Amen Corner at Augusta National: Holes 11, 12 and 13
What Amen Corner at Augusta National is: the 11th, 12th and 13th holes beside Rae's Creek in Georgia, and why the Masters so often turns there on Sunday.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished The Masters24 min read
- Holes
- 11th, 12th and 13th
- Named by
- Herbert Warren Wind, 1958
- The 12th, Golden Bell
- 155 yards, par 3
- Water
- Rae's Creek
Four balls went into Rae's Creek in roughly twenty minutes on April 14, 2019. Francesco Molinari, who was leading the Masters, hit one. So did Brooks Koepka, Tony Finau and Ian Poulter. Tiger Woods, standing on the same tee with the same 155 yards in front of him, aimed well left of the flag, found the middle of the green and made a par that effectively won him the tournament. All of it happened on one short hole at the bottom of Augusta National Golf Club.
That hole is the middle of Amen Corner. The name covers three holes in a row at the lowest point of the property in Augusta, Georgia: the par-4 11th, called White Dogwood, the par-3 12th, Golden Bell, and the par-5 13th, Azalea. Rae's Creek runs through all three. Strictly, the man who invented the phrase meant a little less than that, the second shot at the 11th, the entire 12th and the opening of the 13th, but the wider meaning is the one players and broadcasters use.
Where Amen Corner is, and the narrower thing the name first meant
Augusta National falls steadily from the clubhouse to its southeastern corner. The 10th hole drops down the hill, the 11th keeps dropping, and by the time a player reaches the 11th green he is at the bottom, standing beside a pond with Rae's Creek behind it. The 12th tee is a few steps away. The 13th tee is tucked into the trees behind the 12th green. Then the course turns and begins climbing back.
Those few acres are the corner. For the full card, hole by hole, see our guide to every hole at Augusta National, with pars and yardages.
| Hole | Name | Par | Yards | The hazard that defines it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 11 | White Dogwood | 4 | 520 | A pond tight against the left of the green |
| 12 | Golden Bell | 3 | 155 | Rae's Creek across the front of a shallow green |
| 13 | Azalea | 5 | 545 | A tributary down the left and across the front of the green |
| The stretch | Amen Corner | 12 | 1,220 | Water in play on every approach |
What Herbert Warren Wind actually wrote
The original definition was about shots, not holes. When Wind coined the name in 1958 he was describing the far corner of the course where Rae's Creek comes into play, and the usual reading of his meaning is the second half of the 11th, the 12th and the first half of the 13th. Accounts differ on how much of the 13th that takes in. Some say only the tee shot, others the first two shots, which on a par 5 with water in front of the green is a meaningful difference.
It hardly matters now. Nobody at the Masters distinguishes between the 11th tee shot and the 11th approach when they say a player is "heading into Amen Corner," and the club itself uses the name for all three holes. The narrow version survives as a point of pedantry and as a reminder of what Wind was looking at: the places where a ball can get wet.
- 520Yards, 11th hole
- 155Yards, 12th hole
- 545Yards, 13th hole
- 12Combined par
Yardages as listed by Augusta National for the Masters after the 13th was lengthened in 2023. Tee and hole positions vary the playing length from day to day.
Herbert Warren Wind, a jazz record and April 1958
The phrase is younger than the course by a quarter of a century. Augusta National opened in the early 1930s, the Masters was first played in 1934, and for more than twenty tournaments nobody called this stretch anything in particular.
Wind was the most admired American golf writer of his generation, and in April 1958 he was covering the Masters for Sports Illustrated. His report ran in the issue dated April 21 under the headline "The Fateful Corner." He wanted a name for the place where the tournament had been decided, something with the ring of baseball's "hot corner" or football's "coffin corner," and he reached for a memory from his younger days: a jazz record called "Shoutin' in That Amen Corner."
"Amen corner" was already an American expression, and a church one. It meant the pews near the pulpit where the most fervent members of a congregation sat and answered the preacher out loud. The song borrowed the phrase, Wind borrowed it from the song, and a piece of Southern church vocabulary ended up attached to a golf course in Georgia.
There is a wrinkle, and it is a good one. Wind later attributed the record to a band led by the clarinetist Mezz Mezzrow. Researchers who went looking for that record could not find it, and the conclusion generally accepted now is that Mezzrow never recorded the tune and that what Wind remembered was a mid-1930s version by the Dorsey Brothers Orchestra. So the most famous place name in American golf rests on a slightly misremembered record label. Wind, a meticulous man, would not have enjoyed that.
The name did not catch on at once. It spread through the 1960s as the Masters became a television event and as Arnold Palmer, whose win the article described, became the most watched golfer in the country. By the time color cameras were showing the azaleas behind the 12th green, announcers had a phrase ready.
