Masters Presser Reactions and an Alternative History of Augusta National's Design

the past past few days. People said a lot of interesting and potentially significant stuff, so I thought i'd zero in on a few specific topics. First of all, the chairman of Augusta National, Fred Ridley, gave his very anticipated press conference on Wednesday, and there were a couple of highlights that I wanted to focus on. His first big announcement had to do with Augusta Municipal Golf course, known

locally as the Patch. Augusta National is, according to Chairman Ridley, supporting a joint partnership with the Patch, Augusta Technical College and the First Tea of Augusta to quote usher in a new era for public golf in our city. There are three basic objectives here. First, Augusta Tech will start educational programs for future workers in the golf industry, and those programs will be linked with the Patch and the

First Tea of Augusta. Second, the partnership will create what Ridley called an affordable pathway for anyone who wants to learn the game. And third, Augusta National will assist in renovating the Patch and the First te facility. This is really exciting news, not only for Augusta, but I think potentially for the golf world more broadly. Everything that Augusta National does ends up serving as a model for other clubs, courses, and organizations in the golf world, and that dynamic has

not always been healthy. Just look at the influence Augusta Nationals has had on golfer's expectations for maintenance and agronomy. That hasn't been a positive influence, I would say on the sustainability or the environmental reputation of the game. But this partnership with Augusta Municipal, the first he and Augusta Tech, could be an enormously beneficial model for other wealthy, powerful organizations to follow, and I really hope they do. Either way.

What happens with the patch should be a great story to track in the coming years, and we'll definitely keep up with it at the Frida Egg, all right. The second part of Ridley's press conference that I wanted to pick out is his comments on the Model Local rule for the golf ball that the USGA and RNA recently proposed. Basically, this rule would allow individual tournaments like the Masters to

implement a reduced flight golf ball. As you are no doubt aware, Augusta National has had to make a tremendous number of changes over the past twenty five years to keep up with distance gains at the elite male competitive level. The most recent of those changes was moving back the thirteenth t thirty five yards to restore some decision making

to that famous par five. So I think almost everyone expects Ridley and Augusta National to support the Model Local rule and adopt the MLR ball when it comes out. But of course we were waiting to see what exactly Ridley would say about the matter, because what Augusta National does on this issue will be hugely, hugely consequential. And here's what he said. As the comment period remains open, we will be respectful of the process as the USGA

and the RNA consider this important issue. We have been consistent in our support of the governing bodies and we restate our desire to see distance addressed. Very simple, kind of vague, but he did get more explicit in answering a question from the press. He said, our position has always been that we support the governing bodies. I think in a general sense we do support the proposal, but because it's in the middle of the comment period, it

could change. The whole purpose of the comment period is to take the input from the industry, so we will look at the final product and make a decision. But generally we have always been supportive of the governing bodies. I've stated that we believe distance needs to be addressed. I think the natural conclusion is, yes, we will be supportive. Ridley also made a comment later on about how when

he first played in the Masters himself. In the late nineteen seventies, the course was about sixty nine hundred yards and it was still around that distance when Tiger Woods won in nineteen ninety seven. Now the course is over seventy five hundred yards long, and he is aware of that problem. Undoubtedly. My takeaway here is that Augusta National will do what the USGA and RNA want to do

with regard to the rules of golf. Ridley's most important talking point was we are and have always been supportive of the governing bodies. That I think is the north star for them. So if the Model Local Rule comes through the comment period, intact, I would assume that the Masters will implement the new ball. To me, that means that the opponents of the rollback, most significantly the major equipment companies and the players on the PGA tour who

get paid by those companies. Those opponents of the MLR will try to put their thumbs on the scale now and in the coming months. They don't want the MLR to go through because they know if it does, it will be put into effect by the Open, the US Open, and the Masters, and if those three tournaments go with the MLR, the PGA of America and the PGA Tour are going to fall in line. I don't think they have the clout to stand up to the USGA and r and A when those organizations have the backing of

