Some Of The Best Things Ever Said About The Masters
A subjective listing of the best reflections about a tournament unlike any other.
Time to jump-start our Masters prep!
I’ve put together some of my favorite things said or written about the tournament as a 2025 appetizer. Sorry, no raviolis here.
Unlike the Old Course one-liners edition a few years ago, this list lets the full context of the quotes breathe (when applicable). We try to stay clear of maudlin waxing about towering pines and flowering crab apples. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
After a fierce internal staff debate, The Quad staff decided not to debase all of these wonderful remarks by ranking them. However, these quotes are listed somewhat in order from favorites to very, very favorites. And I’ll happily take other nominations in the comments.
We kick off with a seemingly ho-hum Herbert Warren Wind passage that is the initial reference to holes 11-13, with an assist from Mildred Bailey and lyricists Andy Razaf and Danny Smalls. Enjoy!
On the afternoon before the start of the recent Masters golf tournament, a wonderfully evocative ceremony took place at the farthest reach of the Augusta National course—down in the Amen Corner where Rae's Creek intersects the 13th fairway near the tee, then parallels the front edge of the green on the short 12th and finally swirls alongside the 11th green.
HERBERT WARREN WIND
Almost everybody who has been to the Masters Tournament more than once starts calling it simply The Masters. Not the Masters, as though it were just the best of a lot, but The Masters—capitalized—the way you would for something that stands incomparably alone. For everybody, including people who have been going to it for years, is a bit in awe of the tournament's uniqueness.
CHARLES PRICE
Dignity is the keynote of the Masters Tournament, where the game of golf is elevated to the high position it deserves.
BEN HOGAN
Like the golf course itself, change at Augusta National takes the shape of a steady and quiet evolution, but the overall effect is one of gracious permanence that always makes coming here feel a little like coming home.
ARNOLD PALMER
More words are probably spoken—and certainly written—about The Masters each year before the event takes place and after it happens, than are spoken and written about other tournaments while they are going on.
CHARLES PRICE
A Masters credential with clubhouse-veranda golf course privileges is more valuable than a lung or kidney.
DAN JENKINS
No one quite knows how the Masters golf tournament became a “major.” The little world of golf looked up one morning and there it was on the doorstep marked, “Important. Refrigerate After Opening. Store with the British Open, the American Open, and the PGA. Keep out of reach of children.”
JIM MURRAY
Is it worth our trouble to have to listen to "patrons" for four days? The answer is yes. The alternative would be allowing CBS to control the content. Viacom, which owns CBS, doesn't care about golf. The Augusta National people care about golf.
FRANK HANNIGAN
The prestige of the Masters has made the club’s green blazer the most coveted adornment in golf—so much so that a modern golf fan has difficulty imagining that neither the club nor the tournament was a foreordained success.
DAVID OWEN
More than any other golf tournament, the Masters induces reflection and speculation. This is so, I would guess, partly because it is the only one of the four major championships that takes place annually on the same, evocative stamping ground…and partly because its customary position on the tournament schedule—the first or second week in April—makes it not only the first significant event of the year for the professional field but also a sort of special equinox for most American golfers and golf fans, marking the close of a long, gray winter of enforced cerebration and the arrival of another spring and another golf season.
HERBERT WARREN WIND
The dangers of sitting around at the Masters or any other golf tournament are numerous, for there are well-meaning but lacerating bores on all sides of you, always ready to pounce.
DAN JENKINS
It has been proven, at least to our own satisfaction, that those who patronize the Masters get more pleasure and excitement watching the great players make birdies than bogeys. It would be easy to set up Augusta National so that no one could break 80 on it. But, if this were done, we doubt if the players would like it. And we are certain such a policy would be unpopular with the patrons...most assuredly MacKenzie and Jones would have been disappointed if good scores by capable players had not been forthcoming.
CLIFFORD ROBERTS
For distant golf fans, the first glimpse of Amen Corner on TV is proof that winter is gone.
DAVID OWEN
The Masters did not set out to become a golf classic (that is a surefire way not to become one), but when it came by common consent to be regarded as precisely that, it did not shy away from the crown and all the honors and the headaches that go with it. If no other tournament now approaches it, the reason is not only that the Masters was built on the right fundamentals but also that it works more diligently than any other sports event not to overlook anything, however tangential or trivial, that can add to the pleasure of the occasion.
HERBERT WARREN WIND
Butler Cabin looks like a funeral parlor, badly lit.
FRANK HANNIGAN