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Augusta National, Video Games, and “Hard Luck” Tony Sheehan
Eighth green, Augusta National, 1930s. Photo by Tony Sheehan. My Golf Digest colleague Ron Whitten and I recently spent a couple of days in Orlando with the video-game designers at Electronic Arts, the...
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Masters Countdown: Bobby Jones in Color
The photograph above was taken in 1947, during the next to last Masters that Bobby Jones competed in. His badge identifies him as Player No. 1. The photographer was apparently experimenting with an...
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Masters Countdown: Those Amazing Flowers
The photograph above shows the circle at the end of Magnolia Drive, in front of the Augusta National clubhouse. Everything is immaculate, including the green paint on the curbs—which is touched up...
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Masters Countdown: How Augusta National Almost Built a Golf Hall of Fame
Bobby Jones, 1941 Masters. The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum opened in Cooperstown, New York, on June 12, 1939, and the Professional Golfers Association responded by inducting several...
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Masters Countdown: The First “Green Coats”
Green jackets were first worn at Augusta National in 1937, but they weren’t popular. “The members were not enthusiastic at first about wearing a conspicuous Kelly-green garment,” Clifford Roberts, the...
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Masters Countdown: Cattle, Turkeys, and Prisoners of War
Soldiers from Camp Gordon, with WAC caddies, putting at Augusta National in 1942, before the club closed for the duration. You can see the clubhouse in the background. On Tuesday, I swapped spring...
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New Year’s Day for Golfers
The modern golf season never ends, but it does begin. When the first contestant tees off at Augusta National Golf Club on Thursday morning during Masters week, golfers all over the world reset their...
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Bobby Jones’s Father Makes a Masters Rules Decision
The Colonel. In the early years of the Masters, the club sometimes had trouble finding knowledgeable volunteers to serve as rules officials. “On one occasion,” Clifford Roberts, the club’s co-founder,...
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Masters Week Obituary
Photo: Augusta Chronicle. One of the best things about working on my book The Making of the Masters was getting to know Kathryn Murphy, shown in her home in the photo above. She first worked on the...
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Reader’s Trip Report: Annie Stegall’s First Masters
Annie Stegall and Will Stegall, Masters 2013. Will Stegall attended the Masters for the first time in 1993, when he was a teenager. “My grandfather would always give me a crumpled old copy of a Herbert...
View ArticleMasters Countdown: Tenth Hole
In Alister MacKenzie’s original conception of the golf course at Augusta National (shown above), the holes were numbered as they are today. MacKenzie’s thinking changed in 1931, before construction...
View ArticleMasters Countdown: The Plan to Demolish Augusta National’s Clubhouse
The original plans for Augusta National Golf Club called for two eighteen-hole golf courses—a Championship Course and a Ladies Course—plus tennis courts, outdoor squash courts, an eighteen-hole...
View ArticleMasters Countdown: Bobby Jones’s Father, the Great Flood, and the Eleventh Hole
The Masters tee on the eleventh hole was originally positioned above and to the right of the tenth green, not far from the seventeenth green. The hole ran downhill and played considerably shorter than...
View ArticleHow I Won the Masters, and So Forth
On Sundays during the majors, my friends and I pay homage to the big boys by using scorecards from the course where the major is being played. Usually, Hacker (real name) finds the card online and...
View ArticleMasters Countdown: Augusta National’s Worst Golfer Ever?
Here’s what Augusta National’s first green looked like during the first Masters, when the hole was still the tenth. That bunker was really more of a waste area. It was later removed, and a different...
View ArticleMasters Countdown: Why CBS Refused, for Sixteen Years, to Show Augusta...
The Masters first appeared on TV in 1956, on CBS. (NBC, which covered the tournament on radio, had turned it down.) CBS initially wanted to show little more than the eighteenth hole, but the club said...
View ArticleTracking Golf History With Google’s Amazing Time Machine
I first used Google Earth in 2004, before it was Google Earth. At the time, it was a subscription service called Keyhole Earth Viewer, and I used it while working on an article for the New Yorker about...
View ArticleReader’s Trip Report: Masters Junior Pass Program
On New Year’s Day, twelve members of the Sunday Morning Group played the Black Course at the Wheel, the best course that’s still open within an hour’s drive of our home club, which shut down the Monday...
View ArticleMasters Countdown: Why Isn’t Every Scorecard Like This?
Augusta National’s scorecard is different from every scorecard I’ve ever seen (I think). Can you spot the unique feature? You can read more at this blog’s official home, on the Golf Digest website. And...
View ArticleMasters Countdown: Clifford Roberts and the Thermostats
Clifford Roberts was a co-founder (with Bobby Jones) of Augusta National Golf Club, and he was the chairman of the Masters from its founding, in 1934, until his death, in 1977. The room he slept in is...
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