How Augusta National gets put to bed each night of the Masters

AUGUSTA, Ga. — Twenty-eight-year-old Norwegian lad Kristoffer Reitan was doing exactly what you would do, were you a rookie at Augusta National, early on in Masters week. 

It was 6:10 p.m. and the Masters Witching Hour was well in motion. Spectators were finally leaving the ground — fat, happy and even a bit drunk — and were replaced, as they are every day, by an army of volunteers, staffers, security and grounds crew scurrying about on duty. They wove around each other like worker ants.

Reitan was living his best life, blissfully unaware and at the center if it all, playing chip shots from the back side of 15 green. A group of six maintenance staffers waited in carts near the next tee, eager to redress the turf that took a beating all day. Eventually they were told Sorry, move on by a gallery marshal. So long as player(s) are on the course, their work must wait. 

And wait they did, at times with one big shrug, because Reitan was supposed to be anywhere else. The course “closed” at 6 p.m. and Reitan was the lone player on property, slowly going about his business. The gallery marshal figured he would receive a reminder of normal working hours from one of the green jackets. Maybe he did; maybe he didn’t! 

The point of this article is something different: the morning rush of a dewy Masters day doesn’t compare to the fascination of its harried, evening finish. 

The witching hour begins right around when play ends, duh. But two-legged maintenance creatures seem to emerge naturally from the magnolias, as though they’d been crouching there all day. During tournament rounds, maintenance staffers are instructed to avoid any hole that could be seen in the background of television shots. That means the divots in the 10th fairway — vaguely visible through the trees right of 18 — can’t be replaced until the leaders finish, god forbid the folks at home see the workers on site.

Those divots get replaced with a fertilizing sand, which may seem normal for golf course repair. But this is not normal sand. It’s sand dyed the perfect color of green, filled in softly and stamped down, making it appear as if there was never any divot at all. Staffers scoop the sand out of black hand buckets using tiny Masters coffee cups, which are also painted the preferred shade of green. Augusta National is obsessed with Pantone 342. 

Talk to someone who has been to the Masters and they’re bound to repeat two specific sentences to you:

1. The attention to detail is stunning.

2. You have to see it for yourself.

Those boxes are constantly checked during this witching hour. Never better than by the young staffer wearing latex gloves, crouching down on his knees to pick up, by hand, each of the nine kernels of caramel corn that had been spilled. 

A Toro Workman cart arrives at Amen Corner with a pile of pine straw in its utility bed. More staffers mill around the cart, carrying trash bins and using trash picker tools to snag any pine straw bundles that have clumped together over the day. These are called “straw balls” one of the volunteer staff told me, and must be removed. “We’re just tryna beautify it for y’all,” he said. 

Counter to common belief, fresh pine straw is not brought in overnight, as that would likely have an obvious, different shade of burnt orange. What’s out there will stay out there, as long as it falls from the trees and doesn’t meander into the nearby rough. Any that is brushed into the grass is raked back into place. At the Masters, they believe in a separation of grass and straw.

They also believe in tranquility. Every step of this work feels purposeful. The push lawnmowers are handled like a pet, quietly picked up by hand and placed softly on the turf. The high schoolers tasked with cleaning the grandstands don’t get to use noisy leaf blowers. That would be easiest but much too loud. Instead, they race around with deck brooms, the kind you might use for a boat-washing business. 

Those brooms get flipped upside down in the bunkers, pulled like a rake to smoothen out the sand. The vertical faces of each bunker are then rolled to keep them compact. Finally, a third staffer steps in with an actual rake to even out any discrepancies. Luckily there are just 44 bunkers, but until Reitan walked past each one, they were not done for the night. 

In some ways, this felt like a golfy safari. A group of seven caddies grazed for information from the 9th fairway. Another pack of five studied the 18th. Any garbage clean-up crews hunted in pairs, one with a big green plastic bag chasing after another with the pickup tool. From a distance, you see a hose watering grass between the 7th and 3rd fairways, grass that will not see a golf ball all week, but will be mowed at least every other day to a very specific length, 1 3/8 inches, because that’s what the Masters ecosystem called for decades ago. 

All manner of Masters organisms dashed around each other. There’s the John Deere farmer’s tractor driving backward through the 2nd fairway. It has the might to lift 3,000 pounds, but at Augusta National it uses all its energy toward removing moisture with a turbine air blower. Then there’s the tiny, hand-pushed paint machine loaded up with that Masters green paint to mark the patron walkways. A new coat is applied to every hole every night. That’s to say nothing of the hundreds of mowers tidying up each blade of grass.

It’s hard to know how staffers earn these positions but they take them all very seriously, and if they do a good job, they often return to the same spots with the same tools a year later. But maybe next year, they won’t have a rookie keeping them there all evening. 

It wasn’t long before Reitan learned all he could from the 15th green and finally made his way to 16 tee, but he was still about an hour away from leaving the property. Maybe a dozen spectators encroached upon the tee, and maybe another dozen stood along the ropes nearer the green. Security had been ushering people to the North or South gates for quite a while. 

Reitan stepped up and gave whoever remained a show, tossing a smooth, striking draw at the hole, spinning it back inside two feet. It would have been the quietest ace in Masters history. But as is tradition on the 16th, particularly for first-timers, you’re not going straight from the tee to green. You must perform the skipping shot over the pond.

So there went the one man keeping Augusta National from being properly put to bed — at least for another hour or so — dropping a ball down and skipping it through the pond and into the greenside trap. Then he dropped another and tried again.