The embedded ball behind the 12th green that started it
What Wind was writing about was a ruling, and people are still arguing over it.
Sunday, April 6, 1958. Heavy rain overnight had left the course soft, and the tournament committee had put a local rule in force allowing a player to lift and drop a ball that plugged in its own pitch mark. Palmer, 28 years old and without a major championship, was at the top of the leaderboard and playing alongside Ken Venturi. At the 12th his tee shot flew the green and buried in the bank behind it.
Palmer believed he was entitled to relief. The official on the hole told him he was not and that he would have to play the ball as it lay. Palmer disagreed, gouged the ball out, and made a double-bogey 5. He then went back to the spot, dropped a second ball under the local rule, and played that one out for a 3. Two scores, one hole, and no one sure which counted.
He walked to the 13th tee not knowing whether he led the Masters. His response was to hit the par 5 in two and hole the putt for an eagle 3. Several holes later word came from the committee that he had been entitled to relief and the 3 at the 12th would stand. He won by a single stroke over Doug Ford and Fred Hawkins.
- The tee shotPalmer's ball flies the 12th green and plugs in the rain-softened bank behind it.
- The ruling on the spotThe official on the hole denies relief and tells him to play the ball as it lies.
- Two ballsPalmer scores 5 with the original ball and 3 with a second ball dropped under the local rule.
- The 13thUnsure of his score, he reaches the par 5 in two and holes the eagle putt.
- The committee decidesSeveral holes later he is told the relief was proper and the 3 counts.
The sequence as recorded in accounts of the round. The point in dispute is the third step, on which Palmer and Ken Venturi gave different versions.
Why the argument has never been settled
Venturi's objection, which he repeated for decades and set down in a 2004 memoir, was about timing. As he told it, Palmer played the original ball first, made the 5, and only then announced that he would play a second. The Rules of Golf have long allowed a player who is unsure of the correct procedure to complete the hole with two balls, but the decision has to be made before he makes a further stroke, not after he has seen how the first ball turned out. Palmer always maintained that he had made his intention plain before playing.
There is no film that settles it, and both men are now dead. The committee, which included Bobby Jones, ruled for Palmer on the day, and that ruling was final. Under the modern Rules the principle is the same: the choice to play two balls must come before the next stroke. Our explainer on how golf's penalty strokes are applied covers the general framework. On the facts of 1958, the honest position is that two honorable men remembered the same five minutes differently, and one of them got a green jacket out of it.
The 11th, White Dogwood: a par 4 that plays like a short par 5
Ben Hogan's line about this hole is the best strategic summary anyone has offered. If you ever saw him on the 11th green in two, he said, you would know he had missed his second shot.
He meant that he aimed right of the green on purpose. The 11th is 520 yards, longer than plenty of par 5s on other courses, and it runs downhill through a chute of pines to a green with a pond pressed against its left edge and Rae's Creek behind. A long iron from a downhill lie to a target with water left is a shot with one very bad outcome. So the sensible play, for seventy years, has been to favor the right side, accept a chip from the closely mown bank there, and try to get down in two.
That bail-out area is where Larry Mize was standing in 1987. Mize, who grew up in Augusta, was in a sudden-death playoff with Greg Norman after Seve Ballesteros had gone out at the 10th. His approach to the 11th drifted well right, leaving him something like 140 feet from the hole with the green running away toward the water. Norman was on the fringe with a long putt for birdie. Mize bumped a sand wedge into the bank, watched it run across the green and saw it go in. It is the most replayed chip in the tournament's history, and it was played from the spot Hogan recommended.
The playoff hole it used to be
For a long stretch the 11th decided Masters playoffs, because sudden death began at the 10th and moved here second. Nick Faldo won two in a row on this green: in 1989, when he holed a long birdie putt in near darkness to beat Scott Hoch, and in 1990, when Raymond Floyd pulled his approach into the pond. Since 2004 the playoff rotation has used the 18th and the 10th, so the 11th has lost that role. Whether that is a pity depends on how one feels about championships ending with a ball in the water.
What the pond replaced
The water left of the green is not original. Rae's Creek once curled around that side of the putting surface, and in 1950 the club reworked the hole, moving the tee down and to the left of the 10th green and building the pond. Before that the 11th played as a shorter hole bending the other way. Nearly everything about it that players fear today dates from that change or from the lengthening that followed.
The 12th, Golden Bell: 155 yards and no reliable wind
On paper it is the easiest shot on the course: a short iron from a level tee to a green with no forced carry beyond a narrow creek. Professionals hit that club to ten feet in their sleep.