Augusta National Golf Club. I may be wrong about that, but I think that's just how things are in the golf world. That's where the real power is. Okay, moving on from Ridley's press conference. The other set of comments from the pre tournament interviews that I wanted to address are from players about the newly lengthened thirteenth hole. I thought a lot of these were really interesting, especially the

ones from Dustin Johnson and John Rahm. DJ's comments, which he made on Monday, got a fair amount of traction. I would say the key quote was this. He said, yeah, most likely I'll be laying up all four days. The tea was moved back thirty five yards, and DJ says that that's going to cause him to default to laying up on the hole. This prompted a lot of people to complain. It was like, oh man, they took all

the excitement out of the hole. We want to see birdies, we want to see eagles, we want to see people going for the green, and if if DJ doesn't go for the green, then who will. But I think it's important to pay attention to the rest of what DJ actually said. He said, I don't like to turn the ball over. It's not really my forte with the driver hitting a draw. To explain what he's saying here, he prefers to hit a fade off the tee like a lot of players today. He hits that big knuckle fade

with a driver. It's a stock shot. For the past number of years, the thirteenth hole did still demand a draw off the tee for the best results, but most of the top players were long enough to get around the corner on the hole with a threewood. It's a lot easier to hit a draw with a modern three wood than it is with a driver. They're reasons for that that I wouldn't be the best person to answer, but basically it has to do a lot, at least

with spin. The modern driver doesn't spin very much, and so a fade, which has generally more spin than a draw, is a little bit easier to keep in the air, whereas a draw is always in danger of kind of diving out of the air and turning into a snap hook with the modern spin model that the driver and that the ball have for the top players. So the thirteenth hole was still sort of counter to that tendency.

But because players could get around that corner with a three wood, that was a go to shot for a lot of them, and it was Dustin Johnson's go to shot. I believe he'd take a three wood and turn it over a bit. The threewood has more loft, it produces a little more spin. A draw with a three wood for these players is a little bit more reliable. Well, now the thirteenth hole is long enough so that guys

can't take that show. To get around the corner and give yourself a good chance of hitting the green in two, you need to hit a driver and you need to draw it. So guess what, DJ can't hit that shot. You should be rewarded for being able to hit a variety of shots. You can't just expect to hit one shape off the tee and be able to go for every par five green in two. So the criticism of the lengthening of the hole based on DJ's comments today

is blogoney. What he's really saying is I don't have that shot, and this is one of the rare occasions where not being able to work the ball both ways with the driver is going to cost him. And to be clear, I'm not criticizing DJ. I don't get the impression that he was complaining about this state of affairs.

I'm more addressing the comments about what DJ said. He shouldn't be able to necessarily attack this hole if he can't hit that shot with the driver, and he's maybe fine with that right in general, that power fade works just fine for him, but in this case he can't get around that unless he draws it with a driver, and since he can't hit that shot, that's coming back to bite them in this case. The other comments on thirteen that I found really interesting were from John Rahm.

Now Ram is another guy, by the way, who plays a stock fade off the tee and has a hard time hitting a draw with the driver. I've seen him struggle a fair amount on thirteen in the past, but as usual, he had really interesting things to say on the subject that weren't necessarily just from his own selfish point of view. He said this, I'm not opposed to the change. I think you're going to see a lot

more layups. Obviously, if you don't quite hug the left side, you're going to have such a long iron in that a lot of people will choose to lay up. But there's still going to be more so a risk reward aspect to it, because if you hit the green and give yourself an eagle chance, it's going to matter a lot more maybe than it did in the past. This is all music to my ears, but especially the part about maybe needing to hug the left side of the hole in order to have a less terrifying chance of

going for the green. In two, the left side of the thirteenth hole is guarded by the tributary of Raysed Creek, and that hazard has basically become irrelevant in the twenty first century. In the original design, the whole idea was that if you challenge the water, you could cut off some distance on the hole and give yourself a flattered lie and a real chance of hitting the green with

your second shot. If you bailed out to the right, you would have a long way in and you'd have a very scary side hill lie that would make your ball move right to left, which is not the shape you want going into this green. But starting with equipment advances about twenty five years ago, that strategy started to go away. Players could just blast it up the right and they could hit it so far that they would still have a short second shot into the green. The

angle no longer mattered. Augusta tried to address that problem by planting a bunch of trees on the right side and making the hole narrower, but the strategic spirit of the hole was gone. Now what John Ram is saying is that the value of hugging that left side near the hazard might be back, And as a big time

golf nerd, that is very exciting to me. Speaking of big time golf nerdery, I'm going to talk to Bob Crosby about how a few specific holes at Augusta National have evolved over the years and how those changes represent a tricky philosophical balance that the club has had to strike as the host of the Masters. That's right after this break. This episode of the Friday Podcast is brought to you by Club Champion. Club Champion helps golfers of any skill level play better golf through custom fitted and

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to the episode. All right, Bob Crosby, welcome back to the podcast.

