Masters Plan for Augusta National

Editor's Note: The following is a special feature courtesy LINKS Magazine
 
Great golf courses may be considered works of art, but their owners hardly treat them as such. While adding even a single brush stroke to the Mona Lisa or building another wing to the Taj Mahal would be considered unthinkable, their counterparts in golf are constantly undergoing revisions, redesigns and restorations.
 
No great course more reflects this trend than Augusta National Golf Club, which, especially in recent years, has evolved to the point where the original designers, Bobby Jones and Dr. Alister MacKenzie, may be hard pressed to recognize it. In addition to adding 520 yards since 1998, the club has narrowed landing areas by adding a “second cut” of grass as well as numerous trees.
 
The club has made these changes in response to the increasing distances that today’s best players hit the ball. And while Augusta National has stood pat in the past year, it has proved most willing of any club to alter its layout—both recently and over the years, during which numerous architects have left their marks on the course.
 
There’s no reason to think this trend won’t continue, and in that spirit, LINKS has asked several architects to provide master plans of how they would redesign or restore Augusta National Golf Club. In addition to their thoughts, several young architects—the future Doaks and Fazios—even have offered drawings of their visions. These plans, featured on the gatefold starting on page 71, are similar to what the architects would present to clubs’ green committees. They provide fascinating insight into architects’ thinking processes and help better understand the holes’ strategies.
 
The plan:
The idea of creating a long range or “master plan” has been a recent trend in golf course design inspired by years of committee tampering at some of the world’s great courses. The process is usually instigated by older golf courses looking to reverse decades of change to a master architect’s work. The selection process begins with presentations by the architects to a committee of the club’s leadership. Once hired, the architects analyze the design and receive golfers’ feedback.
 
Every architect handles the committee-driven process of long-range planning differently. Some rely on communication skills while others are not shy to break out PowerPoints and lavish drawings. “We generally don’t do drawings in our consulting work,” longtime restorer Tom Doak says. “Because we are trying to emphasize that our primary mission is to restore old features and so it is more appropriate to work from old photographs rather than new drawings.”
 
Now on his own, Mike Benkusky, a longtime associate of Chicago-area renovation specialist Bob Lohman, has a consistent approach to older layouts. “My philosophy is to throw out ideas on different plans and hope that the committee likes certain ideas on different plans. We then gather all of those ideas and put them onto one plan as our final master plan. I do not try to sway the committee one way or another on the ideas, but lead them through the process by pointing out the pros and cons of each idea and how it relates to the overall design of the golf course.”
 
Augusta National presents a unique challenge because of what happens in early April every year. “The difficulty in formulating a successful plan lies in the need to accommodate both tournament and member play,” says Bobby Weed, architect of several TPC courses. “We all know that technology’s greatest impact is felt by the best players, and that the gap between good and bad golfers is wider than ever. No other course in the world must address that issue as directly as Augusta.”
 
It’s curious to note that most of the architects polled recommended that instead of changing the course, the Masters should develop a tournament ball to prevent future obsolescence. In the meantime they offer a surprisingly consistent set of suggestions for the club.
 
Tee to green: restore options
Augusta National’s recent installation of the “second cut” along with liberal pine-tree planting led all of the architects we questioned to unanimously recommend that the club restore the design to the wider, less cluttered look that could be found during Tiger Woods’ 1997 victory.
 
“Our first step in any renovation work is to work on the non-invasive stuff—removing trees and getting the mowing lines right—and as you know, the club has been moving in exactly the opposite direction for the past several years,” Doak says.
 
Australian architect Mike Clayton, who co-designed Barnbougle Dunes with Doak, is a well-known MacKenzie aficionado doing extensive master plan and renovation work Down Under. “Worse than the introduction of rough has been the use of trees to redefine the strategy at holes like the 11th and the 15th,” says Clayton. “Rather than determining the strategy, the pines have conspired to take away the most interesting options and the resulting penal nature of the driving areas has done nothing to add to the thrills of Masters Sunday—to say nothing of the fun for the members. The holes may be harder but are they better?”