Augusta National Golf Club
Augusta National Golf Club, sometimes referred to as Augusta National, Augusta, or the National, is a golf club in Augusta, Georgia, United States. It is known for hosting the annual Masters Tournament.
Founded by Bobby Jones and Clifford Roberts, the course was designed by Jones and Alister MacKenzie and opened for play in 1932. Unlike most private clubs which operate as non-profits, Augusta National is a for-profit corporation, and it does not disclose its income, holdings, membership list, or ticket sales.
Since 1934, the club has played host to the Masters Tournament, one of the four men's major championships in professional golf, and the only major played each year at the same course. It was the top-ranked course in Golf Digests 2009 list of America's 100 greatest courses and was the number ten-ranked course based on course architecture on Golfweek Magazines 2011 list of best classic courses in the United States.
In 2019, the course began co-hosting the Augusta National Women's Amateur with Champions Retreat Golf Club.
History
Augusta National was founded in 1932 by Bobby Jones and Clifford Roberts on the 365-acre site of a former nursery/antebellum plantation called Fruitland. Jones sought to create a world-class winter golf course in his native state of Georgia. During the first decade of the club's existence, membership was low and finances were short due to the Great Depression and the relatively remote location of Augusta, forcing the duo to scrap future plans for a "ladies' course", squash and tennis courts, and various estates.Its first club professional was Ed Dudley, who served in the role until 1957; Dudley was one of the top tournament professionals of his era, with 15 wins on the PGA Tour.
The Masters was first held in 1934 in an attempt to attract crowds and players. Roberts persuaded Jones, then retired, to return to play in the tournament. Jones was initially against the name Masters.
In 1948, Dwight D. Eisenhower and his wife Mamie were personally invited to Augusta by Roberts. Eisenhower took a liking to the club, becoming a member, and hired Roberts as his executor and financial advisor; Roberts had a house constructed for Eisenhower on the grounds. During his presidency, Eisenhower visited Augusta National 29 times.
Facilities and grounds
Augusta is renowned for its well-maintained impeccable appearance: pine needles are imported, bird sounds are played on inconspicuous speakers, and even the ponds were once dyed blue. The club is famed for its azaleas and dogwoods.Rules and policies imposed on employees, club members, and visitors are notoriously strict. No cell phones or other electronic devices are permitted ; no running or loud talking is allowed; and spectators are not allowed to cheer when a player makes a mistake. Security guards enforce these rules, and are traditionally provided by Pinkerton. Rule-breakers are permanently banned, if not prosecuted when possible.
Other notable facilities include Butler Cabin, near hole 18, where tournament winners are presented with a green jacket; the clubhouse, near hole 1, which dates to the 1850s and has a well-stocked wine cellar; and a practice range. Three large cabins on the property are reserved for tournament sponsors—as of 2020, Mercedes-Benz, IBM, and AT&T.
The club's on-site press building has television studios, a complimentary restaurant and snack options, staffed bathrooms, and leather chairs. Cameras placed throughout the course are directly connected to the press building's studios via underground cables.
Berckmans Place
Berckmans Place, sometimes called Berckmans or BP, is a 90,000-sq.-ft. non-public shopping and dining complex built in 2012. It operates for one week each year, during the Masters. Entry passes for the week cost $10,000 are sold only to corporations, and require Augusta National's approval; there is a 10-ticket limit per pass. As in the rest of the club, neither cell phones nor photography are allowed. The price includes free dining at Berckmans' five full-service restaurants, each of which can seat hundreds of guests: Augusta's Seafood, Calamity Jane's, Ike's Place, MacKenzie's Pub, and the Pavilion. Bathroom stalls are attended and cleaned after each use. There is a pro shop and four putting greens dubbed the "Putting Experience": three slightly smaller replicas of holes 7, 14, and 16; and a "composite course". BP customers can use an exclusive parking lot and entryway. The complex is located near hole 5.Berckmans Place is named after Belgian Louis Mathieu Berckmans, whose family owned the land the club is built on from 1858 to 1910.
Course
The course was formerly a plant nursery, and each hole on the course is named after the tree or shrub with which it has become associated. Several of the holes on the first nine have been renamed, as well as hole #11.Lengths of the course for the Masters at the start of each decade:
Unlike most other private or public golf courses in the United States, Augusta National has never been rated. During the 1990 Masters Tournament, a team of USGA raters, organized by Golf Digest, evaluated the course and gave it an unofficial rating of 76.2. It was re-evaluated in 2009 and given an unofficial rating of 78.1.
