Augusta National Golf Club

Few clubs in the world need no introduction, and this one, on Washington Road in Augusta, Georgia, is perhaps the least in need of any. Founded by Bobby Jones and Clifford Roberts and opened in 1933 on the grounds of a former indigo plantation and nursery, it was shaped by Alister MacKenzie's strategic eye and Jones's own sense of how a great course should ask questions of a player. Every April the world's attention turns here for the Masters, the only major that returns to the same ground year after year, lending the place a continuity and ritual few venues can claim.

The course itself is inseparable from its horticulture. Holes are named for the flowering trees and shrubs that line them, and the back nine's Amen Corner, holes 11 through 13, threads along Rae's Creek beneath towering Georgia pines, producing swings of fortune that have decided championships. The land rolls more than television ever quite conveys, and the greens, famously quick and sharply contoured, demand a precision of approach and touch that rewards imagination as much as power.

Membership remains intensely private, extended by invitation only, and the club guards its traditions, from the green jacket to its quiet, unhurried pace of business, with the same discipline it applies to its turf. For the golfing world, Augusta National stands less as a facility to play than as a shrine to be studied, its lore built hole by hole over nine decades of championship history.