AUGUSTA, Ga. — The Masters keeps spectators off their phones, and Ludvig Aberg says that is part of what makes Augusta National feel unlike any other tournament. The field also heard Fred Ridley defend golf ball regulation as the club opened its 2026 Masters week with the sport still arguing about distance, tradition and how much change the game can absorb.
Phones are among the prohibited items at the Masters, along with laptops, bleepers, radios, cameras, flags or banners, ladders and tripods. Spectators are not allowed to bring mobile phones on to Augusta National property, a rule that helps create the quiet, watchful atmosphere Aberg described when he said normal tournaments seem to have “a lot of phones up,” while here the fans feel “a little bit more engaged” and it is “quite nice to just leave your phone somewhere.”
That atmosphere sits alongside another fixed point of Masters week: the cut. Since 2020, the low 50 players and ties have qualified for the weekend, but the tournament has adjusted the line many times over its history. There was no cut from 1932 to 1956. The Masters brought in a 36-hole cut in 1957, first for the low 40 players plus ties until 1961, then from 1962 until 2012 for the low 44 players and those within 10 strokes of the leader. From 2013 to 2019, it was the low 50 plus those within 10 strokes, and no fewer than 65 players made the cut in 2019.
Ridley’s annual address also put Augusta National into the broader fight over golf’s future. He said regulation of the golf ball is “not an attempt to turn back time or stifle progress,” but “an effort to preserve the essence of what makes golf the great game that it is.” That message lands in a sport where distance remains a live issue, and where even Masters practice rounds can remind the crowd how far players are hitting it: amateur Jackson Herrington drove one 320 yards past the bunkers on the first hole.
The tension is that the Masters sells itself on restraint while golf around it keeps pushing forward. Augusta National still bans phones, cameras and even metal spikes on golf shoes, but it cannot wall itself off from the larger debate over how modern the game should become. If the Masters remains the sport’s most carefully controlled stage, that is also why every rule, from the phone ban to the cut line to the playoff format at 72 holes, carries more weight than it would anywhere else. A tied tournament still goes to sudden death at 18, then alternates 18 and 10 until there is a champion.
Mark calcavecchia has no role in the rules, but the name belongs in a week like this because Augusta National still measures itself against the players, the shots and the rituals that have defined it for decades. At the Masters, nothing is accidental, and that is precisely the point.
