At Augusta National, the answer to who puts the green jacket on a repeat winner is not always the same person who did it the year before. When a Masters champion returns on Sunday night and wins again, the club does not follow the usual handoff from the previous winner.
The last two times it happened, the Masters chairman stepped in. Nick Faldo’s repeat win in 1990 and Tiger Woods’ in 2002 both ended with the chairman helping with the jacket instead of the outgoing champion. That makes the possibility of a fourth repeat winner in 2026 more than trivia. It is a ceremony the club has already had to adjust before, and it has a set of answers ready if it happens again.
The green jacket is one of the sport’s most coveted pieces of clothing, reserved for club members and Masters winners. Under the tradition, the defending champion places the jacket on the new winner every Sunday night. But when the same player wins back-to-back, the old champion cannot also be the one receiving it, so the club changes the script. In 1966, when Jack Nicklaus repeated as champion, club co-founder Bobby Jones suggested that Nicklaus handle both roles and slip it on himself.
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The jacket that appears during the ceremony is also not usually the one the winner keeps. As the tournament nears its finish, the club selects several jackets that might fit the potential champion. The winner is fitted immediately after the victory and receives a new jacket. Once that happens, and the champion returns the following April to defend the title, the jacket stays put.
The tradition itself goes back a long way. The club bought its first jackets from Brooks Uniform Company in 1937, but champions were not given them until 1949, when Sam Snead won. The jackets were then awarded retroactively to previous winners. Hamilton Tailoring Co. has made them since 1967, and the color is Pantone 342, better known as Masters Green.
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There is one cautionary tale the club can point to when explaining how tightly controlled the jacket is. Gary Player once forgot the rule and took his jacket back to South Africa. His way of acknowledging the mistake was blunt: “Well why don’t you come get it?”
The value attached to the jacket extends beyond the clubhouse. In 2013, Green Jacket Auctions sold Horton Smith’s jacket for $682,229. The club’s Green Jacket Experience and Green Jacket Vault also became the subject of outside attention in 2023, a reminder that this is not just a Masters tradition but one of golf’s most recognizable symbols.
If a repeat winner emerges in 2026, the club will not be improvising. It has done this before, and the ceremony already has its backup answer: the chairman steps in when the previous champion cannot, because the jacket belongs to the Masters more than it belongs to the man who won it last.
