Why the Masters—and Augusta National—beguiles us so endlessly

Every April we have the ritual joy of diving into the game’s most storied event, yet every season it manages to surprise us. How does one tournament — and one place, Augusta National — beguile us so endlessly? Michael Bamberger has some thoughts. Actually, a history’s worth of them.

The Masters at AugustaNational our annual marker of fresh starts, is the great American golf tournament because it is so uniquely … American.

It mixes speeds: big and brawny here, small and intimate there. The Masters (inseparable from its host club) is both the sprawling wonder of the Grand Canyon and the majesty of a lone bald eagle cruising at altitude. We pause here to take in Augusta’s Par 3 Course and the little annual event on it, particularly in the years when Arnold, Jack and Gary were roaming its tiny greens, thousands watching, shoulder to shoulder. So intimate. As for brawny, consider the tee shots on 1, 2, 5, 8, etc. The play is smashed driver right down Broadway. (Easier said than done.) Your first putt will thank you.

You’re always building at the Masters, shot to shot, hole to hole, round to round, April to April. Player, TV viewer, fan on a rope line, member, broadcaster, caddie, course worker — the experience is available to all. Augusta National is the most private of clubs and the Masters the most inviting of tournaments. Some years ago, the club’s leadership — the chairman and his green-coated lieutenants, plus more recruited executives than you would likely imagine — decided to build a new tournament driving range in the vicinity of the club’s famous driveway, Magnolia Lane. They built the most spectacular driving range ever conceived, and seemingly overnight. The club’s preferred contractors dug up a dusty parking lot and anything else in their way to create this temple of practice, with a Taj Mahal press building at its far end. But the club’s leaders would never even think about altering Golden Bell, the short-iron par-3 12th hole, typically played through a fickle wind, over a creek and to a slippery green. The golf shot as haiku.

The Masters became the Masters — the tourney as we know it today — in the 1950s, when baseball was still the dominant American sport. Each April, big-pen sports columnists, done with spring training and Opening Day, descended upon Augusta, ate pie and canonized the tournament, the course, the players upon it. The fit was easy for the scribes. (This was in the era of baggy trousers and a bar in the press building, to ease the pain of deadline typing.) The Masters, among all golf tournaments, is the most like baseball, with the pastime’s capacity for redemption. The guy who boots a ground ball in the eighth, giving the visitors a one-run lead, singles in the winning run one inning later. And so it is at the Masters, redemption baked into its storytelling in ways it’s not at other tournaments. This quality is a gift of the course. Augusta gives more than she takes.

Consider last year. On Sunday, on 13, Rory McIlroy dunked his little third shot into the creek. Ghastly. The groan heard ’round the world. Maybe you thought the Irishman had duffed the tournament away. If you did, you weren’t alone.

And here we turn to Elvis, as he channeled another son of the South, Jimmy Reed, and Reed’s “Baby What You Want Me to Do,” a gritty three-minute stompfest that could double as a real-world Masters theme song:

We’re going up, we’re going down
We’re going up, down, down, up
Any way you wanna let roll it
Yeah, yeah, yeah

Rory was down — he doubled the hole winners typically birdie – but not out. He still had five guaranteed holes to try to redeem himself. In the end, he needed six, with his birdie in extra innings, rolling in a playoff putt to win from 40 inches. And now he’s in the Tuesday Night Supper Club forever, about as up as a golfer can get. For the longest time, it was impossible to unsee the dead-pull tee shot McIlroy hit on 10 in 2011, when he was (it seemed) all set to cruise on into a waiting coat. Now that shot doesn’t loom so large. After all his many chances, Rory’s finally in.

Who among us doesn’t like a mulligan? Another chance, a third one, a fourth. Ken Venturi, Tom Weiskopf and Greg Norman were experts in this area, always waiting for next year at Augusta until they ran out of next years. That threesome is as significant to the tournament’s history as Art Wall (the 1959 winner) and Tommy Aaron (’73) and Charl Schwartzel (2011), even if Venturi & Bros. never sniffed the second-floor champions locker room. Greg Norman, when his scoreboard totals were inked for good, was 0-for-23 at Augusta. Rory won on his 18th try. In victory, he fell to the green for part of a half minute. You remember.

