THE MASTERS

The Masters is the first major of the golfing year, and the only one played on the same ground every time: Augusta National, in the first full week of April, when the azaleas are out.

The field is there by invitation. In practice, so is the gallery.

The Nursery

Augusta National was a nursery before it was a golf course.

In 1857 a Belgian family, the Berckmans, bought land on the edge of Augusta and ran it as Fruitland Nurseries. They imported trees and shrubs from Europe and Asia, bred peaches for the Georgia climate, and did as much as anyone to make the azalea the flower of the Southern garden. The house they lived in is the clubhouse.

Bobby Jones retired from competition in 1930, having won the four major championships of his day in a single season, and wanted somewhere to play with friends away from the crowds that followed him. With Clifford Roberts, a New York investment banker, he bought the old nursery, and with the architect Alister MacKenzie laid out a course around what the Berckmans had planted rather than clearing it. Every hole is named for a plant grown there, from Tea Olive at the first to Holly at the last.

The tournament followed in 1934, as the Augusta National Invitation Tournament. Roberts wanted to call it the Masters from the start. Jones thought the name presumptuous, and held out until 1939.

The club closes through the heat of summer. It exists, in a sense, for one week in spring.

It was founded in the Georgia of the 1930s, and it changed slowly. Every caddie at Augusta was Black until 1983, when players were first allowed to bring their own. Lee Elder became the first Black golfer to play the Masters in 1975. The club admitted its first Black member in 1990 and its first women in 2012. In 1997 Tiger Woods, aged twenty-one, won by twelve strokes, the widest margin the tournament had seen.

The Second Nine

The Masters is said to begin on the second nine on Sunday. The club prefers “second” to “back”, and says so.

Rae’s Creek, named for a landowner who died in 1789, runs across the far corner of the property. The three holes around it, the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth, are Amen Corner. The golf writer Herbert Warren Wind gave them the name in 1958, borrowing it from an old jazz record.

The twelfth is the shortest hole on the course and the most feared. The green is shallow, the creek lies in front and bunkers behind, and the wind in the pines above it rarely agrees with the wind on the tee.

Stone bridges carry the players over the water: Hogan’s at the twelfth and Nelson’s at the thirteenth tee, both dedicated in 1958. A third, at the fifteenth, is Sarazen’s. In 1935 Gene Sarazen holed his second shot there for a double eagle, drew level with the leader, and won a thirty-six-hole playoff the following day.

It is where most Masters are lost.

What to Know

Spectators are patrons, and the club is serious about the word. In 1966 the commentator Jack Whitaker described the crowd around the eighteenth green as a mob, and was kept off the broadcast for five years.

Telephones are not permitted on the grounds. Not silenced: absent. A patron found with one can lose the right to buy tickets for good.

Nobody runs.

The badges for the four tournament days belong to a list that closed to new names decades ago. Practice rounds and single days are drawn by ballot, applied for the summer before. The club cancels any badge it finds has been resold.

On the Wednesday the players take part in the Par 3 Contest on a short course by the ponds, many with their children caddying in the white overalls Augusta’s caddies wear. There is a superstition that whoever wins it will not win the tournament that week.

The champion is given the green jacket, which members have worn since 1937 so that patrons could tell whom to ask. Sam Snead was the first champion to receive one, in 1949, and jackets went retroactively to every winner before him. It belongs to the club: a champion takes it home for a year and then returns it. When Jack Nicklaus won twice running, in 1966, there was no one to help him into it, and he put it on himself.

Augusta lets itself out for the week. Households leave town and rent their houses, and a house is the way to stay.

The Court

The Masters is not the Court’s own, and no engagement on the calendar is harder to reach. The club sells badges only by ballot and to its own list, and cancels those it finds resold, so the Court does not buy them. It tells members when the ballot opens each summer, and for a member who is drawn, or who holds a badge already, it arranges the whole of the week: getting there, a house near the course, and the table afterward.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.