Augusta National: Azaleas and a Long History of Exclusion

Every April, a private club on Washington Road in Augusta becomes the temporary center of the golf world. The azaleas bloom. Television cameras pan across immaculate fairways. The green jacket is awarded. Augusta National Golf Club and its Masters Tournament occupy a singular position in American sports, and the full story of how that position was built requires looking at both the genius and the exclusions that shaped it.

Bobby Jones retired from competitive golf in nineteen thirty, at twenty-eight years old, undefeated in the Grand Slam he had created by winning all four major championships in a single year. He wanted a place to play golf with his friends, quietly, without the press. He found property in Augusta, a former plant nursery called Fruitlands, and partnered with his friend Clifford Roberts and the Scottish golf course architect Alister MacKenzie. The course opened in nineteen thirty-two. The tournament now known as the Masters was first played in nineteen thirty-four.

The club was, from the beginning, exclusively white and exclusively male. No Black golfer appeared in the Masters until nineteen seventy-five, when Lee Elder qualified by winning the Monsanto Open the previous year. Leading up to his appearance, Elder received up to one hundred death threats. He rented two houses and moved between them throughout tournament week for his own safety. He shot rounds of seventy-four and seventy-eight and missed the cut. The tournament went on. Augusta National did not admit its first Black member until nineteen ninety, businessman Ron Townsend. Women were not admitted as members until twenty twelve, when former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and financier Darla Moore joined.

The golf at Augusta National is genuinely extraordinary. MacKenzie's routing, with its elevated tees, contoured greens, and strategic use of elevation change, is considered among the finest course designs in the world. Amen Corner, the stretch of holes eleven, twelve, and thirteen along Rae's Creek, has produced some of the most dramatic moments in golf history. The azaleas are real and they really are that vivid in April.

The full picture holds all of it: the beauty of the golf and the deliberateness of who was kept out of it, and for how long.