Word: tournamente
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Until 1999, Augusta, which hosts the Masters tournament each year over the second weekend of April, had no rough at all. Indeed, when its tournament committee finally introduced a light rough around some of its fairways, they couldn't bear to call it by its name, instead christening it "the second cut" of the fairway. Their squeamishness gives some indication of how ardently Augusta honors its idiosyncratic traditions. Most infamously, the club, which was founded by the legendary golfer Bobby Jones in 1933, didn't admit a black member until 1990, and for decades all of the caddies that...
...even as it clings - for better and for worse - to the past, the Masters has a gift for reinventing itself and embracing technological innovation. The tournament uses manual, not electronic, scoreboards, while simultaneously running a website offering up-to-the-second updates. Sandwiches at the venue cost no more than $2.50, even as tickets swap hands for hundreds outside the gates. Spectators are kicked off the property if caught using a cell phone, even though buried under the course's fairways are thousands of feet of high-definition television cable, irrigation pipes wired to an on-site weather radar...
Change has also been forced upon Augusta by a revolution in the game itself. When the Masters begins on April 10, competitors will play a course that is 520 yards (475 m) longer than the one that hosted the tournament in 1997. That was the year in which Tiger Woods, a prodigiously long hitter, ushered in golf's modern era with a score of 270, still a record in Masters history. His performance, remarkable in itself, also coincided with two other innovations: experts from defunct cold war ballistics programs began designing space-age golf clubs, and new video-analysis technology...
Augusta National responded by lengthening almost all of its holes, but it did so with a focus on maintaining what the tournament committee calls the "shot value" of each hole. According to this strategy, holes on which golfers would have hit a 6-iron approach shot 40 years ago were lengthened so as to demand the same club for the approach today. Butch Harmon, Woods' former swing coach, says this fixation on "shot value" robbed the tee shots on several holes of their nuance, since golfers do not need to draw or fade the ball with their drivers when they...
...wiser economically and environmentally to shorten the distance that a golf ball is allowed to travel. "I love that Augusta has succeeded in ensuring that players have the same experience there as I did," says three-time Masters champion and course designer Gary Player. "But the reason the tournament can adjust is because it has a massive amount of money. Wouldn't it make more sense to just change the golf ball rather than the whole course?" There's certainly some precedent for such a move: in 1986, changes were made to the aerodynamics of javelins amid fears that they...