"Who own da Chiefs?"
Posted on 04/08/2026 12:40:47 PM PDT by Jacquerie
Augusta National Golf Club is probably the most prestigious golf club in the country.
There are millions of people all over the world who dream of just being able to step on the grounds.
There is so much history and information surrounding Augusta National that it can be hard to fully understand the impact that this place has had on the game of golf.
August National Golf Course is owned by Augusta National, Inc.
The Augusta National, Inc. is a for-profit institution that was created in Georgia back in 1935 when the course was first built.
The two original owners of Augusta National were Bobby Jones and Clifford Roberts.
These were the masterminds behind the building of the golf course, and they were able to create something that completely changed golf history forever.
Most private golf clubs are owned by the members, but Augusta National is not like that.
This is not a traditional equity golf club.
To get into Augusta, you will have to be invited, and it is not easy to get an invitation.
Once you are invited, you still need to pay a good amount of money for the initiation fee and the annual dues.
Most of this information about what the club costs and what members are paying from year to year is not released to the public.
The last time it was released, it could be estimated that the initiation fee was around $200,000, and the yearly dues were somewhere around $30,000.
When you get invited to join Augusta National, chances are you will have no trouble affording these high prices.
Most of the members of this prestigious place are some of the wealthiest people in the country.
One of the unique things about the club is that they don’t even keep a list of potential members or a waiting list for people.
Most of the time, the idea of a private club is to fill it to its maximum capacity so that it can properly function and pay for the operation.
This is not the case at Augusta, and it is extremely difficult to get in.
The property of the Augusta National Golf course has become quite valuable through the years.
It is currently estimated with a tax assessed value of $85,000,000.
If you are new to the world of golf, you may not have a full understanding of what it is that sets Augusta National apart.
The Masters Tournament is held every year at Augusta National, and it is one of the four major championships on the PGA Tour.
Unlike other championships that will change courses from one year to the next, the Masters Tournament is always played at Augusta.
This has helped to make sure that people are falling in love with the course from one year to the next and really learning each and every hole.
People understand the layout and design of the Masters more than any other course on the PGA Tour circuit.
A few years after the course opened, they hosted the first ever Masters Championships.
If you are a professional golfer, your chances of getting invited to be a member at Augusta are rather slim.
In history, there have only been two professional golfers who have been invited to be members at Augusta.
Those two golfers are Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer.
Only one president has ever been a member at Augusta.
This president is Dwight David Eisenhower.
Eisenhower was a very serious golfer who enjoyed the game perhaps just as much as the average golf fan.
Eisenhower played golf any chance he got, and he was quite good at it as well.
If you have not read about it, there is a lot of history about Eisenhower and golf.
He truly made the sport even more of an average person’s game and showed people all over the country that golf is both fun and accessible.
Eisenhower certainly took advantage of his membership at Augusta and tried to play there often.
After his membership, Augusta never invited another president to join the club.
"Who own da Chiefs?"
A man had two of the best tickets for the Masters. As he sits down, another man comes along and asks if anyone is sitting in the seat next to him. “No”, he says, “the seat is empty.
“This is incredible!” said the man, “who in their right mind would have a seat like this, the biggest golfing event of the whole world, and not use it?”
He says, “Well, actually, the seat belongs to me. My wife always would come with me, but she passed away. This is the first Masters we haven’t been to together since we got married.”
“Oh... I’m sorry to hear that. That’s terrible. I guess you couldn’t find someone else? A friend or relative or even a neighbor to take the seat?”
The man shakes his head.
“No. They’re all at the funeral.
I got to play Augusta as a guest of a member who wanrted to sell me his business. He was a member of several other pretigous courses and didn’t play Augusta often. We stayed in the Stevens cabin and got to handle Bob Jones’ clubs. You had to play with a member and we were the only foursome on the course. Rex the member said the yearly fees weren’t too bad as they made so much money from the Masters and the sales of memorabilia. Of course low fees to a guy with two coroprate jets is a relative thing. The course closes after the Masters and doesn’t open until October whem we were there. Summer isn’t good for the grass.
