Augusta National Golf Club Review

Jones wanted a course a member could enjoy and a champion could not overpower, and he hired MacKenzie, who gave him enormous fairways, almost no rough and greens severe enough that the second shot decides everything. That idea survives, though very little else of the original does. Perry Maxwell, Robert Trent Jones, George Cobb and Tom Fazio have all worked here, trees went in down the eleventh and the fifteenth, a second cut appeared in 1999, and the card reached 7,565 yards for 2026 once the seventeenth was stretched to 450.

What has not changed is the second nine on Sunday afternoon. Amen Corner, meaning the eleventh green with its pond on the left, the twelfth playing 155 yards into a swirling wind over Rae's Creek, and the thirteenth turning left along the same water, is still the best stretch of championship golf anywhere, because every one of those holes offers a shortcut and charges for it.

Conditioning is a category of its own: the club shuts in late May, rebuilds whatever it feels like and reopens in October with turf no public course could afford to copy. Rory McIlroy won there in April 2026, a second year running. The value grade is not an argument about quality. There is no green fee, and membership is by invitation.