George Cobb: The Architect Behind Augusta's Par 3 Course

The roster of architects credited with shaping Augusta National Golf Club tends to start with Alister MacKenzie and Bobby Jones, then jumps to Robert Trent Jones, Jack Nicklaus, and Tom Fazio. Sitting between them, almost invisibly, is George Cobb. From 1954 to 1978, Cobb was the club's consulting architect. He touched all 18 holes in some way, redesigned the green at the par 5 second, set the bunkers behind the seventh, and built the bunkers down the left side of the 18th fairway in 1966. He also designed the most famous nine-hole loop in golf: the Par 3 Course that hosts the Wednesday contest at the Masters.

Cobb is one of the most prolific Southern architects of the postwar era, and his work is still in active rotation. Stymie tracks 64 of his courses across 10 states, concentrated in the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, and West Virginia. View the full list on his George Cobb architect page.

From Savannah caddie to scratch golfer

George William Cobb was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1914, into what the American Society of Golf Course Architects calls "a golf family." He learned the game young, became a scratch player, and went to the University of Georgia, where he played on the men's golf team and earned a degree in landscape architecture in 1937. His first job out of school was with the National Park Service, where he worked as a landscape architect until 1941.

World War II put Cobb in the Marine Corps as an engineering officer at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. The Marines needed a course for rehabilitating wounded GIs, and they asked Cobb to build it. He had no design experience, so he hired veteran architect Fred Findlay to assist on the routing and ran construction himself. The Gold Course at Paradise Point, opened in 1945, was his first project. In 1946 he designed Cherry Point on his own. By 1947 he was in private practice.

Greenville, the Korean War, and a Southern empire

The Korean War recalled Cobb to active duty in 1951, interrupting a career that had barely started. When he came back, he settled in Greenville, South Carolina and built one of the busiest design practices in the Southeast. By 1960 he had eight South Carolina courses under construction or on the boards. He would go on to design more than 100 original courses and renovate dozens more, capitalizing on a Southern golf development boom that ran from the late 1950s into the 1970s.

His best-known new build was Quail Hollow in Charlotte, which opened in 1961 and went on to host multiple PGA Championships and the 2022 Presidents Cup. His best-known renovation was East Lake in Atlanta, redone for the 1963 Ryder Cup. Both have been substantially reworked since, but the routing at Quail Hollow is essentially Cobb's.

The Augusta years

The Augusta commission came through an influential member, Eugene Howerdd, who had retained Cobb to build a resort course in the western North Carolina mountains in the mid 1950s. Augusta chairman Clifford Roberts had fallen out with Robert Trent Jones over credit for changes to the 11th and 16th holes, and on Howerdd's recommendation he hired Cobb. Their working relationship lasted 24 years.

The Par 3 Course opened in 1959 at 1,060 yards. Roberts was involved in supervisory ways but the design is Cobb's, and according to John LaFoy, his longtime partner and successor, it was the project Cobb was proudest of. The Par 3 Contest has been held there every Wednesday of Masters week since 1960. No player has ever won the Par 3 and the main tournament in the same week.

Cobb's strength as a consultant was the same thing that made him forgettable as a celebrity architect: he did not need credit. He worked for Roberts, who was famously demanding, by being deferential when it served the project and firm when it did not. When Ben Hogan suggested in the 1970s that the bunkers Cobb had built on the 18th be removed, Cobb told Roberts it was a bad idea and slow-walked the work until Roberts died and the change was forgotten.

What a Cobb course feels like

"He didn't care for overly dramatic or abrupt golf features," LaFoy told Links Magazine. Cobb believed the beauty of a course should sit in its surroundings, and the course should blend in. He moved as little dirt as possible. His fairways have minimal mounding except where it was needed to move water. His bunkers are mostly oval, without the capes and bays of later styles. His greens are uncomplicated and playable. The whole philosophy was to give the average golfer something attractive and enjoyable rather than something that would beat them up.

That preference shows up in the courses still in play. High Hampton Golf Club in Cashiers, North Carolina, opened in 1956 and remains a public mountain layout with a 140 slope. Bald Head Island Country Club on the North Carolina coast plays to 6,814 yards from the tips with a 144 slope, the highest of any Cobb course in the Stymie database. Deerwood Country Club in Jacksonville stretches to 7,228 yards. The Cobb Course at Glade Springs Resort in West Virginia and Cobbs Glen Country Club in Anderson, South Carolina both carry his name on the marquee.

The mentor and the legacy

Cobb hired John LaFoy as an apprentice in 1968 and made him a full partner in 1971. They collaborated on every course the firm built after that. When Cobb's health failed in the early 1980s, LaFoy ran the company. Cobb died in January 1986, eight months after being elevated to ASGCA Fellow. LaFoy went on to serve as president of the ASGCA in 1999.

Most of Cobb's individual contributions to Augusta have been tweaked, replaced, or erased by the architects who came after him. That is partly why his name does not come up much during Masters week. But his original courses across the Southeast are still where they were, still playable, still doing what he wanted them to do.

View all 64 George Cobb courses on Stymie.