The Best Day to See Augusta National Isn't During Masters Week

Let’s start with the obvious: there is no bad time to be a patron at Augusta National. It is the most coveted ticket in all of sports. No other event has a yearly tradition where thousands mourn their ticket lottery rejection email. For the lucky patrons who get to make their way inside the gates, their time on the grounds becomes a pilgrimage of sorts, venturing into a spiritual experience for some.

You can count me as one of the lucky ones. I won the lottery back in 2017 and have had the privilege of covering the Augusta National Women’s Amateur the past four years. While it’s true that any time spent on the course is time well spent, I’d like to nominate early Saturday morning of the final round at ANWA as the best time to experience the course as a patron. Some may argue that you can’t beat Sunday at the Masters energy or the feel-good vibes of Wednesday’s Par 3 Contest, but in terms of seeing Augusta National, of taking in all it has to offer, the quiet and calm of the early hours at ANWA’s final round are unmatched. 

The main reason a sunrise walk on Saturday is the best of the best is simple. The course is essentially empty. The combination of fewer tickets allotted to ANWA and hoards of merchandise ghouls spending their first hours at Augusta in a never-ending line is the perfect recipe to see the course completely unimpeded.  No squeezing through crowds or stretching on toes to get a better view. Just wide open spaces and time to soak it all in. The first year I came to ANWA, I hustled down the 10th hole shortly after the gates opened. I made my way to Amen Corner and couldn’t believe I had the place all to myself. A smattering of chairs near the 12th tee was all that stood between me and the most famous par 3 in golf.

{{inline-article}}

The morning stroll became my routine after that first year. From taking in the insane scale of the MacKenzie bunker to staring in awe at the genius of the 14th green to marveling at how small the window off the tee at 18 is to wondering how anyone makes a putt on the fifth green, it’s about as good a walk you can get. Players are hours away from making the turn. There’s no traffic flow of patrons or cadence of waiting for shots to be played and greens to clear. You can linger wherever you’d like, see all sides of each green, and explore every angle the rope lines allow. Toss in the disconnected feeling you get with your phone nowhere near you, and it doesn’t take long for the therapeutic effects to take hold. 

These are the spots that define some of the most iconic moments in all of golf, where legends are made or where it all falls apart, sometimes both in a matter of minutes, as Rory McIlroy showed us last year. When Saturday afternoon rolls around, these holes will decide who gets to call themselves an Augusta National Women’s Amateur champion. Whether it’s your first time at Augusta National or you’ve been blessed to walk the grounds over and over, there’s no better way to kick things off and set the mood for a storybook day. No merch haul can match that.