Fairways to Heaven: the Augusta Masters 2024

Home to the Masters, the first men’s Major tournament on the annual golfing calendar, the Augusta National course is as beautiful as it’s fiendishly difficult. And this year, thanks to the competition’s 25-year partnership with Rolex, Prestige was there to follow the action.

Around 200km east of the booming metropolis of Atlanta lies the small city of Augusta. Spread out westward from the banks of the Savannah River, which here marks the boundary between the states of Georgia and South Carolina, it’s a genteel southern town, slightly faded in parts and with an unfeasible preponderance (or at least to non-American eyes) of hospitals, clinics, churches and the edifices of multitudinous religious denominations, several of which, I’m sure, overlap in one great big Venn diagram. I might even have invoked the inevitable cliché “sleepy”, were Augusta’s peace not regularly interrupted by the rumble and roar of the supersized pick-up trucks that seem to be the preferred mode of transport in these parts – and by the hundreds of thousands of golf fans, who descend upon the city from every corner of the planet for around a week-and-a-half each year, to watch and simply immerse in the unique atmosphere of the Masters, which for the past 80 years has ranked among the four leading international tournaments on the sport’s annual calendar.

That Augusta has become a place of pilgrimage for Golfers everywhere is largely due to the efforts of the Georgia-born Robert Tyre “Bobby” Jones Jr, who in the 1920s was regarded as the world’s top player, and his Business partner and financial fixer Clifford Roberts. On Jones’s retirement from the Game in 1930, the two set about establishing a Golf club, taking over the site of a former fruit plantation on the outskirts of the city and hiring the services of a leading architect of the day – an Anglo-Scot named Alister MacKenzie – to help design a world-beating course that would combine fearsome complexity with astounding beauty. Those attributes have only been magnified over the nine decades since the Augusta National Golf Club opened to members in 1932; in fact, though much of Jones’s and Mackenzie’s basic layout remains unchanged, subsequent revisions to the topography, fairways, greens and other features mean that nowadays it’s a substantially different and considerably more difficult course to play.

Jones also quickly fulfilled his ambition to host a golf tournament. The precursor to the Masters – that name was adopted in the late ’30s – was first held in 1934 and by the end of the Second World War the competition had come to be seen as one of the top tournaments in the world. With the post-war growth in coverage of the sport in newspapers, on radio and then TV, the Masters entered its glory days, with international players seriously challenging American pre-eminence by the beginning of the ’60s. The South African Gary Player won his first Masters title in 1961 when he beat Arnold Palmer, golf’s acknowledged superstar at the time, whose dominance of the game was also soon threatened by the rise of fellow American Jack Nicklaus. Fast becoming known as the Big Three, Palmer, Player and Nicklaus together won countless international titles – including 13 Masters championships over a remarkable 28-year period between 1958 and 1986.

Those latter achievements of the three legendary golfers are celebrated on an enormous Rolex billboard that stands
outside the Augusta National course – and, indeed, it’s thanks to the Swiss watch manufacturer that I’m now making my own pilgrimage to this shrine of golfing greatness. When Palmer shook hands with the brand in 1967 he became the brand’s first Testimonee, with other players quickly following in his footsteps. Today Rolex’s rollcall of golfers includes Nicklaus and Player – sadly, the great Palmer died in 2016 – as well as later Masters champions Tom Watson (1977 and ’81), Bernhard Langer (1985 and ’93), Fred Couples (1992), José María Olazábal (1994 and ’99), Phil Mickelson (2004, ’06 and ’10), Trevor Immelman (2008), Adam Scott (2013), Jordan Spieth (2015), Hideki Matsuyama (2021), Scottie Scheffler (2022 and ’24), Jon Rahm (2023) – and, of course, the incomparable Tiger Woods (1997, 2001, ’02, ’05 and ’19).

At the same time, Rolex was also increasing its involvement with the game of golf in general, so that today it partners with all four men’s Major tournaments and five women’s Majors, leading tours both global and regional, and the Ryder, Solheim and Presidents cup team competitions, as well as helping foster the development of the game at the amateur level. As for the Masters, Rolex became formally involved as a partner in 1999, with this year’s tournament marking the silver anniversary of that relationship.

It’s because of that milestone that I’ve been invited by Rolex to Augusta as part of a small group of writers, every one of whom appears to be a walking compendium of knowledge about the game – with one singular exception: me. In fact, as I haven’t picked up a golf club in 27 years, I feel both impostor and interloper, though fortunately my journalist colleagues – they’ve arrived from various corners of the planet and include among their ranks an Irishman who continually doles out arcane facts and encyclopaedic insights into the game for our benefit – have the good grace not to display their disdain too openly. Not only does my four-day stay in Augusta introduce me to the history, traditions, splendours and, it must be said, marvels of the Augusta National and Masters tournament, but it also serves as a crash refresher course on the sport and culture of golf.

It would be fair to say that the Augusta National Golf Club remains something of a mystery. Ultra-exclusive and with
no formal application process – as with participation in the Masters tournament, membership is by invitation only – the club is said to have around 500 members, no list of whom has ever been made public. However, among the famous names who’ve worn the club’s distinctive green jacket are President Dwight D Eisenhower, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and Condoleeza Rice (I know this, because I saw the former US Secretary of State’s green-blazered figure standing at one of the tees of the club’s par-3 course), as well as Palmer and Nicklaus. Although members are able to use the course and the wonderfully cosy and colonial-style clubhouse (but only after announcing their intended ETA), Masters winners, who also receive a green jacket as well as an invitation to play in the competition each year, don’t enjoy such privileges. Put it this way: if you’re fortunate enough to be invited to join the Augusta National, you’re in. Big time.

