From Brent Kelley,
Your Guide to Golf.
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A. Nobody knows, including the membership at Augusta, because the club has never requested a USGA rating team visit the course to produce the ratings. Or at least, if they have, they've never admitted to it.

Course Rating and Slope Rating are staples of the USGA Handicap System, and they also serve as a guide to how challenging a golf course plays. Augusta National is one of the most private clubs in the world, and has apparently chosen to forego the USGA rating system.

However, there was a secretive effort in 1990, organized by the magazine Golf Digest, to rate Augusta National. The magazine found a handful of USGA raters who were planning to attend The Masters in 1990, and set up the sting: the covert ops rating team would prowl the grounds at Augusta during tournament week, secretly going through the ratings process.

The result? The unofficial findings of Golf Digest's covert ratings team was that Augusta National had a Course Rating of 76.2 and a Slope Rating of 148.

According to the magazine, that Course Rating, in 1991 (at the time of publication), was among the 10 highest in the U.S. And no course, to that point in time, had a slope rating higher than 148 (other courses have since rated as high as the maximum slope of 155).

The article is reprinted on the website of Dean Knuth, the inventor of the slope system. It can be read here. Keep in mind that Augusta National has undergone some lengthening since the time the article was written.

See Also:
What are the yardages at Augusta National during The Masters?

Return to Masters FAQ Index

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