It is the most famous golf course in the world. It is the best inland golf course in the world, arguably — a fun debate for a grill room or patio. Augusta National Golf Club can be notoriously furtive about its movements or who is even working there. But because it hosts the most high-profile golf tournament on Earth every year, more is known about Augusta National, from every slight contour change or sharpened edge, than any golf course.
Augusta National first opened for play in 1933 and hosted the first Masters Tournament in 1934. It is the last Alister MacKenzie design that opened in America before the architect’s death. MacKenzie, the Scottish surgeon who established himself as a “camofleur” by using shaped landforms to conceal fortifications during the Boer War, had worked both in the States and abroad. His courses at Cypress Point and Pasatiempo in California made prominent impressions on the early golf intelligentsia in America. Among them was Bob Jones, co-founder and President in Perpetuity of Augusta National, who collaborated with MacKenzie in laying out the course.
The Old Course influenced MacKenzie and Jones heavily, and they sought to bring its principles of strategic design to create this “inland links.” They emphasized wide playing corridors and wall-to-wall fairways with no rough in order to provide strategic options. The preferred lines are not always clear, but the advantage for finding them, or the challenge resulting from missing them, can quickly become revelatory. The opportunity for recovery still exists from a less preferred line in a fairway, but the challenge is greater and the penalty for not pulling it off even more severe and compounding. The renowned Jones summation still rings out: “We want to make bogeys easy if frankly sought, pars readily obtainable by standard good play, and birdies — except on par 5s — dearly bought.”
MacKenzie had built a reputation for theatrics in building greens and bunkers, and that was a point of emphasis at Augusta National. The drama peaked at his audacious greens, revealing the options for a range of heroic or disastrous outcomes. After MacKenzie’s work in California, Augusta National represented the next phase of his career, one in which he resolved to push creative green design even further. Speaking on the Fried Egg Golf podcast, historian Bob Crosby called these efforts “strategic golf course architecture on LSD.”
Several of MacKenzie’s greens remain, and the masterful routing conjured up with Jones is largely intact, even after the nines were flipped following the first Masters. Augusta National lays across one larger hill, cascading from the clubhouse down to the farthest points of Amen Corner. But within it are several smaller hills and dips that the routing uses continually, creating uneven lies for approaches to different elevations, such as the climb up the eighth or the drop down to the 15th. Mackenzie was an expert at creating multiple meeting points, using a feature or two to anchor multiple holes. The large hill where the second, seventh and 17th greens sit is one example, with the 18th, 8th, and third tee boxes nearby. There is a reason the scoreboard behind the seventh green is a common meeting point for phone-less patrons. You can quickly get anywhere out on the course from that central point. There are very few places — the fifth tee perhaps being one — that feel removed and isolated in this routing.
MacKenzie brought his dramatic bunker style to Augusta National, but, in concert with Jones, showed restraint in numbers, with only 22 bunkers on the original design, relying more on the contours of the land to create both hazard and escape in and around the bold greens. This led to a course that could still be both challenging to the elite golfer of the Masters while playable and fun for the average golfer, a dynamic that persists today.
Of course, the number of bunkers grew over the years and their aesthetics changed. The only constant at Augusta National is change. Golf writer and Jones confidante Charles Price said the course was not the most “revolutionary” in America, but rather “the most evolutionary.” Certain critics would suggest that even calling this a MacKenzie design is misleading.
Indeed, the number of architects and consulting voices who have “worked” with the club over the years numbers in the double digits. Perry Maxwell, who served as MacKenzie’s associate on several projects in the Midwest, was the first and most prominent architect to work at Augusta National after MacKenzie’s death in 1934. Maxwell made several changes to greens, rebuilding and re-bunkering them, and most significantly moved the greens at the seventh and 10th holes, pushing them back up on their respective hills.
Robert Trent Jones was the primary architect to work at the club in the postwar era, building the new and modern-day 16th hole and lengthening the 11th hole. Tom Fazio worked with the club starting in the late 90s, often adding more length, most notably on the seventh hole. And then there was the Tiger-proofing era at the start of the 21st century, when trees were added — such as at the 11th, 15th, and 17th holes — and a rough cut implemented with greater frequency. These efforts constricted the original vision of strategic design by MacKenzie and Jones, with the tree clusters eliminating certain positions of attack into the greens. The rough stopped mishits from cascading further offline into something more treacherous, and also mitigated some of the spin control that is requisite into these wildly undulating greens. Tiger Woods was critical of the rough and narrowing, writing that it “eroded strategic values that Bobby Jones and Alister MacKenzie had created as the course’s essential feature.”
The work continues on an almost annual basis. Some of the most recent changes have been targeted at reclaiming some of the width at the 11th hole and taking out some of the “second cut” rough. While the lengthening continues in an effort to keep up with the massive distance gains by those playing the Masters, the member tees remain at 6,300 yards and the course exceedingly playable. As Jones wrote, “The first purpose of any golf course should be to give pleasure, and that to the greatest possible number of players, without respect to their abilities.”
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Take Note...
Routing changes. The first hole, as we know it today, was the first hole when Augusta National opened, but prior to the inaugural Masters, the nines were flipped, making the first the 10th, and vice versa. This routing was abandoned after the tournament and returned to its current sequence.
Not original. As Brendan mentions in his introduction above, a few of Augusta National’s holes have seen significant changes over the years, particularly the seventh, 10th, and 16th. Each of these now features completely different green sites than they initially did. The seventh and 10th greens were moved from low areas to ridges by Perry Maxwell in the 1930s, and the 16th was completely redesigned by Robert Trent Jones in the late 40s.
Never built. In the early 1930s, Alister MacKenzie created a plan for a reversible short course at Augusta National, but it was never built. In 1958, the club opened a par-3 course designed by George Cobb and Clifford Roberts. That course was renovated to create better spectator flow in 2023.
A sad ending. Building Augusta National was an ambitious endeavor at the height of the Great Depression. As a result, the club struggled financially in its early days, never paying Alister MacKenzie his full design fee. The architect died a few months before the playing of the first Masters and did not get to see the finished version of the course
Atlanta’s Augusta. Atlanta’s favorite son, Bobby Jones, had a hand in the design of one other golf course: Peachtree Golf Club in Atlanta. There, he collaborated with Robert Trent Jones to create Atlanta’s premiere course. Jones’s role in designing Peachtree’s greens seems evident; many possess bold contouring similar to Augusta National’s and a far cry from much of RTJ’s solo work.