The course's greens are meticulously maintained to provide a fast and hard golfing surface. This firmness is assisted by an underground irrigation and ventilation system known as the SubAir System, developed and installed in 1994 by course superintendent Marsh Benson. SubAir soon evolved into its own company in nearby Graniteville, South Carolina, designing and installing similar automatic water suction systems in venues such as Pebble Beach, East Lake, Citi Field, and Citizens Bank Park.
The bunkers are filled not with traditional sand but with granulated quartz which is produced as a byproduct during work at feldspar mines in the Spruce Pine Mining District in and around Spruce Pine, North Carolina. Augusta has been using Spruce Pine sand to fill its bunkers since the early 1970s, when Clifford Roberts visited Linville Golf Club in Linville, North Carolina, which used the material. Since the mining company providing the sand refused payment, in exchange Roberts offered to host the company owner at Augusta at any time, and later gifted him six Masters passes.
The golf course architecture website GolfClubAtlas.com has said, "Augusta National has gone through more changes since its inception than any of the world's twenty or so greatest courses. To call it a MacKenzie course is false advertising as his features are essentially long gone and his routing is all that is left." The authors of the site also add that MacKenzie and Jones were heavily influenced by the Old Course at St Andrews, and intended that the ground game be central to the course. Almost from Augusta's opening, Roberts sought to make changes to minimize the ground game, and effectively got free rein to do so because MacKenzie died shortly after the course's opening and Jones went into inactivity due to World War II and then a crippling illness. The authors add that "ith the ground game gone, the course was especially vulnerable to changes in technology, and this brought on a slew of changes from at least 15 different 'architects'." Golf Course Histories has an aerial comparison of the course's architectural changes between 1938 and 2013.
Among the changes to the course were several made by architect Perry Maxwell in 1937, including an alteration involving the current 10th hole. When Augusta National originally opened for play in January 1933, the opening hole was a relatively benign par 4 that played just in excess of 400 yards. From an elevated tee, the hole required little more than a short iron or wedge for the approach. Maxwell moved the green in 1937 to its present location—on top of the hill, about 50 yards back from the old site—and transformed it into the toughest hole in Masters Tournament history. Ben Crenshaw referred to Maxwell's work on the 10th hole as "one of the great strokes in golf architecture".
For the 1999 tournament, a short rough was instated around the fairways. Referred to as the "second cut", it is substantially shorter than the comparable primary rough at other courses, with an average length of. It is meant to reduce a player's ability to control the ball coming out of this lie, and encourage better accuracy for driving onto the fairway.
Amen Corner
The second shot at the 11th, all of the 12th, and the first two shots at the 13th hole at Augusta are nicknamed "Amen Corner". This term was first used in print by author Herbert Warren Wind in his April 21, 1958, Sports Illustrated article about the Masters that year. In a Golf Digest article in April 1984, 26 years later, Wind told about its origin. He said he wanted a catchy phrase like baseball's "hot-corner" or American football's "coffin-corner" to explain where some of the most exciting golf had taken place. Thus "Amen Corner" was born. He said it came from the title of a jazz record he had heard in the mid-1930s by a group led by Chicago's Mezz Mezzrow, Shouting in that Amen Corner.In a Golf Digest article in April 2008, writer Bill Fields offered new information about the origin of the name. He wrote that Richard Moore, a golf and jazz historian from South Carolina, tried to purchase a copy of the old Mezzrow 78 RPM disc for an "Amen Corner" exhibit he was putting together for his Golf Museum at Ahmic Lake, Ontario. After extensive research, Moore found that the record never existed. As Moore put it, Wind, himself a jazz buff, must have "unfortunately bogeyed his mind, 26 years later". While at Yale, he was no doubt familiar with, and meant all along, the popular version of the song, which was recorded by the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra, vocal by Mildred Bailey in 1935. Moore told Fields that, being a great admirer of Wind's work over the years, he was reluctant, for months, to come forth with his discovery that contradicted Wind's memory. Moore's discovery was first reported in Golf World magazine in 2007, before Fields' longer article in Golf Digest in 2008.
In 1958, Arnold Palmer outlasted Ken Venturi to win the tournament with heroic escapes at Amen Corner. Amen Corner also played host to Masters moments such as Byron Nelson's birdie-eagle at 12 and 13 in 1937, and Sam Snead's water save at 12 in 1949 that sparked him to victory. On the less positive side, Jordan Spieth's quadruple bogey on 12 during Sunday's final round in 2016 cost him his 2-stroke lead and ultimately the championship.