I talked a little before this. We chose four holes to focus on, and those are three, seven, eight, and ten. And we chose those holes not because they're famous, but because each of them represents something about the evolution of the course, about the philosophy of architecture and renovation that has defined what the course has become overall. So why don't we start with the par four third, which is

one of my favorite holes on the golf course. Could you just describe the hole for me, just to kick things off if people aren't super familiar with that. You know, it doesn't necessarily always star on the coverage of the Masters. So what is this hole? Basically?

One of the things that I think that strikes me about why that hole has survived in its current state for so long as something that Tom Dope mentioned recently about the changes he made to his memorial course in Houston, which is that he tried very hard hard to make sure that the middle of the greens, that is to say, the safe shot areas had some sort of undulation or contour in them that made them less safe. And I think that's why the third hole works so well. It's

slightly crowned. You're putting downhill to most pen locations, which is scary and lightning fast. Trying to hit at the pins is probably not a good idea because of the the size of the green. Just a wonderful hole all around, and there are good reasons for why it is not undergone or at least very few changes. I think Fazio we did some of the fairway bunkers and O two, but other than that, essentially it's the hole that Mackenzie and Jones put on the put on the ground in

nineteen thirty two. Three. The other hole I would like to talk about. I think it has a wonderful end story to it, and that is the a Toll, one

of my favorite par fives in the world. Cliff Roberts, in the mid nineteen fifties, because of line of sight issues with galleries and also gallery flow around the green, decided to take out a lot of the Mackenzie features, which were essentially several mounds running upside of both sides of the green, including a large mound in the front of the green front left of the green, and replaced those mounds with this awful, awful circular green, sort of

a saucer shaped green that shocks the offenses every time you see even a picture of it. One of the great stories of Augusta National and this was not a coincidence. Not long after Cliff Roberts passing in nineteen seventy seven six.

But basically, this hole is a two valley hole. You hit your drive over a valley, and if you are at the top of the hill in the middle of the fairway, then you hit your approach over a valley. You mentioned that the bunkers have been changed. I actually looked this up, and the cluster of bunkers replaced a big bunker that used to be in the same location. And it was actually Jack Nicholas who suggested that in the early eighties, and then Bob Cupp, Nicholas's design partner

at the time. I believe executed the work and was the architect of record for that work. Fasio did make some changes, as you mentioned later on in the early two thousands, but they were a little more subtle. But that's basically all that has changed about the hole. And it's fascinating to me to walk around the course today and look at the members tees and the championship tees and see how different they are on every other hole on the golf court except for three where they are

not different. This hole was three hundred and fifty yards in nineteen thirty four and it's three hundred and fifty yards today. So what do you think allowed this hole to stand the test of time in this way?

enormously difficult. It has withstood the new power Game beautifully and in many respects, I think Dope probably feels this way is something of a template for or how to attack the power game today with shorter holes.

on pin position, you really don't want to be. So if you're trying to drive the green, you have to really think about it because you don't want to be long of this green, and you also in many cases do not want to be in that valley short of the green left where your ball will end up if it's not exactly precise rolling perfectly onto the green, and so it motivates I think some more cautious play where you do see players in the Masters laying up to the top of that hill in the fair way with

long iron or something like that and taking that full wedge into the green because because they just don't like anything that will happen if they miss the green, sort of pin high or pass the pin.

which all undid his strategy. But still that is But it's that you're even thinking that way makes it a very interesting hole.

The place you want to leave your drive ideally is as close to that right side bunker as you can if you aren't able to fly it, which narrows what might appear to be a fairly wide driving area to a fairly narrow one in the sense that if you want to go for the green in your next shot, you've got to play around to the right of that

massive mound front of the green. It's just a beautifully elegant, little strategic hole, not little, a big, hard uphill hole at which I have come to respect the more I've seen it.

There's very little leeway for bailing out left or right. You've got to go right at it. And there's a big debate these days about whether angles matter in strategic golf architecture. If the idea is that you should bail out to the middle of the green and take your two putts from there as a long term strategy for lower scoring, McKenzie's original greens, like Doak's idea at Memorial

Golf Courps, sort of defeat that idea. In some greens, I'm not sure where the middle of the green is because of the odd shapes, for example, the ninth Green, the fourth Green, other greens that just with these sort of odd shaped where you could tuck pins in places where you shouldn't expect a two putt two if you're

in the wrong part of the green. So the eighth is a nice representative of that long, narrow finger type green that I think featured either alone or in combination with other features and other greens.