Two things undo them. The first is the shape of the green. It is wide from left to right and extremely shallow from front to back, and it sits at an angle to the tee, the left side nearer and the right side farther away. Rae's Creek runs across the front. One bunker sits between the creek and the middle of the green and two more are cut into the bank behind. A right-handed player's natural misses line up badly with that diagonal: the pulled shot tends to fly longer and the pushed shot shorter, so a ball leaking right toward the traditional Sunday hole location is also the ball most likely to come up short. Short means the bank, and the bank is shaved so that a ball landing on it rolls back into the water.
The second is the wind. The tee and green sit in a hollow ringed by tall pines, at the point where the 11th, 12th and 13th fairways meet. Air moving down the corridor of one hole collides with air moving along another, and what the player feels on his face on the tee is frequently not what is blowing sixty feet up, where the ball spends most of its flight. Players have a ritual about it. They look at the flag on the 11th green and the flag on the 12th, which are a short distance apart and often pointing in different directions, and at the tops of the trees behind the green, and then they wait for a moment when all of it agrees. Sometimes it never does.
The result is a club-selection problem with no tidy solution. The difference between an 8-iron and a 9-iron is roughly ten yards, and the green at its narrowest is not much deeper than that. A player who guesses the wind wrong by one club is in the creek or in the back bunker facing a shot down a slick slope toward the water. The advice usually credited to Jack Nicklaus is to ignore the flag entirely and aim over the front bunker at the center of the green, whatever the hole location. Woods did precisely that in 2019.
Almost nobody is brave enough to do it with a one-shot deficit and seven holes to play. The pin on the right is close, the club is short, and the urge to attack is what the hole is designed to exploit.
Through the 2026 Masters three players have made a hole-in-one here in the tournament: Claude Harmon in 1947, William Hyndman in 1959 and Curtis Strange in 1988. That is a small number for a 155-yard hole across some ninety tournaments.
What the 12th has done on Masters Sundays
The list of damage is long enough that a table is the kindest way to present it.
| Year | Player | Round | What happened at the 12th |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1980 | Tom Weiskopf | First | A 13, with five balls in Rae's Creek |
| 1992 | Fred Couples | Final | Tee shot stopped on the bank short of the water; he saved par and won |
| 2016 | Jordan Spieth | Final | A quadruple-bogey 7 with two balls in the creek, after leading by five at the turn |
| 2019 | Four contenders | Final | Molinari, Koepka, Finau and Poulter all found the water; Woods made par and won |
| 2020 | Tiger Woods | Final | A 10, with three balls in the water |
Weiskopf's 13 remains the highest score recorded on the hole, and he is reported to have followed it with a 7 there the next day. He was one of the best ball-strikers of his era and a four-time runner-up at Augusta.
Couples in 1992 is the exception that proves how the bank normally behaves. His ball landed short, on the slope, exactly where everyone else's rolls back. It stuck. He has never claimed to know why, and neither does anyone else; the usual guess is that rain had left the grass a fraction longer and softer than normal. He chipped up, made his 3 and won by two.
Spieth's case is the cruel one. He was the defending champion, had led after every round, and went to the 10th tee on Sunday five shots clear. Bogeys at the 10th and 11th cut into that. At the 12th he pushed a 9-iron into the creek, dropped, hit the next one fat into the water as well, sent his fifth into the back bunker and got down in two from there. A five-shot lead had become a three-shot deficit in about forty minutes. Later that evening he had to help Danny Willett into the winner's coat, a duty explained in our guide to who keeps the green jacket and who presents it.
Woods's 10 in November 2020 was the highest score he had made on any hole in his professional career. He then birdied five of the last six. The hole gives nothing back, but it evidently does not take everything.
The 13th, Azalea: the decision from a hanging lie
The 13th tee is the most secluded on the course, set back in the trees behind the 12th green where no patron can stand. A player who has just escaped Golden Bell, or failed to, gets a minute of near silence there before hitting one of the most important drives of the round.
The hole bends hard to the left around a stand of pines. A tributary of Rae's Creek runs down the entire left side and then cuts across in front of the green. The fairway tilts from right to left, toward the water, so a ball in the ideal spot leaves the player with the ball above his feet. That stance encourages a right-hander to draw the shot, and a draw is the wrong shape for a green that sits behind a creek and wants something high and soft. Four bunkers wait behind the green, and from them the next shot is downhill toward the water.
So the hole asks a question twice. On the tee: how much of the corner to cut. In the fairway: whether to go for the green in two. Bobby Jones, who built the course with the architect Alister MacKenzie, wanted exactly that, a par 5 where a player would have to make a real decision every time he played it.
