Augusta National was a men-only club until 2012, when it admitted its first two women members, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and a businesswoman from South Carolina. (Since then, it has admitted at least two more.) Surprisingly, given both its history and the history of golf, the club actually owes much of its original conception to a woman: Marion Hollins, who in the late nineteen-twenties created a golf club that the founders of Augusta National initially treated almost as a blueprint.
Samuel F. B. Morse, a distant cousin of the inventor of the telegraph. Morse had acquired an enormous piece of property on the Monterey Peninsula, a hundred and twenty miles south of San Francisco, and Hollins helped him develop it. The centerpiece of Morse’s project was the golf course known today as Pebble Beach—but Hollins built him an even better one: the Cypress Point Club, two miles to the north. When Morse’s chosen golf architect, Seth Raynor, died shortly after beginning work on Cypress Point, Hollins replaced him with Alister MacKenzie, a British physician, who had collaborated on several courses in the United Kingdom but was barely known in the United States. MacKenzie credited Hollins—in a memoir that wasn’t published until many years after his death—with the design of Cypress Point’s most famous hole: the sixteenth, a par three, on which the ideal tee shot has to carry two hundred yards over an ocean inlet, from the top of one cliff to the top of another. Raynor had said that the shot was too difficult, MacKenzie wrote, so Hollins dropped a ball to the ground and showed him that it wasn’t. Cypress Point is currently No. 3 on Golf Digest’s biennial list of the hundred greatest courses in the United States; Pebble Beach is No. 7.