I don’t know. There is a lottery every year for a certain number of grounds passes and I entered every year for ten years - I wanted to take
My golf-nut Dad. But I never got selected. For all its elitism, The Master’s has kept prices quite low I understand.
My cousin’s grandfather was a retired banker and investor who played golf a lot, and he took my cousin and I one day to play the (public) Bethpage State Park Black Course on Long Island.
The grandfather shot a respectable 89. My cousin and I were both over 100 - I think I shot 112.
We were part of a required foursome with a Mr. McDonald. As we were finishing 18, he came over to my cousin and I, and said, “If I EVER see you two boys around here again, I will smash your heads in with this (driver) and strangle you with my belt”.
Some people take their golf very seriously.
Only issue is that the Masters is NOT on the PGA tour. It’s a private event for those who meet the criteria (winning or placing in other tourneys, playing well in other Masters, etc).
Otherwise, it’s one of the most beautiful places on Earth, andd, if you ever get a chance to go, do so. My Uncle lived about 1/4 of a mile from the 12th green (back up against the Augusta Country Club) and had been getting tickets from back in the 40s. He would let my Dad and I go use his tickets on Thursdays and it is an amazing place.
(I fear they don’t let you share tickets like that any more)
Only problem with that is “Duffers” never qualify except in stupid Hollywood movies.
I got a good laugh from that! I’m working a related event in Augusta right now, so I had to share that with the rest of the crew. Hopefully they find it funnier than my wife did ;-)
I went to the women’s Amateur on a Saturday before the Masters. We went to see the golf course, not the players, though they were very good. Augusta National is even more beautiful than it is on TV, which did not seem possible before being there.
LOL. That is soooo good.
There was a story about a first year member writing a letter to the president of Augusta with some suggestions for improvements. The president replied thanking him and revoked his membership. Its the ultimate snobfest. If you openly campaign for a membership like Bill Gates, you’ll never get in regardless of how much $$ you have. When the feminists were pushing for female members, CBS was fretting over advertisers so Augusta took over all support and I had (I think) IBM, Rolex as the only advertisers. Couple years later, they included Condoleezza Rice and Sandra Day O’Connor but Augusta will not be pressured.
The occasional qualifier does break through occasionally. Steve Jones won as a qualifier in 1997. Jack Fleck, a driving range pro, beat the immortal Ben Hogan back in the 50s. And Orville Moody won the US Open as his one and only professional win. The Open tournaments tend to bring out the journeyman - or even lower level - player who out of nowhere has that one magical week. The Master's is invitation only and a more limited field, usually 95 or so participants. And six to ten of those are past champions who have no chance of winning whatsoever. So it is said it is the easiest of the majors to win. But... courses for horses, one must have the right type of game - Lee Trevino for instance never did well at Augusta - and putt like a demon.
Best thing about The Master’s is that if you win, you get a lifetime exemption to come back and play.
Well played
Excellent! Maybe it is just my age, but seems like nobody tells jokes anymore.
When I was a kid, we told them endlessly!
It is interesting to look at the difference in humor between men and women-I always tell the story of watching my mom and dad at the breakfast table. They both drank coffee like fish and smoked like chimneys.
My mom was the talkative one with her Armenian and Italian blood. Dad with his English and French blood, was silent. He had been a high-functioning alcoholic his entire life, so his thoughts were largely an enigma to us onlookers.
My mother, however, was another thing altogether. You never had to wonder what she was thinking. She was right out with it.
My dad would be fairly deadpan, my mother animated and gesturing.
But later in life when he got sober, his hidden personality came out, and as his son, I found it delightful, especially not just that he had a sense of humor, but that his sense of humor had an unorthodox, dark twist to it that I had never suspected. I have the same thing, and I got it from him.