The 35 yards added in 2023
For years the decision had been getting too easy. Modern players were bending drivers and 3-woods around the corner and reaching the green with middle irons; in 2014 Bubba Watson hit a drive there so far over the trees that he had only a wedge left. The club had bought land from the neighboring Augusta Country Club, and for the 2023 Masters it built a new tee roughly 35 yards farther back, taking the hole to 545 yards.
The effect has been what the club intended. More second shots are now played with long irons and hybrids, more players lay up, and going for the green has become a risk again instead of a routine.
Mickelson from the pine straw
The shot people remember here was hit from the wrong place entirely. In the final round in 2010 Phil Mickelson, leading narrowly, drove into the trees on the right and found his ball on pine needles with two trunks between him and the green, a little over 200 yards away across the creek. The percentage play was to chip out. He hit a 6-iron through the gap to about four feet.
He missed the eagle putt. People forget that. The birdie was enough, and he won by three, but the shot's reputation has outgrown its result. Jeff Maggert did better on paper in 1994, holing his second for a double eagle, one of a handful in Masters history. The other side of the ledger includes Tommy Nakajima's 13 in 1978 and Curtis Strange's ball in the creek in 1985, when he was leading on Sunday and decided to go for it.
The Hogan Bridge and the Nelson Bridge
On the afternoon before the 1958 Masters began, the club dedicated two stone bridges in this corner. Wind opened his article with the ceremony. It is one reason his attention was on this part of the course in the first place.
The Hogan Bridge crosses Rae's Creek to the left of the 12th green and is the route every player takes after hitting his tee shot. It commemorates Ben Hogan's winning total of 274 in 1953, which was the lowest 72-hole score the tournament had seen to that point and stood as the record for more than a decade. Hogan won the U.S. Open and the British Open the same year.
The Nelson Bridge crosses the water by the 13th tee and marks something more specific to the location. In the final round in 1937 Byron Nelson came to the 12th trailing Ralph Guldahl. Nelson made a birdie 2 there and an eagle 3 at the 13th. Guldahl, playing the same two holes, took 5 and 6. Six strokes changed hands in two holes and Nelson won his first Masters. No plaque on the property describes Amen Corner more accurately.
A third bridge elsewhere on the course, honoring Gene Sarazen at the 15th, had been dedicated a few years earlier, so the idea was established. There had been an older crossing down here as well: during the Second World War, when the club was closed and the grounds were given over to raising cattle and turkeys, German prisoners of war held at a nearby Army camp built a wooden bridge over Rae's Creek that lasted into the 1950s.
Only players, caddies and officials walk the Hogan Bridge during the tournament. Patrons are kept on the near side of the creek. The walk across is therefore one of the few moments in a Masters round when a player is truly out of reach of the gallery, with a few hundred yards of grass and water between him and the nearest spectator, and many have said it is the quietest place they ever stand in a major championship. The applause for a good shot arrives late and from a distance.
Why the scoring swings at Amen Corner are so large
Take the three holes as a set and the arithmetic explains itself. The first is one of the hardest par 4s on the course. The second is a short par 3 where a double bogey is always one gust away. The third is a par 5 that the field plays under par. A player can reasonably make 4-3-4 through the stretch, or 5-5-6, and neither sequence requires anything freakish.
By those long-run figures the 11th ranks with the 10th as the hardest hole at Augusta, the 12th sits among the top handful despite being the shortest, and the 13th is the easiest or very nearly so. Hard, hard, easy. No other three-hole run on the course spreads the field that widely.
The averages understate it, because averages flatten the tails. What matters on a Sunday is the range. At the 13th the realistic outcomes run from 3 to 7. At the 12th from 2 to 6. Two players tied on the 11th tee can be five shots apart on the 14th tee without either of them doing anything a spectator would call a disaster: one eagle, one water ball, and the tournament has a new leader.
Position in the round does the rest. These holes arrive with six or seven left, late enough that a lead is worth protecting and early enough that there is time to lose it. A leader plays the 12th trying not to make 5. A chaser plays the 13th needing a 3. The course setup behind that kind of pressure, firm greens, chosen hole locations, shaved banks, is something our explainer on the four dials that set scoring on a golf course goes into.
It is also why the Friday version matters. The stretch can cost a player his weekend as easily as his jacket, and the line it pushes him toward is described in our guide to the Masters cut after 36 holes.
