After a while, he went to work on his wedges. The crowd moved with him, while some broke off to line the path he’d be taking from the range to the clubhouse and the course. Momentarily averse to such gawkery, I hung back and watched a couple of golfers I’d never heard of; I recognized, not for the first time, that the mechanics and variables of the golf swing are a mystery to me.

Still, it was a soothing place to hang out. I’d been told that the recorded birdsong played on a loop, and so for a few minutes I listened intently, but I didn’t have the ear for it. Earlier, I’d been told by a guard that there was a bird speaker in a nearby magnolia tree. Now I followed one chirping sound to a holly bush. I eased my head carefully into a gap in the prickly leaves and, to my surprise, scared up an actual bird. Pulling my head out, I saw that I was being watched closely by a couple of Pinkertons. “A real bird!” I said to them. The Pinkertons remained expressionless.

The Masters is the only one of the four major tournaments that is staged at the same place every year. The other three—the U.S. Open, the P.G.A. Championship, and the Open Championship (known as the British Open)—are organized by various governing bodies and rotate among an evolving roster of courses, some of which are open to the public. The Old Course at St. Andrews, in Scotland, the so-called home of golf and an inspiration for the layout at Augusta, is a public course. So is Bethpage Black, on Long Island, the site of two recent U.S. Opens as well as last month’s P.G.A. Championship. The 2019 U.S. Open, which took place last week, was at Pebble Beach, in California, also a public course.

Augusta is obstinately private. Its leadership, embodied by its chairman, who serves for an indefinite term as a kind of sovereign and is the only person authorized to speak about the Masters, invariably deflects questions about club matters by saying that they are club matters. The club operates as a for-profit corporation. No one knows how much money it makes or has—except that it’s a lot, judging by the investments the club continually makes in the tournament, the course, the physical plant, and the expansion of its real-estate holdings. No one, anyway, is pocketing cash. Still, the high profile of the Masters, as an athletic competition and a cultural event, has often made Augusta National’s desire to be otherwise left alone seem risible, especially in light of the prominence—in business, in politics, in public life—of so many of its members. It’s a remarkable, if dodgy, achievement that the club has managed to maintain the private-public charade for as long as it has.

Augusta National opened in 1932. Its founders were Bobby Jones, the amateur golfing champion, and Clifford Roberts, a Wall Street stockbroker. Jones, an Atlantan, and a lawyer, with an English degree from Harvard and an engineering degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology, was, except for Babe Ruth, the era’s most revered sports figure, and is still considered, in the precincts where such mythologies pertain, the quintessence of the humble and graceful gentleman-athlete. As he grew disenchanted by fame and by competitive golf, Jones sought to establish a world-class private club in his home state—a winter course. Roberts, a flinty, fastidious martinet with a hardscrabble background and a knack for making himself indispensable to powerful men, befriended Jones and took up the cause. In Augusta, they found three hundred and sixty-five acres of a defunct commercial nursery called Fruitland, which had been owned and operated by a Belgian family called Berckmans. (The owner before that was a slaveholder, and some evidence suggests that slaves were housed on the property.) Jones and Roberts hired a British designer named Alister MacKenzie to lay out a course, and Roberts set about building a membership. At first, he had a difficult time getting more than a handful of men to join, owing both to the remote location and to the Depression. In the first decade, the operation was basically broke. The failure to attract members led Roberts and Jones to abandon grander plans—for squash and tennis courts, a “Ladies’ course,” a new clubhouse, and the development of estates adjacent to the links.

The tournament, first held in 1934, was Roberts’s gambit for attracting attention, members, and money. He persuaded Jones to come out of retirement to compete in it—an instant lure to fans and players alike—but at first Jones wouldn’t agree to calling it the Masters, finding the word too grandiose. A pivotal development, in the life of both the club and Roberts, was the membership of Dwight Eisenhower, who, at Roberts’s behest, first vacationed there with Mamie in 1948 and was thereafter besotted with the place, despite a rickety golf game. Jones’s health was declining, and Roberts adopted Eisenhower as his (and the club’s) principal means of advancement. Roberts served as Ike’s financial adviser and executor, and, after Roberts helped arrange his run for President, as his bagman. During his Presidency, Eisenhower made the club his Mar-a-Lago, visiting twenty-nine times; Roberts had a house built for him on the property. Eisenhower and his son were shareholders, along with other members, in a lucrative international Coca-Cola-bottling venture called Joroberts, run by Roberts and Jones, who were set up in the business by the Coca-Cola chairman and early Augusta member Robert Winship Woodruff, known as the Boss. Augusta National is still Coke country, although, in keeping with a Roberts edict of yesteryear, no brand names are visible at the concession stands.

The golf establishment tends to remember Roberts as a sour figure, a charmless tyrant, and a canny sycophant—the bad cop to the faultless Bobby Jones. Given access to the club’s archives, my colleague David Owen, in “The Making of the Masters,” from 1999, painted a more nuanced portrait of Roberts, from his dismal, itinerant farm-boy childhood to his death, by self-inflicted gunshot, on the grounds of Augusta National, in 1977, next to Ike’s Pond, which he’d had built for Eisenhower to fish in. Owen dismisses or, at least, parses some of the nastier Roberts legends. But, clearly, the club and the tournament owe their exacting standards and often peculiar, now widely venerated traditions to Roberts’s obsessive attention to detail and stubborn insistence on a certain way of doing things.

Because of him, the Masters is probably the best-run sporting event in the world. “They have established the gold standard in terms of the conditioning of the golf course,” Brandel Chamblee, the commentator and former pro, told me. “I’ve yet to encounter anyone who is curt or rude. I don’t know how you can find fault with this place.” A standard of etiquette, attributed to Jones and strictly enforced, is printed on the sheets that patrons carry around, with groupings, tee times, and a course map: “ ‘Most distressing to those who love the game of golf is the applauding or cheering of misplays or misfortunes of a player’—Robert Tyre Jones, Jr. (1902-1971), President in Perpetuity.” The concession stands run smoothly, and the prices are famously modest: a buck-fifty for a soda or a sandwich, four dollars for a beer. You could say that it’s a prelapsarian paradise, a dream of a bygone America of good manners and affordable delights. You could also say that this America never really existed, except as a figment of privilege and exclusion, and that the conjuring of it, on such a scale, is a kind of provocation.

“I always pick the sweetest ones.” Facebook

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As a televised event, the Masters is peerless. You don’t have to be a golf fan to enjoy it, or to enjoy napping in front of it. The apparatus for all this footage—the camouflaged camera towers, the buried cables, the hidden microphones—is hardly noticeable when you’re there. The club maintains tight control over the broadcast, and has been awarding one-year contracts to CBS since 1956. The Masters could fetch more on the open market, but Roberts, and subsequent chairmen, have exchanged higher rights fees for control, which, in the end, has enhanced the event’s prestige and ultimately its earning power. Originally, only the final four holes were broadcast. Later, coverage expanded to include the “second nine,” as the back nine is called at Augusta. (Jones felt that “back nine” evoked an image of one’s rear end.) Now the entire tournament is televised, and this year an app carried every shot by every player in the field. Because the players compete on what is more or less the same terrain, year after year, they do so in the context of bygone feats and failures, a folklore of shots made or missed, so that the way each successive champion tackles, say, the par-three twelfth is analogous to the way generations of folk musicians interpret “Long Black Veil.”