From The Archives: Just How Tough Is Augusta?

Our undercover team does what the club won't do -- gives you the course rating

An undercover team first rated Augusta National as spectators outside the ropes at the 1990 Masters.

By Ross Goodner

April 1991

If adventurer Richard Halliburton thought it was tough hiding out overnight in the Taj Mahal, he should have tried getting past the guard at the Augusta National Golf Club. It's easier to get into Fort Knox. The Augusta National is America's best-known course, yet it is, paradoxically, one of the most private. Whether this attitude results from paranoia or an extreme desire for privacy doesn't matter. The important thing is that the attitude exists, and woe unto him who attempts to get information the club doesn't want revealed.

Take an innocuous item like the course rating. The U. S. Golf Association has be rerating the nation's courses the last few years to standardize handicaps and implement its Slope system, which became the law of the land on March 1. The USGA has ratings for virtually every course, including such ultra-private ones as Pine Valley, Cypress Point and Seminole. But does it have Augusta National? No way. The club's chairman, Hord Hardin, has said, "We don't need a handicap system. Our members already know each other's games."

To the editors of Golf Digest, this was like telling Edmund Hillary he couldn't try to climb Everest. We immediately began making plans to get the course rated on our own.

The first step was to contact those who had been rating courses regularly for the USGA. Then we had to find out which of them, if any, were planning to attend the 1990 Masters. It was obvious immediately that we couldn't pull the thing off at any other time--safety in numbers, you know--and it was equally obvious that we had to find official raters who already had Masters tickets, since getting tickets to the event is even tougher than getting the course rating. (We had a number of volunteers, most of whom thought we could get them tickets to the tournament. Fat chance of that.)

When the fateful day arrived (it was Thursday, the opening day of the tournament), our intrepid little group met near the big scoreboard and, with me riding shotgun, marched resolutely down the first fairway--outside the ropes, of course, along with several hundred others who were interested only in watching the players. We weren't doing anything illegal, but that knowledge didn't keep me from looking furtively over my shoulder while darting from tree to tree on the first few holes. As it turned out, nobody paid any attention to us, and the venture proved to be a pleasant exercise, during which our raters briskly went about their business.

Course rating, according to the USGA is the evaluation of a course for scratch players. (Courses are rated from forward tees, too, but that was beyond the scope of our mission.) The rating is expressed in strokes and decimal fractions of a stroke, and is based on yardage and other obstacles to the extent that they affect the scoring ability of a scratch player. It is done by considering 10 obstacle factors, each of them graded on a scale of 0 to 10, on each hole.

The rating criteria

1. Topography -- Difficulty of stance in the landing area and the vertical angle of shot from the landing area into the green.

2. Fairway -- The effective width and depth of the landing area, which can be reduced by a dogleg, trees or fairway slope.

3. Recoverability and rough -- The existence of rough and other penalizing factors in the proximity of the landing area and the green.

4. Out-of-bounds -- The existence of out-of-bounds in the proximity of the landing area and around the green.

5. Water hazards -- The existence of water in the proximity of the landing area and around the green.

6. Trees -- The strategic location, size, height and number of trees.

7. Bunkers -- The existence of bunkers in the proximity of the landing area and around the green.

8. Green Target -- The size, firmness, shape and slope of a green in relation to the normal length of the approach shot.

9. Green Surface -- The contour and normal speed of the putting surface.

10. Psychological -- The mental effect on play created by the proximity of obstacles to a target area.

Slope itself is a universal standard that enables a golfer to adjust his handicap to fit the difficulty of the course he is playing on a given day--i.e., at Pine Valley you'll get more strokes and at the local muny you'll probably get fewer. Obviously, to implement the system, it is necessary to rate every course in the country. Oh, yes. The Course Rating of Augusta National turned out to be 76.2, which puts it in the top ten toughest courses in the U.S.

How the course plays

Augusta National is a big, robust course with towering pines, dramatic elevation changes, broad fairways, and greens that are slicker than a bobsled run. The popular conception has always been that you can drive the ball anywhere; only the greens are a problem. On the contrary, the drives have to be hit to specific areas that will yield the best approach shots. If you don't hit the ball to the right spots on the greens, you can three-putt all of them.

How tough are they? The USGA calculates that adding the green surface ratings for each of the 18 holes on the average U.S. Open course produces a difficulty figure of 110, as compared with a figure of 72 for all U.S. courses. Augusta National's total is an astonishing 148, the highest in the country.

OK, so the greens are tough. Anybody who has watched Seve Ballesteros four-putt the 16th or has seen any number of players putt clear off the ninth can attest to that. But there is more to Augusta National. Let's take some examples.

The rating reveals that the toughest green to hit is the fourth, a 205-yard par 3 that has a wide, fairly shallow target guarded squarely in front by a large bunker. The hole resembles the 11th on the Old Course at St. Andrews, only longer. One wonders if Bobby Jones, during the building of Augusta National, recalled his won misadventures on the 11th, when he tore up his card and walked in during his first exposure to St. Andrews.