How the corner has been altered since the 1930s
Augusta National changes its course constantly and announces it sparingly. Amen Corner has had as much work as anywhere, with one conspicuous exception.
| When | Hole | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| 1950 | 11th | Tee moved left of the 10th green and the pond built beside the 11th green |
| 1958 | 12th and 13th | Hogan and Nelson bridges dedicated |
| 2002 | 11th and 13th | Both tees moved back as part of a course-wide lengthening |
| Mid-2000s | 11th | Lengthened again to 505 yards; pines planted right of the fairway |
| 2022 | 11th | Tee moved back and left to 520 yards; trees thinned on the right and the fairway reshaped |
| 2023 | 13th | New tee about 35 yards back, to 545 yards |
The 11th has been pulled in two directions. Each time it was stretched, the bail-out right became a longer and less appealing shot. In the mid-2000s the club planted pines down the right of the fairway to narrow the drive, which drew criticism from players who thought the hole had lost its options, and the 2022 work took a number of those trees back out and reshaped the ground so that a drive pushed right now runs away from the ideal line instead of being blocked. That is a more interesting kind of punishment.
The 13th's green complex has been rebuilt more than once, with the ground behind the green and the channel in front both reshaped over the years. The details of those projects are not all public and accounts vary, so it is safest to describe the direction: each revision has made a missed second shot cost more.
A flood forced some of the work. In the fall of 1990 a tropical storm sent Rae's Creek over its banks, washed out the 11th green and damaged both bridges. The club restored everything in time for the following April.
Then there is the 12th. Its listed yardage has barely moved since the course opened, and it is 155 yards now. The green has been repaired and reshaped at the edges over the years, and its bank adjusted after flooding, but nobody has built a back tee or changed the angle of the shot. Every other hole in the corner has needed lengthening to keep pace with equipment. The 12th never did, because its defense was never distance.
Rae's Creek and the lowest ground on the property
The creek was there long before the golf. It is named for John Rae, who held land along it in the eighteenth century and died in 1789. It runs along the southeastern edge of what became the club's property on its way toward the Savannah River, and when Jones and MacKenzie routed the course over a former plant nursery in the early 1930s they sent three holes down to meet it.
What the creek contributes is partly visual and mostly psychological. It is not wide. At the 12th a decent amateur could throw a ball across it. But it is everywhere a nervous shot would go: behind the 11th green for the approach hit too hard, in front of the 12th for the one hit too softly, and beside and in front of the 13th for anything pulled or short. The designers used one modest stream to threaten four different misses.
Under the Rules of Golf the creek is a penalty area, so a ball in it costs one stroke and the player chooses where to play next: from the tee again, or from a point back on a line that keeps the spot where the ball crossed the water between him and the hole. At the 12th that second option is harder than it sounds. It leaves a partial wedge from a downslope to the same shallow green, with the same water in front, hit by someone who has just watched a ball sink. Spieth's second ball in 2016 was that shot.
The low ground matters for another reason. Cold air and moisture settle here, the trees keep the sun off parts of it for much of the morning, and the wind that confuses players on the 12th tee is a product of the same bowl. The corner has its own weather.
The flowers that make it the most photographed spot in American golf are not an accident either. The site was a commercial nursery before it was a course, each hole is named for a plant that grows along it, and the bank of azaleas behind the 13th green is the one most people picture when they think of the Masters at all.
Where patrons watch Amen Corner
There is one place to see it from, and thousands of people head there the moment the gates open.
Behind the 12th tee the ground rises into a hillside, and the club puts a large grandstand on it. From that stand and the slope around it a patron looks straight down the 12th hole across the creek, with the 11th green and its pond just to the left and the players walking off over the Hogan Bridge. It is possible to watch approach shots land on the 11th, every tee shot at the 12th, and the putting on both greens without moving.
What cannot be seen well is the 13th. The tee is back in the trees beyond the 12th green, visible at a distance as a group of small figures, and the hole then bends away out of sight. To watch second shots into the 13th green a patron has to walk around to a different area farther up that fairway.
Nobody is allowed across the creek. That is why the 12th green is seen only from 150 yards away and why the reaction to a putt there is oddly delayed: the people watching are a full short-iron back and judging by body language. Phones are not permitted on the grounds during the tournament, so there is no checking a screen to confirm what just happened. The crowd works it out together.
Getting a seat takes commitment. The Masters lets patrons set down a folding chair and leave it, an honor system that is one of the tournament's distinctive customs, and the spots behind the 12th tee are claimed early on every competition day. People sit there for eight hours. They see perhaps ninety tee shots at Golden Bell, most of them dull, and they stay because the one that is not dull may decide the Masters.
Those lucky enough to be there earlier in the week have a gentler option in the form of Wednesday's exhibition on the short course, which our guide to the Par 3 Contest covers. More of our American coverage is gathered on the USA guides hub.