“We are quite willing to have low scores made during the tournament.  It is not our intention to rig the golf course so as to make it tricky.  It is our feeling that there is something wrong with a golf course that will not yield a score in the sixties to a player who has played well enough to deserve it.”

So wrote Bobby Jones some 48 years – and 48,000 changes – ago, of his beloved Augusta National.

Speculation on what Jones (or, for that matter, his design partner Dr. Alister Mackenzie) might think of Augusta today has become an annual part of pre-Masters coverage, right up there with handicapping the favorites and wistfully recalling how Martha Burk went out with more a whimper than a bang.

Suggestions that Jones would be opposed to any alteration of the original design are flatly wrong; he was alive for – and largely presided over – numerous early changes, including the flattening of several greens, and the move away from the replica-style holes that once dotted the front nine. [Aside: how the often-cantankerous Mackenzie might have rolled with this is anybody’s guess.]  It is safe to say, on the other hand, that Jones certainly would not have embraced the rough which now flanks the club’s narrowed fairways (frequently removing a great measure of tee-shot strategy), nor the quasi-gimmicky tree-planting that came with it.

In any event, other then the color green, change has likely been the single most consistent theme at Augusta over the decades, so with apologies to readers of 2003’s Lost Links (from which I’ve adapted parts of this text) here’s an encapsulated look at the back nine, comparing how Jones and MacKenzie built it with what exists today.

Hole Number 10: Camellia   495 yds, Par 4  (1934: 430 yds) 
The 10th began life as a strategic, downhill 430-yard par four whose green was perched...  (Continue)