In victory, Hideki Matsuyama’s caddie bowed to the course. That was in 2021. You remember. Maybe not the year but surely the image. Likewise, these snaps: the caddie Carl Jackson consoling Ben Crenshaw in victory (1995); Nick Faldo, the winner, embracing Greg Norman, leader by six earlier in the day (1996); Jack and Jackie walking off arm in arm (1986); Tiger falling into the arms of his father (1997). We know these images regardless of our age. We know these images because we care. Millions of us, around the world, care.

Of course, we weren’t born caring about the Masters and who wins it and how. Yet here we are, agitating for the next one. It’s as if the club and the tournament were born under an astral plane, Jupiter aligned with Mars, something like that. The course and Bobby Jones’ — and Alister MacKenzie’s! — role in it; the relative isolation of Augusta, making the tournament the only show in town, local schools closed for the week; the standing April date and all that flowering pink; the engaging personalities of various winners and near-winners; the coverage of the tournament in newspapers and magazines and on various networks, CBS most especially.

The first Masters was played in 1934. Gene Sarazen’s “shot heard ’round the world,” en route to a victory after a 36-hole playoff, came a year later. Ben Hogan won his first Masters in 1951 and a few weeks later a Hollywood movie about him, Follow the Sun, came out. Hogan won again in 1953, two months after Dwight Eisenhower (war hero, golf nut, Augusta National member) became president. And then the tournament went from stage to screen, on TV for the first time in 1956. The broadcasting network that year was CBS and the tournament has been on CBS ever since, with limited commercial interruption. Arnold Palmer won his first Masters in 1958, then won three more, in ’60, ’62 and ’64. Jack Nicklaus won his third green jacket in ’66, when the CBS telecast was in color for the first time and Grammy Hall, stuck in still-thawing Chippewa Falls, Wisc., could finally see those blooming azaleas in their bathing-beauty majesty. Nicklaus won his record sixth Masters, his namesake son on his bag, 20 years later. When Tiger won his fifth coat in 2019, people immediately began to wonder: Can he catch Jack? Woods was 19 when he played in his first Masters. Now he’s 50. Year to year and decade to decade, one player to the next and one generation to the next, the Masters is always building on its past. But all the while the club puts a laser focus (no distracting cellphones) on its present, on the here and now. It’s all familiar. It’s all brand-new.

“Whatever product any company is trying to sell, toothpaste or anything else, it could never do what the Masters does, because people want to feel something, and the Masters gives people something they can feel,” Jim Nantz said recently. The CBS broadcaster worked his first Masters in 1986 with millions of people sweating out the Golden Bear’s win over Seve Ballesteros and Greg Norman. (Nicklaus was 46 — ancient, then.) On the course, the rooting was decidedly partisan. “The Masters doesn’t have to sell anything because the tournament has been handed down through the years. When I talk about the Masters, I always go back to this word, and you have to: tradition. Tradition is in short supply in the world. But not at the Masters.”

A week of fixed tradition. The Monday night Amateur Dinner. The Tuesday night Champions Dinner. The Wednesday afternoon Par 3 Contest, after the chairman’s annual State of the Masters press conference, a line of green-coated members holding up the back wall. The honorary starters early Thursday morn. The Act I curtain coming down Friday night after the 36-hole cut is made. Then Act II on Saturday, the protagonists jockeying for position. Followed by the tense wonder of Sunday’s Act III, concluding with a standing ovation for the winner you know and some kid (the low amateur) you likely don’t. Late on Sunday and before 60 Minutes, the two of them, plus the defending champion, descend a set of steps and enter the eerie quiet of the Butler Cabin basement. And there, waiting on ’em, is the chairman in a green blazer, Jim Nantz in a blue one. It’s always the same and it’s never the same.

