Long Before Tradition Took Over, The Masters Had to Earn Its Place Among Golf's Biggest Stages

Mar 19, 2026, 4:30 PM CUT

The green jacket ceremony looks inevitable in hindsight, but it wasn't.

For years, Augusta National struggled to fill its own grounds before the tournament found its footing. One conversation later helped define what the modern Grand Slam looked like, and The Masters was part of it.

In 1960, Arnold Palmer and journalist Bob Drum were flying to Ireland for the Canada Cup, and they got to talking about what a modern Grand Slam might look like.

This version focused on professional golf rather than Bobby Jones’ 1930 Grand Slam, which included two amateur events. Palmer had already won The Masters and the U.S. Open that year, and he included both alongside the PGA Championship and The Open.

At the time, The Masters also had the biggest prize money. The winner got $17,000, which was more than the $14,400 paid at the U.S. Open.

That, along with Palmer’s run, started to change how people saw the tournament. Drum wrote about it, and the idea caught on. The British press picked it up at St Andrews, and from there, The Masters just kept getting mentioned with the biggest events in the game.

"One thing led to another," Palmer said. "Everybody picked up on it at St Andrews that year."

Around that time, Palmer and Drum helped frame The Masters as part of the modern Grand Slam.

But by the time that recognition started to take shape, Augusta National had already gone through years of uncertainty.

Before the Prestige, Augusta Was Struggling to Survive

The club was opened in December 1932 with 76 members instead of the 1,800 its founders had planned.

Bobby Jones and Clifford Roberts had originally wanted to host the U.S. Open, but it didn't go as planned. The United States Golf Association (USGA) declined because Georgia's summer heat made June staging impossible. So they built their own tournament instead.

It struggled financially, and the club defaulted on payments to course architect Alister MacKenzie, who died without collecting his fee. There was no substantial prize fund to start with. Members passed a hat around, and even that wasn’t enough.

The city of Augusta ended up putting in $10,000 for the 1934 event. They expected big crowds, around 20,000 a day, but it didn’t come close. It was closer to 1,000.

Things didn’t really pick up until 1939, when a local businessman, Alvin M. McAuliffe, got involved. That same year, the tournament was renamed The Masters, and ticket sales finally started moving through local businesses.

By the time people started talking about it as part of the Grand Slam, Augusta had already done the hard part. It wasn’t officially made a major. It just became one, because the tournament kept building something people couldn’t ignore.

Written by

Sneha Abraham

Edited by

Pulkit Prabhav