At the Augusta National Women’s Amateur, a Changing of the Guard—And a Changing of the Game

If you golf—or if someone close to you does—you’ve likely heard of the Augusta National Golf Club. Aside from its status as the host of the Masters Tournament every year since 1934 (the 2019 tournament kicks off today), it is perhaps the most famous private golf club in the world, with its members including Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Condoleezza Rice—among many other movers and shakers who also happen to be drivers, chippers, and putters.

Want to be a member of Augusta National? Don’t ask—literally. (Membership is by invitation only.) Want to attend the Masters? Good luck—most tickets are family heirlooms passed down from generation to generation. (Grounds passes for this weekend’s final rounds are currently going for anywhere between $2,000 and $10,000 each on the resale market—which is, of course, frowned upon.)

If you don’t know Augusta National, though, the above summary will do little by way of helping you understand its place in the hearts and minds of golfers the world over. Picture instead some combination of Wimbledon, Graceland, and Versailles but with a sublimely honed landscape of thousands of loblolly pines, dogwood, live oaks, magnolias, the first and largest wisteria vine in the United States, and more than 30 varieties of azaleas—the flowering shrub, in fact, owes its popularity to the agronomist and horticulturist Prosper Julius Alphonse, who ran the nursery that predates the golf club on the site—and you’re getting closer.

And while the story of Augusta National is entwined with the history of golf itself—from Byron Nelson and Sam Snead and Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus to Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, all of them Masters champions—on the Saturday before the Masters, I witnessed a very different sort of golf history as the club hosted the first annual Augusta National Women’s Amateur.

Why history? In 2002, the club became the focus of worldwide attention for its refusal to admit female members. Two members resigned in protest of the club’s position, and because of the pressure felt by corporate sponsors of the Masters, the 2003 and 2004 tournaments were broadcast without commercials. After holding their line for a few years, though, Augusta National welcomed their first members—Rice, along with the investor and philanthropist Darla Moore—in 2012.

With the high-profile debut of the ANWA tournament, which featured 72 players from Moscow and Bangkok and Florida and Italy and Texas and South Korea and Paris and California and, yes, Georgia, among many other locales—the final round was broadcast live on NBC on Saturday afternoon—Augusta National seems to be embracing the future not just of the women’s game but of golf itself.

“It’s historic,” said Annika Sorenstam, the retired Swedish American who ranks as the winningest woman golfer of all time. “I’m very proud.” I was chatting with Sorenstam and Lorena Ochoa—the pioneering Mexican pro who took Sorenstam’s place at the top of the rankings and held on to it longer than anyone in history—about the significance of the tourney and Augusta National’s embrace of women’s golf. “These girls [playing in the tournament] understand the importance of this week,” Sorenstam continued. “They understand that this is monumental. And a lot of them are influencers in their own peer groups, so this is going to have so much effect coming down. Augusta National is putting all their efforts into it—I haven’t seen such social media for junior golf than I have in the last week or so. It’ll have a huge impact. Fifteen years ago, only 15 percent of all junior players were girls. We’ve doubled that, and 15 years from now, I wouldn’t be surprised if we’re at 45 percent. You need this kind of big elephant, so to speak, to push things forward.”

The other elephant in the room, so to speak: Rolex. While the world of corporate sponsors for athletic events is always a fragrant bouquet of flowering annuals, it’s virtually unheard of for a single company to plant deep-rooted perennials not just on the terrain of event sponsorships but throughout the landscape of an entire sport for more than a half-century. Aside from a two-decade-long partnership with Augusta National on the Masters and the Masters Tournament Foundation (which has in turn cofounded the Asia-Pacific Amateur Championship and the Latin America Amateur Championship), Rolex sponsors the U.S. Women’s Amateur, the Ladies’ British Open Amateur, the U.S. Girls’ Junior, the Girls’ British Open Amateur, the Rolex Rookie of the Year and Player of the Year awards, the Rolex World Rankings, and the Rolex Annika Major Award. For starters. (We’re not even mentioning the ranks of top men and women professionals—both active and, in the case of Sorenstam and Ochoa and many others, retired—the scores of tour events, or the various cup competitions the company backs, nor their deep involvement with more grassroots and regional aspects of growing the game.)