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A decade ago, Bryson DeChambeau was the tournament’s low am. He almost stumbled on his way to his assigned Butler Cabin high-backed chair, then took care not to seat himself before the winner, Danny Willett, did. There’s something about Augusta: Your manners improve upon arrival. DeChambeau and Willett, along with Jordan Spieth (the defending champion) were still wearing their white golf shoes, early on a lovely spring night. (Augusta enjoys the gift of a late mid-April sunset, close to 8 p.m.) Jim Nantz and Billy Payne, then the club chairman, faced the three players. DeChambeau was a pack of jangly nerves his red sweater could not conceal. “Never in a million years did I think I’d be the low amateur here,” he told Nantz. Really? He earned his way to the Masters as the U.S. Amateur champion. But at the Masters, and at Augusta National, gentility is a way of life. Gentility, modesty, charm. You pass through the gate and put on your best Bobby Jones.

That 2016 Masters was Billy Payne’s last as the club chairman. (Billapane, in the local patois.) Augusta National has had seven chairmen, starting with Clifford Roberts, cofounder of the club with Bob Jones, who was made the president in perpetuity while he was still alive. (Kinda weird, no?) All the chairmen have been czars, some more heavy-handed (Hootie Johnson; Billy Payne) than others (Jack Stephens; Fred Ridley, the current chairman). They all have left imprints, large and small. Hord Hardin (1980 to 1991) didn’t like striped shirts at dinner and declined to lengthen the course, despite the arrival of metal woods. Hootie Johnson (1998 to 2006) didn’t want women as members but did want a far longer course and many more obstacle trees. Billy Payne (2006 to 2017) did want women as members (and invited the first class). He also wanted to have paying fans to have more of a Ritz Carlton-meets-Disneyland experience. Payne picked Fred Ridley as his successor. In style and manner, they’re totally different. (Payne came at you with a torrent of words; Ridley weighs every last one.) But in purpose they’re the same.

What makes the whole thing work is that the broad interests of Augusta’s chairmen and the broad interests of Augusta’s fans align exactly. The chairman, any chairman, wants the best course, the best field, the best coverage, the best Sunday. As do we.

THE MASTERS IS a wide bonding experience, whether you’re watching in your living room, in an airport lounge, on a clubhouse TV at Augusta (there’s a lot of that) or on the course. In this last category, the no-phone policy informs the whole experience. You’re sealed off from the rest of the world. If you want to know what’s going on, on campus at Augusta, there’s not much spoon-fed to you. You have to use your own eyes, ears, intuition, experience. You watch the leaderboards change. You might actually talk to the person (stranger/not a stranger) standing next to you.

What was that?

I’m thinking Scottie staked one on 12.

Conversation is part of the bonding experience at the Masters. Language is too. As Augusta National publishes (annually) a Spectator Guide, the club could also publish a Language Handbook. Patron, of course, would get an entry, for paying fan. Also, by way of first-tee player introduction, Now driving. This is the broadly accepted definition of Amen Corner: the 11th green, all of 12 (the wee par 3), the tee shot on 13. The preferred shorthand for 10 to the house is the second nine.

And then there’s the oral tradition. Here, for example, is a real-life exchange from an on-course men’s room, with a greeter at the door and a spotter deep inside it, in place to keep the line moving.

Greeter: “What you got back there?”

Spotter: “I got two open and a shaker.”

Yes, fellas being fellas. Deep in the club’s DNA and secret history there’s a lot of that. Calcutta gambling, imported entertainment, business wheeling and dealing, cloaked by all that gentility. There used to be, on the second floor of the clubhouse, a loo with wallpaper featuring urinating dogs. Beside it was the club’s library, a cozy room just big enough to accommodate the former champions at their annual dinner, all the gents at one long table, the defending champion picking up the tab, the chair- man there as a guest. (The former winners get $25,000 just for showing up.) Ben Hogan started the dinner. Byron Nelson was its MC forever. For years, Sam Snead closed the night out with a few choice jokes. None can be repeated here.

