On Sunday, Augusta will become a tale of two cities. Up at the golf club, the year will reach its zenith and a new hero will emerge from a Southern Gothic scene to mark his brilliance surrounded by billionaires and bucket-list smiles. And a few miles away down in the parking lot at the James Brown Arena, Mike Garrison and his team of volunteers will park their shower trailers and clothes truck. Golf will always have a home here, but others are not so lucky.
The disparity between the hyper-exclusive grounds of Augusta National Golf Club and its near-neighbours is an eye-opener for any visitor who ventures past the generic malls of Washington Road, the garish Whole Life Ministries and the John Daly roadshow at the Top Dawg Tavern (it was reported he made $780,000 [about £588,000] one year when signing anything at the now bulldozed haunt Hooters).
In the past two years, surveys by WalletHub have damned Augusta. Out of 182 US cities, it was ranked 177th for job prospects, 181st for women’s safety and tenth for neediness, a label based on 28 indicators of economic disadvantage. The Rise Augusta education programme says more than a third of children in Richmond County are now living in poverty.
Elder, left, with Gary Player, centre, and Jack Nicklaus, right, was the first black golfer to play at the US Masters when taking part in 1975 Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images
Drive from the Augusta Country Club, the golf club’s neighbour, and you quickly see the stats brought to life. Mansions become shacks with worn sofas on porches. This is Sand Hills, where Tommy “Burnt Biscuits” Bennett grew up. He caddied for Tiger Woods at the 1995 Masters and has a mural to remember him. Fired by Augusta National for being late in 1997, the year Woods won here for the first time, he told me in 2022: “I haven’t been back for 25 years. I just don’t feel comfortable.”
The disparity of Augusta’s haves and have-nots is as marked as at any major sporting event. Garrison, who helps the Compass For Hope community organisation, says: “It’s a bit unfortunate that a lot of people reference Augusta as ‘Disgusta’, but it can be fitting at times.
“Every February there is a point-in-time count where they go around and try to physically count [homeless] people. Our numbers have gone up, but I could have said that without counting. We see a fairly constant population. There’s a lot of folks that we would call regulars, and some transient folks who you see for a while but then disappear — that’s a double-edged sword, because you wonder, ‘Is it good news or bad news?’ ”
Last year’s count found the number of homeless people had doubled to 1,098, including 395 children. The population is about 200,000. While this is not a golf club’s problem, the proximity of pain and pleasure is jarring.
Car parks and concrete: visitors are in for a shock if they venture beyond the malls of Washington Road…Sports Illustrated /Sports Illustrated via Getty Images
Daly, who never won the Masters, was reported to have made £588,000 one year when signing anything the public brought to him at HootersStan Grossfeld/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
It was made worse by Hurricane Helene, which hit the town in 2024, felling trees at Augusta National and destroying homes around the city. “It displaced a lot of people and we’re almost 18 months removed and still dealing with a lot of it,” Garrison says.
“The National is amazing in the way they recovered, but everybody else doesn’t have the resources they have. I think there’s some local people that resent Augusta National for that. There’s such a disparity, but I can tell you they do amazing things in the community and give away thousands of dollars every year. They obviously keep a lot of secrets and do what they want to do because money is no object, but they are a wonderful neighbour.”
Augusta’s exclusivity has sometimes been a source of rancorous controversy. In 2020 the census stated that the city’s population was 57 per cent black and 32 per cent white, but it took until 1975 for Lee Elder to become the first black man to play the Masters. Five years before that, a thousand black locals rioted in Augusta after a teenager died in police custody. The Pulitzer Prize-winning sports writer Jim Murray wrote: “The Masters is as white as the Ku Klux Klan. Everybody in it can ride in the front of the bus.”
The place of women has been another source of complaint. Martha Burk is now 84, but in 2003 she led a protest against Augusta National for having no women members. Burk was the chair of the National Council of Women’s Organisations, and called her political activist friend, the former presidential candidate Ralph Nader: “He had a 25-foot inflatable pig he used for demonstrations and I called him and said, ‘I want to borrow your pig.’ ”
In 2003 Martha Burk, bottom centre, borrowed a 25-foot inflatable pig from a former presidential candidate to lead a protest against Augusta National for having no women membersGetty Images
The pig went down to Georgia and Burk plastered it with the names of companies whose chief executives were Augusta members.
“We had to hold the protest in a muddy field away from the gates,” Burk says. “I had to get a bulletproof vest. The press outnumbered the participants, but we made a point of saying these people are comfortable with keeping women out of an all-male club that does business every day.
“The CEOs are not there to play golf, half of them probably don’t know how. They were there to make business connections and our point was women were being excluded from the powers that be.”
Burk says several CEOs and the Secretary of the Treasury resigned after the story segued into a storm, and Augusta National waited long enough for her organisation not to receive any credit before admitting some women members in 2012.
“After their initial flurry of letting a few token women in, they’re still stuck with about 2 per cent female members,” she says. “This thing will be on my gravestone, but it wasn’t about sport, it was about corporate power.”
Bennett, left, caddied for Woods at the 1995 US Masters, with the American winning the first of his five titles at Augusta two years later USA TODAY Sports
Should corporate power be obliged to help the wider Augusta community? The present club chairman, Fred Ridley, is undoubtedly more forward-thinking than his predecessors so the club now funds a women’s golf programme two miles away at Paine College, a historic university set up to serve black students in the pre-civil rights era, and has poured money into redeveloping The Patch, the old hardscrabble public course where Burnt Biscuits and Augusta’s old black caddies would gather to talk about old times.
According to Golf.com, Augusta National has also bought up $280million worth of neighbouring property in the past 25 years, largely for the dual purposes of parking and control.
Meanwhile, the Compass For Hope volunteers will be out in force as usual on Sunday, handing out toiletries, repairing bikes and washing clothes.
“The surrounding counties don’t offer much so the displaced find their way downtown because of the services,” Garrison says. “But there’s been a rise in housing costs that has caused people to find themselves homeless, and the urban sprawl has taken a lot of folks further out of the city.”
He likes golf and loves his city, but as the sports world feasts on what Rory McIlroy calls “the prettiest park in the world”, he knows it will be the best of times and the worst of times.
Where to watch the Masters on TV?
Sky Sports holds the exclusive broadcast rights in the UK, including for the par-three contest from 5pm on Wednesday. Coverage of the featured groups in the opening two rounds will begin at 2pm on Thursday and Friday on Sky Sports Main Event, before the full live action starts at 6pm. The weekend’s action will begin at 2.30pm on Sky Sports Golf with build-up and updates from the early starters, before the main coverage begins at 4.30pm.