As young girls playing what was then still largely a boys’ game, Ochoa and Sorenstam differed wildly in their styles and temperaments: When, at the age of 11, Sorenstam discovered that winners of junior golf tournaments had to give a speech, she started dropping putts to purposely finish second. (When tournaments got wind of this, they simply required the top two finishers to give speeches, and Sorenstam suddenly got over her shyness. “I think golf teaches you a lot about character,” she told me.) Ochoa, on the other hand, simply declared, at age 12, that she wanted to be the best golfer in the world. (“You have to be brave,” she says.) With no other girls to golf with, she and a friend simply played with a group of 20 or so boys. “Some people thought we were crazy,” Ochoa says, “but it never bothered us—I just tried to beat the boys, to make them mad by hitting the ball farther than them. And today there are hundreds of Mexican girls playing and competing: The president of my local club told me recently, ‘Look what you’ve created!”

Just after sunrise on the morning of the final round of the ANWA, I met up with a Rolex representative for a walk-through of the legendary course, and as we eventually make our way out toward the course’s back nine, we’re left almost to ourselves to take in the sublime Amen Corner, an ecstatic riot of azaleas and rolling greens and historic footbridges over Rae’s Creek that exists as a kind of Valhalla among the golf obsessive. (Players have been known to scatter the ashes of loved ones here after their souls have departed for the—no doubt disappointing in comparison—fairways of heaven, though obviously the club discourages this.)

Later, my guide points out the Eisenhower Cabin off to our right near the 10th tee and the practice putting green, which functioned as a Camp David–like retreat for our 34th president. (A local sportswriter has written, diplomatically, that President Eisenhower “wasn’t known for his skills as a golfer”—and it’s worth noting that when the president, after repeatedly hitting into an enormous loblolly pine stuck smack in the left-center of the 17 fairway, proposed at a 1956 club meeting that the tree be removed, the chairman ruled him out of order and immediately called the proceedings to a close.)

Making our way back to the clubhouse, we run into the legendary Hall of Famer Nancy Lopez (as one does, of course). Along with Sorenstam and Ochoa and Se Ri Pak, Lopez hit the ceremonial first tee shots to open the final round of the ANWA tourney a few moments earlier, and she’s overwhelmed with emotion at the significance of it all: Women—young, amateur women—golfing on the world stage at Augusta National, with all the pomp and circumstance (and national and international exposure) that entails. “Do you know how cool this is?” she asks us, wiping away tears of joy. (Tears, it should be noted, along with enthusiasm and emotion, are part and parcel of Augusta National. What’s not allowed, though: Yelling; applauding or cheering a player’s mistakes or misfortune; running; cell phones, cameras; jeans; selfie sticks.)

I’m told that no visit to the club is complete without tasting their signature pimento-cheese sandwich, and soon we’re taking our seats on the gated lawn outside the clubhouse underneath a green-and-white-striped umbrella. In short order, a green-jacketed Condoleezza Rice squires a group of her friends to the next table over, and soon we’re all off to the Georgia-peach-ice-cream-sandwich races.

Soon we received word that the players were marching up the 18th fairway en route to what promised to be a photo finish, and we took our seats next to the bunker flanking the green. When Jennifer Kupcho nailed a 30-foot birdie putt to win the tournament by four strokes over Mexico’s Maria Fassi, the throngs of fans surrounding the 18th green leapt to their feet; Kupcho and Fassi hugged, wept, hugged some more. Soon, Kupcho was raising the Tiffany & Co.–designed trophy over her head in front of a sea of green-jacketed Augusta National members arrayed on the lawn. In a few days, she and Fassi would begin their day in Manhattan on the Today show and end it on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. And while the gallery was overcome with emotion, Kupcho was a master class in composure (only later did we learn that Kupcho endured a migraine on the back nine so severe that she played three holes with blurred vision).

“I think,” she said, calmly, “that we’re really starting something great.”