What will happen to the land where the Augusta Hooters once sat?

PublishedNovember 17, 2025 5:42 PM EST•UpdatedNovember 17, 2025 5:42 PM EST

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And just like that, Masters week has officially changed forever. 

Excavators moved into the Augusta Hooters parking lot on Monday and destroyed what many considered to be pop culture holy land — a place where millions of red-blooded American men pilgrimaged each April to suck down draft beers, eat wings, chase waitresses, and reminisce about what they just experienced down the street at the world’s most prestigious private golf course.

With Augusta National’s property lines encroaching ever closer to the Hooters where John Daly set up his personal flea market for years, it’s not a huge shock that the excavators came calling. 

But it’s still hard to believe it’s all gone. 

augusta Georgia hooters torn down

(An excavator works on destroying the rear of the Augusta Hooters. Notice the front rock wall still standing like a monument.  (Photos via an anonymous Outkick reader))

(After being told he was no longer allowed to park his RV and run his flea market in the parking lot, John Daly sold his memorabilia in a small patio that you can see as the concrete pad in front of the wall that’s still standing.  (Photos via an anonymous Outkick reader))

Hooters in Augusta on Friday, June 28, 2024. © Miguel Legoas / USA TODAY NETWORK

What will happen to the holy land where the Augusta Hooters used to stand?

It doesn’t take a real estate genius to figure out that the Hooters footprint impeded on future Augusta National expansion. In 2019, the Wall Street Journal reported that the club had spent $200 million over the previous 20 years buying up “more than 100 pieces of land totaling no fewer than 270 acres.” 

To the east of the course, entire neighborhoods have been purchased and bulldozed. Outside of a Publix and some other random small-to-medium sized national brands, Augusta National already owns a massive swath of land. 

What will happen to the Publix? 

“Last year alone, a corporate entity connected with the club spent a combined $41 million on a pair of adjacent strip malls whose tenants include a Hooters restaurant and a Publix supermarket,” the Wall Street Journal noted. 

That’s right, Augusta National killed the Augusta Hooters. Not literally, but you get the picture. Monday’s official day of death had been planned for years. 

“Corporately, we plan 20 years down the road,” former Augusta National Chairman Billy Payne said in 2015. “We have plans for every couple years’ iteration going all the way out to 20 years.”

The death of the Augusta Hooters is a kick in the gut to the common man who wins Masters tickets

In 2024, I was lucky enough to find myself at a Tuesday Masters practice round via an unnamed source that I will take to my grave. He said all hell could break loose if the club ever found out. 

It was in that Augusta Hooters parking lot where I met my “source” for the badges. His final message went something like this: “Promise me you won’t act like jerk-offs at the practice round.” 

The “source” knew my buddy Kirk and I were about to go crush draft beers inside Hooters on a Monday night and act like hundreds of other morons who were inside the restaurant. It was Masters Week. Guys who went to the Monday practice round were falling down drunk off the cheap Augusta National beers. 

John Daly was inside holding court. Hooters brought in their A-Team from Atlanta, Myrtle Beach, Jacksonville or wherever they shipped them in from. I remember feeling like we were at the center of the golf universe that night. It felt like we’d made it in our golf lives. 

It was dingy. Cops were in and out to deal with the drunks. 

It was heaven. And now it is no more. Where will Daly move to? I don’t know. He hasn’t said, but it will never be like what it once was. It’s impossible. 

A famous philosopher once said, “Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.”