So, one morning after he got sober, I came down for breakfast (I was communing to College after the Navy) and they were seated at the kitchen table in the usual way. Him looking out the window at the side yard, smoking his unfiltered Pall Malls in one hand that he lit with an ever-present Zippo, and in his other hand, a ceramic mug of steaming hot black coffee. My mother was smoking a filtered mentholated Salem and had her coffee black too, except she put lots of saccharine in it.
This morning, she was very serious. As she told my father what my grandmother had related to, my Armenian grandfather (named “Nesses” a most Armenian of Armenian names) on my Mother’s side who lived with his Italian wife on the other side of town was starting to show signs of dementia. They slept in different rooms, and one night my grandmother woke up to see her bedroom door open, and my Armenian grandfather standing in the doorway, the stark ceiling light in the hallway rendering his silhouette in total black.
Now, my grandfather was nearly completely bald, and he had a physique exactly like Scatman Carruthers.
My grandfather was standing motionless as if indecisive, my mother said, and for some reason it struck terror in my grandmother. My mother was obviously upset about this serious matter, her cigarette smoke spurting from her mouth as she spoke, and her coffee mug bobbing up and down.
At that point, my heretofore quiet and solemn father lifts both hands together over his head as if holding an imaginary axe vertically above his head while holding it aloft with two ridiculously bony old man arms. His leathery face became a grinning-toothed rictus of a deranged man, and he boomed loudly in that small kitchen: “NESS THE AXE MURDERER!”
I had never seen my dad do anything like that, but it was absolutely the kind of inappropriate humor that occasionally got me into trouble as an adult.
How my mother glared at him! This was serious business (and it was, as anyone who has had to care for someone with dementia knows) but for some reason, my mother’s relating of the event triggered an irresistible impulse of inappropriate and twisted humor, and it looked to me (as it often has looked to myself) that it formed and just came out.
My mother had a seriously Neapolitan countenance, black eyes, black hair with a prominent widow’s peak in the front, and my God, did her eyes flash in anger at my father’s indiscretion. If you have heard the expression “If looks could kill” it was that, there.
It’s a little weird (but also something of a right-of-passage), finding out that your parents are real people ;-)
It was awesome. For me, my dad’s personality was quite constrained my whole life until I got out of the Navy. He was very quiet, very private. He didn’t talk much, and rarely used profanity. When he was angry, he would call us a “Dumb bunny” which makes us laugh today-what the hell was a “dumb bunny”?
When he retired from the Navy, my friends in high school found him very intimidating. They called him “The Commander” and it was said in absolute respect.
So, for me, it was great. Just great finding out who my parents were as individuals.
My mom was an open book! “Too much information!” But dad was close-mouthed. I never even knew who he voted for, but I figured it out easily enough later in life! That was a real joy.
That statement tells me you've never been to the Masters. My visit started when the gates opened up at 8AM. Four of us walked over to the 18th green, which had been roped off with about a 6' border from the green. We each unfolded our chairs and placed them on the first row next to the rope. We then proceeded to the 1st tee to watch the start.
Nowhere on the grounds did I see a blade of crabgrass or a piece of trash. A beer was $3 and a pimento sandwich is $1.50. The course is deceptive on TV. The 6th is a par 3 and relatively short and on TV looks like an easy 3. What doesn't come across in the picture is that there is a mastodon buried in the middle of the smallish green making one wonder how anyone holds a tee shot on the green, let alone make a putt of more than 8'.
Patrons (they are not called customers) are well-mannered and know the rules and etiquette of golf. At around 2PM, we walked back to the 18th hole to watch the pros finish. We walked over to our chairs, which were occupied, and asked if we could sit in our chairs. All four people rose, thanked us profusely for their use, and we sat down in our chairs.
I've been on some of the best course in the country and none even come close to Augusta. Everyone there seems to hold the same reverence for the course...it's magical.
Strict.
Mark Calcavecchia kicked out of Masters grounds — for using his phone
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