He wouldn’t recognize the place. If Dr. Alister MacKenzie were alive today and you dropped him onto the grounds of Augusta National – arguably the most famous golf course in the world and inarguably the one for which the physician-turned-architect is most known – he might guess a dozen places before realizing he was on those old Fruitland acres off Washington Road.
That works both ways. Today’s players, even those who believe they know every nook and cranny of Augusta National, wouldn’t recognize the MacKenzie version of the place, either. But thanks to photography from 1935, taken before the playing of the second Masters, we can see extraordinary differences between what MacKenzie and Bobby Jones found on the ground and what the women in the Augusta National Women’s Amateur and men in the Masters will find in the next two weeks.
“The most stark and immediate difference you see is in the bunkering,” said architect and former tour player Bill Bergin, who provided GGP+ with the photographs. “If you look at those old photos of Augusta, any of the holes, really, the bunkering is totally different. The old bunkering is much more of what we think of as the MacKenzie style, wandering with a lot of fingers and unformed edges.
“If you look at early photos of (No. 13), it doesn’t look like the same hole. The bunkers behind that green meander up into the trees and off to the left side of the green. It’s a completely different visual from what you have now.
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The 1935 photographs of the famous 13th at Augusta show a much different bunker than the cavernous snow-white pits facing players today. And at No. 12 there once were stairs leading from the sand to the green.
“Manicured edging around bunkers is a relatively new thing,” said Bob Jones IV, the grandson of Bobby Jones, whom he called “Bub.”
“I know that my grandfather did not build Augusta National with the idea of perfectly manicured bunkers because even as late as the 1960s, when I have my first memories of going to the club, the edges were still pretty rough; not because they couldn’t afford to edge them but because that was how Bub wanted it. That was how it was supposed to be.”
No. 10 is unrecognizable. The bunker that is now in the center of the fairway was unstructured, meandering and greenside. The trees from which Bubba Watson hit his now-famous hooked sand wedge weren’t there in 1935. And even if they had been, Watson would have had a much different shot, as the green sat well forward of its current location.
“My grandfather did not mind trees so long as they played no strategic role in how a hole was played,” Jones said. “He believed that trees limited your options and in many ways made a hole play easier than it should. This was before yardage books or laser measurement. Players eyeballed distances. Trees made that easier. Bub wanted to feel the wind coming over trees in the distance but he never wanted them to be in play.”
Charles Harrison, one of the best amateurs in the world in the mid-1960s, confirmed that, saying, “When I was a boy, I planted most of the trees at East Lake but only after Jones stopped playing golf. He despised trees on a golf course.”
“If you think about the places Bub loved to play – Scioto, Inwood, The Country Club in Brookline when he was at Harvard, the Old Course at St. Andrews, Royal Liverpool, even Merion back at that time – there were not a lot of trees in play,” Jones IV said.
The other dramatic differences found in the old photos are the greens. The ninth green looks nothing like its current configuration, with two tongues diving toward a craggy bunker in front.
No. 4 had a false front reminiscent of Seth Raynor’s more diabolical par-3s. And 16 was a relatively short hole with a creek instead of a pond in front with bunkers well left of the putting surface.
“A lot of how greens were constructed back then had to do with the trajectory you hit shots,” Bergin said. “False fronts gave players a way to hit low runners onto the putting surface, which, a lot of times was the only way to play a hole. But the greens were not fast. You can tell by the undulations. When you see contours and slopes in an 85-year-old photograph, you know they were pretty severe.”
“Oh, yes, holes like (Nos.) 5 and 11 were definitely designed for the ball to run up onto the green,” Jones IV said. “My grandfather loved a golf course that crunched under his feet. He and MacKenzie designed those holes with the idea that the ball would land short (of the green) and run.”
MacKenzie died in 1934 at the age of 63, two months before the inaugural Augusta National Invitation Tournament. He never saw a round played on the course. Nor was he completely paid.
There are only a few places left in the world where you can find an original MacKenzie. The holes he designed at Lahinch on the west coast of Ireland are close to his original vision. The bunkering at Royal Melbourne in Australia remains true in form and philosophy if not MacKenzie’s exact design. Perhaps the only course that has kept every element of the doctor’s original work is Alwoodley Golf Club in Leeds, England. There the wandering bunkers, scruffy mounds and tongued greens give golfers a sense of the strategy and deception that the architect had in mind.
MacKenzie died in 1934 at the age of 63, two months before the inaugural Augusta National Invitation Tournament. He never saw a round played on the course. Nor was he completely paid.
“Can you possibly let me have, at any rate, five hundred dollars to keep us out of the poor house?” MacKenzie wrote to Clifford Roberts. “I am at the end of my tether, no-one has paid me a cent since last June, we have mortgaged everything we have and have not yet been able to pay the nursing expenses of my wife’s operation.”
MacKenzie died before final payment could be made.
So, should Augusta National, which has undergone changes throughout its history, go back to its originalist roots? Should there be more MacKenzie in MacKenzie’s most famous design?
“That’s a completely subjective question,” Bergin said. “But the idea that you can’t change or modify anything from the architect’s original plans is nuts. I mean, look at Pasatiempo (in Santa Cruz, Calif.). That’s another one of MacKenzie’s famous designs. He lived on that golf course and tinkered with it all the time. He was always making revisions, just like Donald Ross was always tinkering with Pinehurst No. 2. You can’t say that no one should change a golf course when the architect would have almost certainly changed it if he’d lived long enough.”
Jones IV agreed. “Augusta National wasn’t open two years before my grandfather started making changes,” he said. “Golf courses aren’t paintings that you finish and walk away from forever. They’re gardens. They grow, they evolve. They change. Bub knew that from the beginning.”
(Top photo: Alister and Hilda MacKenzie)