Augusta National continues to expand in its old age

Before the Masters, there was the Municipal. By the time they started building Augusta National up at the old Berckmans fruit plantation in 1931, the city’s public course had been open for three years already. And the man who manages the course today, Ira Miller, cannot hide his smile as he says it.

The Municipal is on a piece of land called The Patch, which it shares with a little airstrip. From the first tee, in Masters week, you can see the private jets lined up by the runway.

Tee-times are hard to come by in Augusta at this time of year, because everyone has got the bug. Miller says this is not the busiest week at the Municipal, because so many of his regulars clear out while the tourists come through. But it is the most lucrative. Normally anyone can play for $20.

But in Masters week Miller charges $50 to the out-of-towners. They say that the National’s founders, Clifford Roberts and Bobby Jones, chose Augusta as a venue because it was far enough south to be warm in the winter, but close enough to New York to reach by overnight train.

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For Jones, the appeal was that the place offered him privacy. In the early 1930s he was so famous that it got, Roberts said, so that “he couldn’t even plan a weekend game without feeling like he was playing in an exhibition”.

The Berckmans site was up on a hill above the city, surrounded by walls of tall loblolly pines. The perfect place “to develop a golf course and a retreat of such stature, and of such excellence, that men of some means and devoted to the game of golf might visit and play with kindred spirits from other parts of the nation”.

Those kindred spirits do not tend to spend too long downtown. There is a tension, then, between the club, its tournament, and the city that surrounds it. Of course the locals love the money it brings in.

Miller is not the only man who jacks up his prices in early April. This week one of the nearby hotels is charging $220 a night. Rooms normally go for $40. And you might say that is a bit steep given that it was recently condemned by health and safety inspectors , who visited it after two guests were arrested for running a meth lab in one of the rooms .

Traffic jams

A lot of the regular “patrons” – as the club insists on calling them – choose to rent private houses. The owners are happy enough to get out. For those that stay around, the Masters means seven days of traffic jams.

The boundary between the club and the town keeps shifting, as Augusta National spreads out in its old age. This year an entire road has disappeared. It was bought up to make room for the new press centre.

“The exact place where you are now sitting,” said the club chairman, Billy Payne, in his introductory press conference, “was directly on the centreline of old Berckmans Road.”

It was, Payne explained, the result of seven years of planning.

“People always ask us why we continue to improve our campus and our facilities, which are already considered by some as without peer in the sporting world,” said Payne, modestly. The answer, he explained, was “we simply know no other way”.

On TV, it seems Augusta National never changes, as if the place was pickled in the early 30s. The opposite is true. The club is always tinkering. And by buying up this stretch of land on the old Berckmans Road, it has made room for a couple more alterations.

As Payne said: “It’s fair to say, as is always the case, we are always looking at certain holes, certain other improvements to the golf course, and we talked about some of those, and I think they are all pretty obvious. We have a great opportunity now in that we now own the old Berckmans Road. It gives us the ability, as it touches certain holes, it gives us some way to expand or redesign – not redesign, but lengthen some of those holes, should we choose to do so.”

Payne was talking about the 5th, which is likely to play longer next year.

Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus have both raised concerns about the way the club keeps adding yardage to the course, though.

“My philosophy is the golf ball is what our problem is, not whether we move the 5th back,” Nicklaus said. “When the golf course is long, it just eliminates so many players from having a chance to play it. I’m never in favour of making the game longer.”

Less fun

In his recent book on the Masters, Woods wrote that “the course has changed in just about every way imaginable”, and not for the better. “You used to be able to create shots and find a way out of the trees. You could be inventive,” he wrote.

But the club have “reduced the options” and made it less fun to play.

While the players and fans fret over whether or not the changes are in keeping with the true spirit of the course designed by Alister Mackenzie, the neighbours have other stuff to worry about. Like where to move to. A lot of people had to make way to make the changes possible.

The club bought up dozens of nearby houses and businesses just so it could knock them down. Of course, the residents were handsomely rewarded for the inconvenience.

Augusta National was reportedly paying up to $1m for properties worth a quarter of the amount. And it is still buying. A neighbouring music shop just went for $5.35m, a mechanics for $6.9m. You get a lot of rounds at the Municipal for that. But not a start time at the Augusta National. It is one thing in the place that money can’t buy.

Guardian Service