Every April, television audiences watch the final-round drama unfold on Augusta National's 16th hole without realizing they are looking at the only hole on the property that bears almost none of Alister MacKenzie and Bobby Jones's original fingerprints. Golf Digest's Derek Duncan has laid out the strange, contested history of the par-3 "Redbud" — and the decades-long dispute over who deserves the credit for designing it.
"It's become an annual tradition each spring to ponder all the ways Augusta National has changed since it opened in 1933," Duncan said. "Every April, we gaze at photos from the earliest days and all its bare, rugged scruffiness, and when you compare those to the Garden of Eden we see on television today, it's hard to believe it's the same course. But for all the ways Augusta National has evolved, matured, and been modified, the shapes and concepts of the holes that Alister MacKenzie and Bobby Jones designed are still fundamentally recognizable. The essence of what those holes were from the beginning are still there, except for one."
That exception is the 16th. When Augusta reopened after the Second World War in 1946, club officials took a hard look at the course through tournament eyes and concluded that MacKenzie's original short par-3 simply was not pulling its weight on Masters week.
"Those eyes told them that the 16th, as much as the members liked it and as pretty as it was, had never quite been a satisfactory hole for tournament golf," Duncan said. "It was too close in both length and concept to the par-3 12th. They were both, at least originally, short irons over water into shallow greens that angled away. But the 16th lacked the infuriating winds and intimidation of the 12th."
To fix the redundancy, the club hired a young Robert Trent Jones — who would become the most prolific architect of the 20th century — to rebuild the hole. Jones dredged a basin, dammed a creek to create an artificial pond, and constructed an entirely new green. The project, Duncan argues, did far more than repair a weak hole. It marked a turning point in golf architecture globally.
"Before the 1940s, it was not common for architects to create artificial ponds and lakes on golf courses. And though he didn't invent the use of artificial lakes, Trent Jones's use of them here and at Peach Tree was influential. Man-made water hazards soon became a part of his repertoire, as well as that of basically every architect that came later."
What followed the completion of the hole in 1948 was one of the more bitter behind-the-scenes disputes in Masters history. Club chairman Cliff Roberts refused to give Trent Jones design credit, claiming the concept had belonged to Bobby Jones, and only acknowledged the architect's role in the 1970s, shortly before Roberts's death. Duncan says the hole speaks for itself.
"When you look at it, it's pretty obvious that Augusta National's 16th is a Trent Jones specialty. That's not to say Bobby Jones didn't consult or have his say, but Trent Jones's fingerprints are all over it. You've got a long, runway-style tee box, which was an RTJ signature in his early years. There's the constructed lake. It's got a huge modern green with high and low tiers and heroic and penal hole locations. Nobody else was doing it like this in 1948."
Trent Jones eventually settled the argument himself, in print. As Duncan put it, "The design, Trent Jones later wrote, was mine."
What the disputed architect built is, in Duncan's reading, not just a scenic par-3 but a precise scoring instrument. The green is shaped like a bean, tilted and split by a ridge that creates upper and lower tiers, which in turn allow for four distinct tournament pin positions used across the four rounds of the Masters.
"Today's 16th is uniquely designed to expose shaky shots," Duncan said. "Let's take a closer look at what makes it almost scientific in the way it controls scoring. The brilliance of the design is that it's really several greens in one, each equipped with a unique demand and a unique opportunity."
The most famous of those pin positions is the traditional Sunday back-left location, where the slopes feed toward the cup and turn a well-judged iron into a near-certain birdie — the setting for Tiger Woods's 2005 chip-in, Jack Nicklaus's 1986 charge, and any number of Rory McIlroy, Scottie Scheffler, and Jordan Spieth fireworks in recent years.
"The entire complexion of the hole changes psychologically when it's there because of the way the slopes funnel the ball down toward the hole. The players know that a two is likely if they just come close to hitting their number."
For a hole that was originally dismissed as redundant, the 16th has arguably produced more Sunday Masters memories than any other par-3 in major championship golf — thanks to a reluctant client, a forgotten architect, and a piece of construction that, eighty years on, still decides green jackets.
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*Originally published on [Golf News Global](https://golfnews.global/article/secret-history-augusta-national-16th-hole-trent-jones-design). Visit for full coverage.*
