public play Augusta National?

No. There is no public play, no guest tee times, and no charity outing that gets you on. Play requires membership or an invitation from a member, and members are expected to accompany their guests. The only way onto the grounds is as a ticketed spectator.

How do you become a member of Augusta National?

You do not apply. There is no application, no waiting list, and no published criteria. Membership is extended by invitation at the club's discretion, and members are told not to campaign on anyone's behalf. The roster runs around 300 and is not published. Reported figures for initiation and dues vary enormously and none are confirmed.

What are the actual odds of winning the Masters ticket lottery?

The club does not release selection rates. Commonly cited outside estimates put a tournament day at roughly half a percent, with practice rounds better. Entry is free, so apply every year during the June window, request practice days as well as tournament days, and treat it as a long-term entry.

Does the Masters champion keep the green jacket?

For one year. The winner takes it home, wears it for twelve months, and returns it at the next Masters, after which it stays at the club and is available whenever he visits. Members have worn green jackets since 1937. Sam Snead in 1949 was the first champion presented with one.

Why is it called the Masters?

Clifford Roberts pushed for the name from the start, as a reference to the masters of the game invited to play. Bobby Jones thought it immodest and blocked it, so the event was officially the Augusta National Invitation Tournament from 1934 through 1938. Sportswriters used the Masters anyway, and the club made it official in 1939.

When did Augusta National admit its first Black member and its first women members?

Ron Townsend, a Gannett television executive, became the first Black member in September 1990, two months after the Shoal Creek controversy prompted golf's governing bodies to bar championships at clubs with discriminatory membership policies. Condoleezza Rice and Darla Moore became the first women members in August 2012. Lee Elder had been the first Black player in the field in 1975.

Where does the name Amen Corner come from?

Herbert Warren Wind coined it in Sports Illustrated on April 21, 1958, covering Arnold Palmer's win, taking the phrase from a jazz record, "Shoutin' in that Amen Corner." His original definition covered the second shot at the 11th, all of the 12th, and the tee shot at the 13th. It is now used for all three holes in full.

Is Augusta National open all year?

No. The club closes for the Georgia summer, generally late May until October, for course maintenance and to escape the heat. Members play roughly October through May. That closure is part of why so little about the club leaks.