unexpected directions. And in fact, on the third hole, the original third hole, one of the subtle changes that was made early on is that one of these fingers that used to be there on the front right portion of that green got pushed back by I believe, Perry Maxwell, and so a lot of the greens, including the seventh which we'll talk about later, just have these little jutting portions that went out in unexpected directions and they're just I don't know, you know, that seems to be something

that he was looking at at the end of his career as maybe a way to push his design experimentation, just trying these different green shapes. Do you think do you think that's valid?

of eight. I mean, if you miss wide left or right on eight, getting up and down from those mounds that run up both sides of that green is very very difficult.

put up a sign saying, this change is temporary. You know what this looks like right now is temporary, And so it's kind of silly looking, but I believe he did it to enhance spectator views. Am I right about that?

think that this represents some of that tension. Right Clifford Roberts was looking to enhance the spectator experience here, but it came at the cost of the architecture. So it's an interesting change in that way. But what I find really fascinating about what you're saying about the eighth whole work that happened after Roberts's death is that it was one of the first instances of true restoration, and so you really haven't found any earlier instances of.

Augusta is unique. You're right, Augusta is trying to thread a very small needle between hosting a major golf tournament and preserving McKenzie's and jones intent for the design on the golf course. And it is a It is a It is a source for ongoing arguments every spring, and I have to admit I find that I enjoy them very much. But you're right, and I you know, we can quibble with decisions made, but those are tough calls. Those are tough calls.

for a whole lot of mainstream criticism. But there's still quite a bit of pretty radical stuff out there, and so it's tantalizing in that way where the club has clearly, you know, put some resources into preserving certain features, but at the same time has also been willing to change other features for the sake of some of these modern imperatives.

of a golf course. Fighting that fight since nineteen thirty four has been I think one of the central themes of Augusta National.

across perpendicular to the line of play. Based on the photos I've seen, it looks like the green fell off fairly severely from right to left. But it was a hole that even in the thirties a lot of players could come close to driving, which was the motivation I think for changing it. Horton Smith, who won the first Masters Lodge, complaints with Cliff Roberts and Bob Jones that he and other players were driving the green in some cases and that something ought to be done about it.

So it was complaints from the pros that I think motivated changes to seven. As to ten, I mean, some of the similar notions apply there too. Ten was also a fairly short part for straight downhill, a large, magnificent bunker to the left of the green, which is still mostly there, but there it was maybe forty yards ahead back towards the tee where it is now in a small valley. The strategy on the whole would have been to keep the ball up on the right to the

extent you could to open the green up. That's very hard to do on that sloping downhill fairway which wants to feed balls down into the left. So it was again kind of a l against strategic golf hole. Also beautiful to boot that I think, although I don't have any specific documentation or that I'm guessing seen to be too short and too easy for professional players.

But back in the early thirties, that hole was about trying to stay to the right, and if you caught that little speed slot to the left, you would find yourself hitting this pitch over the famous bunker to a green in a saddle on the other side, which must have been a very very difficult shot. So kind of a funky hole and quite different from what it is today.

are what they are today today. Seven is this green that's kind of benched in to a hillside with bunkers all around the green, sort of a shallow green and one of the smaller ones on the course. And then on ten the green is perched sort of on this hill that falls off severely to the left. So elevated Perry Maxwell greens for both of these holes that made them longer, made them sort of stout par fours, which they are today. So what do you think was the idea or the philosophy behind those changes.

Georgia red clay does not percolate its sheet drains, and mackenzie didn't have a lot of experience on that sort of turf and soil, so that might have been part of it. But I think there was also a very clear attempt by Maxwell to unlinksify a lot of those holes there are. And I've always been curious about Jones's

reaction to that. And I found something the other day which both sort of confirmed and troubled me at the same time, where Jones and this is from nineteen thirty eight, and this is a newspaper account of what was going on with Maxwell at Augustine nashvill and they count reads

as follows. Although Bob Jones felt that the original job done by the late Alistair McKenzie was beyond reproach, he has yielded to the wishes of others, and the changes made in nineteen thirty seven and this summer nineteen thirty eight by Perry Maxwell have eliminated a number of original features. I think the importance of the Masters by the late nineteen thirties was importance in the sense that the club club's financial future depended on the revenues from the Masters,

at least during the Great Depression. I think the importance of that event for the viability of the club was such that I think Jones, notwithstanding his conviction that Mackenzie's design was beyond I think he realized to continue to make the tournament appealing to professional players, the changes had to be made, and there's a bit of tragedy in that.

