Masters Tournament Par 3 Contest

The Masters Tournament Par 3 Contest is a golf competition that precedes the Masters Tournament at Augusta National Golf Club in Augusta, Georgia. The first Par 3 Contest was held before the 1960 tournament, and was won by three-time Masters champion Sam Snead. The contest takes place in a single round on a nine-hole, par-27 course in the northeast corner of the club's grounds, designed in 1958 by George Cobb and club founder Clifford Roberts.

Traditionally, the contest participants have invited family members to caddie for them, sometimes allowing them to play shots on their behalf. Through the 2019 contest, 115 holes in one have been recorded, including nine in the 2016 event.

Snead became the contest's first multiple winner in 1974, fourteen years after his first. The most recent is Tom Watson, who won his second Par 3 Contest in 2018, 36 years after his first in 1982. Pádraig Harrington is the only one with three wins; he won his first pair in consecutive years (2003, 2004), as did Sandy Lyle (1997, 1998). Seven players have multiple wins; the other three are Isao Aoki, Jay Haas, and David Toms.

Jimmy Walker holds the course record of 19 (–8), set in 2016, which included an ace. The contest has been decided by a playoff on 21 occasions, and concluded with a tie twice. Just 15 of the 60 winners (including ties) are non-American. No winner of the Par 3 Contest has gone on to win the Masters in the same year.

Winners

Sam Snead (pictured in 1967) won the inaugural contest in 1960, and again in 1974
Vijay Singh (pictured in 2007) won in 1994
Sandy Lyle (pictured in 2006) won consecutive contests
in 1997 and 1998
Pádraig Harrington (pictured in 2007) has three contest victories;
two shared and one playoff win
Key
* - playoff
† - tie
(a) - amateur

Masters champions who also won a Par 3 Contest

Arnold Palmer (pictured in 2009) won the Par 3 Contest in 1967 having won the Masters four times between 1958 and 1964.
  • No player has won the Par 3 Contest and the Masters in the same year, a fact well known by the players.
    Raymond Floyd came the closest in the 1990 tournament, but lost in a sudden-death playoff.
  • Ben Crenshaw and Vijay Singh are the only players to win a Masters after winning a Par 3 Contest.
  • Tom Watson is the only player to hold both titles at once, for four days, winning the Par 3 Contest in 1982 as defending Masters champion.

Notes

  • a Par is a predetermined number of strokes that a golfer should require to complete a hole, a round (the sum of the total pars of the played holes), or a tournament (the sum of the total pars of each round). E stands for even, which means the round was completed in the predetermined number of strokes.

References

33°30′11″N 82°01′05″W / 33.503°N 82.018°W / 33.503; -82.018

Uses material from the Wikipedia article Masters Tournament Par 3 Contest, released under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.