Dating back to Horton Smith in 1934, 57 different players have won the Masters. Though all Masters winners are made honourary members of Augusta National, only six-time winner Jack Nicklaus and four-time winner Arnold Palmer were invited to become full members of the game’s most exclusive golf club.
The differences in honourary membership and full membership are significant.
Honourary membership gets you an invitation back to compete in each subsequent Masters until such time as you no longer should, and to play in the Par 3 Contest long after. You can wear your green jacket whenever you’re on site, and play casual rounds, but you need to be accompanied by a full member, so even five-time winner Tiger Woods and three-time winner Gary Player can’t just invite themselves.
Full membership means a whole lot more than just having to rely on the goodwill of an existing member and being able to play a fourball of your own choosing. It means rubbing shoulders with titans of industry, with fellow legends of the sport, and both forming new connections and deepening existing ones with major power brokers in both global and sporting economics.
Nobody is going to tell Augusta National how to conduct its business, but I’d be surprised if Rory McIlroy doesn’t eventually join Jack and the late Arnie as winners who are offered the chance to become full members.
Tiger, for off-course reasons that have become all too apparent in recent weeks, may not, and Player was overlooked long before he began making no secret of his frustrations at not being able to play a round there with his three grandsons.
The Masters place in golfing lore was cemented long before McIlroy rocked up as a bushy-haired 19-year-old in 2009, and will continue to write chapters long after he’s hung up his clubs for good, but his decade-plus quest for the Career Grand Slam and the manner in which he finally overcame his demons last year will be some of the most interesting Masters chapters in years to come.
Now, as only the fourth player to ever successfully defend the title, he’s moved into even more exclusive company than he did when he became just the sixth player to win all four majors.
He’s said all the right things down through the years, and in the 12 months between his first and second victories, he paid tributes to both the club and the tournament’s history in the most befitting of ways.
While Augusta National and the Masters open the doors to the leading players on all the leading professional tours, to the winners of historic national opens, and to the champions of various amateur championships, its relationship with the PGA Tour has always been foremost. And no player went to bat for the PGA Tour more in its deepest hour of need than McIlroy, all of which won’t have gone unnoticed down Magnolia Lane.
And when it comes to success at Augusta National, who’s to say that he’s going to stop at two Masters wins?
Last year, he finally shed the shackles that threatened to imprison him eternally, and though he admitted that he now realises that winning the Masters is a monumental task with or without the Career Grand Slam shadow hanging over him, the manner in which he rebounded from his early final-round setbacks this year was made all the more possible by it.
Every year we see Fred Couples come to Augusta National and resemble a kid in a sweet shop. It’s his happy place, and for a short period at least, always seems to bring out the best in him.
Now, after years of anguish and torment, it’s become Rory’s happy place too. It’s not hard to envision him in his late 50s or 60s, no longer any sort of regular competitive golfer, coming back to Augusta National and having a run. In a decade, he’ll be eight months older than Jack Nicklaus was when he turned back time and won his 18th major championship and became the oldest winner in Masters’ history. Again, it’s not hard to imagine a world in which Rory eclipses Nicklaus there, though a decade can seem like a lifetime in the modern sporting landscape.
If the offer to become a full Augusta National member does come – and it’s an offer that he’d gladly take with both hands – it’s unlikely to arrive while he’s still an active tournament player, but how cool a storyline would it be to have one of the club’s own crowned champion?
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