I think Jones was fully aware that a lot of the things that he and Mackenzie had thought were important had to be subsumed to those higher goals for the golf course. I think, for example, his shock at the changes that were made to the a toll. He was appalled by them, but ended up living with them. I think Maxwell's changes in thirty seven and thirty eight set the tone for further changes made by Robert Trent Jones

ten years later. I think the idea was to preserve the course as a challenging site for a major golf tournament, and part of that was because at least in the first ten years or so, club needed to have that tournament conducted there as a revenue source. Later on they didn't. The revenue source was, I guess irrelevant. They had other

sources of revenue. One of the things that I hope historians do it better, and I maybe should try to do it, is that Maxwell, in several newspaper accounts, talks about in thirty seven and thirty eight reducing a lot of the mounding on the golf course, which had been an attempt to make it feel more lenksy. That was certainly the case on seven, it was certainly the case

to some extent on ten. What is interesting is that you compare old photos from the thirties with photos from the fifties or sixties, and clearly mounting in any number of spots is lower and less dramatic. The record of what exactly Maxwell did with all that mounding is at

best unclear, but I suspect that he made changes. His exchanges to Augusta National were in many cases small, subtle and unrecorded, unlesser things than the Augusta National Archives I'm unaware of, but it was a big change, and I think the changes since then, with the exception again of Byron Nelson and Joe Fingers restoration of the Eighth Green, that have continued more or less a pay since.

changes by Perry Maxwell in the late nineteen thirties. And by the way, one of the iron news here is that Perry Maxwell created one of the most authentic links golf courses inland in America in prairie dunes, and so it's not as if he was the sort of Parkland hack job ban coming in and taking out all the link stuff. He was asked to do this and he

did it. But do you think that the late thirties is sort of the time when Augusta National started that slow transition away from its original vision as the ultimate inland links course and toward the Parkland Major Championship Test that it's known as today.

distinction there. And I think this has to do again with the turf in the terrain at Augusta, that it just didn't work very well there, and that Jones is in McKenzie's grand experiment maybe was conducted in the wrong locale.

As I think I've said before, it's sort of strategic golf course architecture, as we used to say in the sixties, on acid and some of the green contours, the green shapes, some of the shots he's asking players to hit to very very narrow pinnable areas are nuts. I mean, we think of them as nuts today. But I think that it was part of a larger part of this experiment. Jones was very clear he thought this was an experiment that might have but for the intervention of the Great Depression,

World War two. We can think of other counterfactuals might have set golf architecture in a very direction. And that's my regret about Augusta National, because following on in the forties is Robert Trent Jones, Dick Wilson, and some others.

To some extent, we didn't start reverting back to some of the ideas that Mackenzie and Jones were trying to do at Augustin National until sometime in the nineteen nineties, maybe even later with Dope Core Crenshaw and some others, And I'm not sure even they were prepared to be as radical as Mackenzie was at Augusta National. He had the ideal owner at that point, Jones, to try to carry out some of those experiments. A lot of them have been domesticated. Greens now are very oblong and consistent.

The contours that sort of leveled out and undulations are muted. Now it is much more a parkland course. But God, it's sad to see the experiment go away, because at one point in time it was a remarkable, remarkable effort. The thing I wonder, and maybe there's just no good answer to this, is that a lot of the modern designs by living golf architects and trying to figure out how to design shorter courses i e. Less than seventy four hundred yard courses that will also stand up to

the pros. It strikes me that a lot of the ideas that are experimenting with are ones that Mackenzie tried at Augusta, Nashvial. These little fingerlets on the greens, odd shapes, bumps and humps, undulations. One thing pros hate to do is hit off uneven lies. All of that are all those things are being tried, and I think somewhat successfully in trying to combat the power game of the pros. So I wonder, I wonder maybe we've come full circle. Maybe some of the things, maybe some of the features

that Mackenzie had built at Augusta really do work. Now the pros will hate him, and they said they hated

him back in nineteen thirty seven. There is a persistent, enduring conflict in the evolution of golf, not just in architecture, but frankly also the rules between a group who want to see golf become a fair more rational game i e. That's usually professional players, and those who want to see golf as a more interesting, difficult game that involves luck and randomness that one has to learn to deal with.

Mackenzie and Jones I think came down the side of more interesting, unpredictable golf courses, less predictable golf courses, I guess is a better way to put it. And they were I think, at some point along the way overrun by the professional perspective, which is they need to be more free, fair and rational. And that evolution begins at Augustine National with the arrival of Perry Maxwell on the scene.

But but that clash continues today with modern architects clashing against people who want fair golf courses, that sort of thing. And it's it's, uh, it's a clash that I think will always be with golf, and God blessed both sides of that. It's you know there, it's it's uh, it's a wonderful, energetic thing to follow as things play out.

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