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Amateurs' Finest Hour
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© Historic Golf Photos The Ron Watts Collection
-Ken Venturi at the 1956 Masters
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The 10 best performances by amateurs in the Masters
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By
Michael Arkush
Amateur is not a term of derision at the Masters. Rather, largely due to the
example set by tournament co-founder Bobby Jones, amateurs leave Augusta much
richer in experience, if not in their wallets. They get to stay in the Crow’s
Nest in the clubhouse for the week and are feted during an annual dinner, one of
the Masters’ grand traditions. (The other pre-tournament dinner is the one with
a strict dress code: green jacket required.) Amateurs play practice rounds with
the game’s greats and are paired with past champions for the first two
rounds.
“That was living the dream for me,” says Matt Kuchar, who played the
1998 and ’99 Masters as an amateur. “The coolest thing was waking up in the
Crow’s Nest. You walk down these ladder-like stairs. You exit from what appears
to be a phone booth out into the main dining room, and people go, ‘Where did he
come from?’ And then you see this magnificent view of the big oak tree and the
putting green and the 18th green.”The amateur experience at the Masters
remains entrenched despite golf’s shift of power almost entirely to the
professional game during the past several decades, a trend reflected in the
number of amateur
invitees—from a high of 26 in 1966 to three this
year.
But no matter the number of amateurs in the field, there has been one
constant: None has won the Masters. A few have come close, and here are the 10
best amateur performances in tournament history.
____________________________________________ 1. Ken Venturi 1956
2. Billy Joe Patton 1954
3. Charles Coe 1961
4. E. Harvie Ward Jr. 1957
5. Frank Stranahan 1947
6. Ryan Moore 2005
7. Jack Nicklaus 1961
8. Robert Tyre Jones Jr. 1934
9. Richard Chapman 1954
10. Matt Kuchar 1998 
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