As for the main par-72 course and the club facilities, which seem constantly to be in a state of improvement, though never while the public is around, to step into these hallowed environs is almost to enter a world of fantasy – or, as a lady manning the till in the club’s pro shop said to me as I was paying for a hefty haul of memorabilia (available, mark you, only on-site during the few days each year that the course is open to the public), “It’s Disneyland for adults.” Rarely, with the possible exception of Balinese rice terraces at sunset, have I seen greens of such vivid verdancy, grass so impeccably manicured, or azalea, jasmine and flowering peach whose dazzling pinks and yellows can only be described as psychedelic. And are those bird calls, which seem to happen with synchronised regularity, actually real? According to one of our on-hand experts, who points to a small cable running up the trunk of a tall pine tree, they’re piped through loudspeakers – and even the cones and needles strewn beneath the branches are said to be trucked in.

Located in a zone that’s well beyond the merely pretty, the main course’s 18 holes, each of which is named after a flower or shrub, are also murderously difficult to play, and even to walk its 6.9km length, which involves a number of steep inclines, is no mean feat in the hot Georgia sun. Today’s golfers may be ripped athletes compared with their predecessors of two generations ago, but when such strenuous exercise – there are no golf carts here – is combined with accurately driving a ball thousands of yards up a fairway time and time again, well, it’s no wonder the 48-year-old Woods, who’s still recovering from major surgery some two years ago, looks tired and drawn as he walks close by me between the 1st hole and the 2nd tee.

As well as elevations, dog-legs, wickedly placed bunkers and fiendishly undulating greens, where a ball landing tantalisingly close to a hole will then gently – and infuriatingly – roll away into the longer grass, there’s also the notoriously difficult Amen Corner, which comprises parts of the 11th and 13th holes and all of the 12th, involves a particularly nasty water feature and, as I’m sitting there, has winds blowing in two contrary directions. The nemesis of many a top player, it’s probably the most thrilling section of the course and a must-see for any Masters “patron” (as members of the public are known) – and it goes without saying it’s also one of the most picturesque.

Not to put a finer point on it, Rolex spoils us rotten during our visit to the Masters, getting us access to parts of an unbelievably impressive operation that would be firmly out of bounds to anyone else. After a visit to the vast press centre, which offers every conceivable – and possibly inconceivable – convenience to a moderate-sized army of international journalists, we’re then taken to the communications centre, a state-of-the-art facility whose array of technology probably outstrips that available to the leaders of several First World countries (and don’t forget that, as with the press centre, the shops and the restaurants, it only functions for a couple of weeks a year).

And then there’s Berckman’s Place, which occupies a corner of Augusta National that once housed a plant nursery owned by a Belgian of the same name. A private dining and shopping complex within the campus, it can be accessed by anyone willing to shell out what’s said to be an enormous daily sum. For that, they get the privilege of free food and drink, and the chance to play on four replica putting greens – though if they head into the pro shop to stock up on the obligatory Masters merch, it’s credit cards out and Business as usual.

If all that weren’t enough, Rolex has also arranged for us to meet three of its most distinguished golfing honourees, Masters champions who are here at the course to take part in the ceremonial tee-off of the 2024 tournament. Off-course, and the morning before the competition begins, we’re taken to meet Player, who at the age of 88 seems as hale, hearty, outspoken and cheeky as ever. Over breakfast he flirts with the ladies, regales us with stories of his life and career, and then, on a more serious note, talks of his concerns that technological advances are transforming the game for the worse. As the next day we’re also introduced over lunch to the 84-year-old Nicklaus and Watson, who at 74 is a relative youngster, we can’t help but put Player’s views to the two of them. Nonsense, retorts Nicklaus, as combative as ever towards his old adversary – and, like the other two former champions who join him at the tee-off ceremony, to prove he’s lost none of his fire he fairly whacks the ball down the fairway.

By the time you read this, of course, you’ll know that 2022 champion and Rolex honouree Scheffler convincingly won this year’s Masters from the Swede Ludvig Åborg, with an impressive final score of –11 – and with what in the early stages looked like a possible victory for Bryson DeChambeau eventually whittled down to sixth place with a tally of –2. Woods, on the other hand, made it through to the end to his 26th appearance in the Augusta tournament with an eventual 16-over score of 304, yet the crowds still craned necks to see and cheer him on for the five-times champion he is, fervently hoping that by some Masters magic he’d somehow pull it off all over again (and if you want to experience a real tingling in the spine, read Tiger’s letter written to the chairman of this former bastion of conservatism after he’d won his first title, the original of which hangs in the Augusta clubhouse). Maybe next year? What’s certain is that if he can still walk the course, hold a club and hit a ball, Woods will be back. It’s who he is and what he does.

Such is golf – and there’s no point in a blow-by-blow report on a tournament that by now is history. What I will say is that I’ve just experienced sport at its finest, with many of the world best facing off against each other in the most challenging and gorgeous of settings. It’s been a tournament for the ages – I’ll even risk an appalling pun by calling
it Masterful – and thanks to Rolex and its long-term support not only to this tournament but to the game itself, I’ve been able to appreciate these fairways to golfing heaven in a manner I’d never have dared imagine.