Augusta National Golf Club
Designed by Alister MacKenzie
History
The land had once grown peaches and indigo, a nursery tract called Fruitland that Bobby Jones and his partner Clifford Roberts came upon in the early 1930s while searching for ground on which to build a club unlike any other in the American South. Jones, freshly retired from competitive golf after completing the Grand Slam in 1930, wanted a retreat where he and a small circle of friends could play the game for its own sake, away from galleries and obligation. Augusta, with its mild winters and rail access from the Northeast, suited the purpose. The club opened for play in 1933, incorporated the following winter, and from the start operated as a private membership club rather than a public or resort concern.
Jones brought in Alister MacKenzie, the Scottish-born architect whose work at Cypress Point and Royal Melbourne had already marked him as a designer of unusual imagination, to lay out the course. MacKenzie walked the old nursery’s rolling hills and pine corridors and shaped a design that leaned on wide fairways and large, contoured greens rather than the punishing rough and narrow lines then common in American course design — an approach Jones himself favored, having found in MacKenzie a kindred belief that golf should reward thought over brute force. MacKenzie did not live to see the club reach maturity; he died in January 1934, months before the first Augusta National Invitation Tournament was played that April, an event later renamed the Masters.
The course has been altered steadily since, though always under the stewardship of the club rather than outside developers. Perry Maxwell reworked several greens in the late 1930s, and in the decades that followed, architects and consultants including Robert Trent Jones, George Cobb, Jack Nicklaus, and Tom Fazio each left a hand on the grounds, lengthening holes and adjusting bunkering as equipment and the professional game changed. Roberts, who oversaw the club with exacting control until his death in 1977, and the chairmen who followed him treated the course as a living document, revised nearly every year in advance of the Masters, which has been played there annually since 1934 apart from a wartime pause between 1943 and 1945.
Playing Notes
Expect a walk, not a cart ride — this is a walking course through and through, and the hills will test your legs more than you'd guess from watching it on television. The greens are the real story here: they run fast and break in ways that seem to defy the slope you can see, so lag putting matters more than your birdie chances on approach. Pine straw lines nearly every hole, and the trees funnel tee shots into corridors that punish anything sprayed off-line, meaning club selection off the tee matters as much as raw distance. Elevation change is constant — uphill approaches play longer than the yardage suggests, downhill ones shorter, and you'll want to trust a caddie's read over your own eyes more than once. Water comes into play at a handful of holes but announces itself clearly; the bigger threat is short-siding yourself around greens that slope away from most pin positions, leaving little margin for recovery. Bring your best speed control and patience — this is a course where the sticks in your bag matter less than your ability to read grain and gravity on the greens.