It’s strange to say, but Byron Nelson, a lifelong Texan, a two-time winner of the Masters, is an undervalued figure in the club’s lore, even though the wide, sturdy stone bridge on the 13th hole is named for him. Texas runs deeply through the Masters, and Nelson spent his whole long life (94 years) in the Lone Star State. (Nelson, Hogan, Jimmy Demaret, Ralph Guldahl, Jackie Burke, Charles Coody, Ben Crenshaw and Jordan Spieth are native Texans; Patrick Reed, Sergio García and Scottie Scheffler are Texans by choice. That’s 17 wins right there.) But Nelson had that gentleness that is so emblematic of the Masters, and through his 80s and into his 90s you’d see Lord Byron all week long, unhurried, smiling, happy to chat up anyone, his green coat draped on his arm on warm afternoons. One day, Bill Kirby, a longtime columnist at the Augusta Chronicle, was in the small Augusta National pro shop, looking to buy a gift for his father. He had his fingers on a maroon tie patterned with time-capsule Masters badges. “That’s a nice one,” came a voice from over Bill’s shoulder. Byron Nelson. Kirby bought the tie and then Nelson bought the same make and model. Kirby gave the tie to his father, along with the Nelson story, and the tie and the story came back to Kirby upon his father’s death. How intimate is all that?

Rees Jones, the golf-course architect, has been to Augusta National many times, to watch the tournament and play as a guest. He was close to Bobby Goodyear, a pitcher at Yale, an Air Force veteran, an heir to a family fortune. Goodyear was also an Augusta National member forever. Over the years, on 80 different occasions, Goodyear invited Jones to play the course and bring a pal. “If I like the guy, I’m paying,” he’d tell Rees. “If I don’t, you are.” Rees paid twice. How fun is that? You might be surprised to learn that being a good hang is an unspoken requirement for membership. You don’t have to be a Goodyear or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company to be invited in. There are doctors who are members, two retired NFL quarterbacks (they’re brothers), people prominent locally and nationally. (Condi Rice: good hang!) Billy Morris, a longtime member and the longtime publisher of The Chronicle, used to have an important job at the tournament, driving the winner from Butler Cabin to the press building in an E-Z-Go golf cart for the victor’s press conference, driving cautiously to avoid the patrons and to make sure his Panama hat did not go flying. E-Z-Go (fun fact) got its start in Augusta, inspired by the three-wheeled, custom- made cart the ailing Bobby Jones drove around the course in the ’50s. E-Z-Go’s main competitor, Club Car, was founded in Augusta too. Augusta, the city and the club, is all mishmashy that way. Augusta, the city and the club, likes it that way. Robert Tyre Jones Jr. was the cofounder of Augusta National. Robert Trent Jones Sr. (Rees’ father) was the architect who designed the par-3 16th hole as we know it today. The two men are often confused and are not related. No big whoop. What makes 16, Jones (pick your Jones) said more than once, is the slope of its green. Tiger Woods will tell you the same thing. A golf course, and a golf tournament, can turn on the subtlest of things.

Paul Talledo is an Augustan in his early 60s who has been going to the Masters pretty much all his life, and he’s been taking his son Patrick to the tournament pretty much all his life. Father and son, in their early visits, observed what everybody who has been on the course has observed: The downhill 10th hole is so steep it could be a ski run; the uphill 18th hole is so steep you can see players gulping air as they make their shoulders-first march up it. Talk about big and brawny. In his mind’s eye, Paul can see Patrick, almost 20 years ago when the boy was 65 pounds of pure kid, eager to see his favorite golfer, Lucas Glover, make the walk up 18. Other spectators cleared a path for the boy and the next thing he knew he was sitting under the rope line, watching. How intimate is that?

One year, father and son were having trouble with their badges, with the this-is-me barcodes on them, as they tried to enter for the tournament. A security officer called in for assistance. A green-coated member responded. He asked the boy his name and age, gave him a little Masters pin to put on his shirt, waved them both in and said, “Y’all have a nice day.”

In they went, the father and his son, leaving behind the chaos of Washington Road and falling into a 350-acre haven of golf. All that green.