Why Is The Masters A Major?

From the verge of extinction to one of sport’s most celebrated events...

- Roderick Easdale

The Masters is the odd one out of the Majors in so many ways, not least because it is an invitational tournament with a small field and run by an elitist, secretive, private club. How, then, does it stand alongside open events run by golf’s governing bodies as one of the four ‘Major’ golf tournaments?

In the early years, the Augusta National Invitational Tournament – as The Masters was first known – was a little-regarded event held by a private club in desperate financial straits struggling to survive.

This was not how it was meant to be. The idea of the club’s two founders, New York investment banker Clifford Roberts and Bobby Jones, one of the greatest golfers of all time, had been to create a club for the rich elite which would host the US Open. There would be two 18-hole courses, 1,800 members and homes built on the site. None of these four things came to pass.

Funding issues 

Augusta had for decades been a popular winter destination for wealthy north-easterners, and the club had aimed to carve out a part of that market for itself – hence the National part of its name. It was not to be a locale for the locals.

The club had bought the land cheap from a hotel chain, which had purchased it from a plant nursery that closed in 1925. The plan had been to construct a hotel there, but the hoteliers ran out of money to do so, and ended up selling the land for a third of what they paid for it.

The club also struggled to raise the money to build what it had intended. It managed to build one course, although it defaulted in paying Alister MacKenzie, who died without remuneration for his most famous design.

Although Mackenzie’s course was clearly a good one, the United States Golf Association was not prepared to host the US Open in Georgia as the weather was too hot in June.