The Masters through the years

The Masters is the greatest event in sports. Legends have built their names here, but the course is always the star of the show. Put simply, Augusta National is why the Masters is the best event of the year. Immortality hangs on every shot, and the razor-thin margin between “all-time great” and “‘epic disaster” lingers over the field on Sunday. In its heyday, great shots produced pivotal birdies. Mediocre and poor shots yielded tough 2-putts or up-and-downs from well-placed hazards. Gary Player remarked:

“Every shot is within a fraction of disaster. That’s what makes it so great.”

When Gary Player won his three Masters tournaments, the course featured very wide fairways with essentially no rough. The fairways rewarded cerebral play. You won at Augusta by setting up ideal angles to attack flags on the vexing green complexes. Every yard off the ideal line on a hole produced worse angles and tougher shots. The wide fairways were the essence of the course’s brilliance. World-class players who found the fairway but not the ideal spot were allowed to recover with extraordinary shots. If they couldn’t pull off the low percentage play, disaster ensued. Golf course architect and U.S. Open winner Geoff Ogilvy alluded to this in an interview with the Augusta Chronicle:

“Nearly every time you hit it to the wrong side of the green or the wrong side of the fairway you have no chance, but you are given a lot of space to find out for yourself.”

The wide fairways of Augusta National gave every style of golfer a chance at succeeding by finding the route to the hole that best fit their skills. Today, due to the tree plantings that narrowed many of the fairways, that is no longer the case. In an effort to control scoring, the world’s greatest golf course has slowly been strangled.