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Golf, being a Scottish game, is steeped in Calvinist notions of sin and salvation. At most championship courses, a graceful swing from the tee will find the fairway, but when golfers err from the straight and narrow, they find themselves in the wilderness of the rough. The Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia is different: being in Southern Baptist country, it gives golfers the benefit of the doubt. Its wide, generous fairways mean the outcome is rarely predestined from the tee. What matters is the endgame — the approach shot and, most crucially, the chips and putts on its devilishly slick greens. This is not to say that Augusta doesn't provide a stern test of a golfer's resolve — a particularly demanding three-hole stretch is known as Amen Corner — it's just that this test is predicated on the principle that a person should have multiple opportunities for redemption.

Until 1999, Augusta, which hosts the Masters tournament each year over the second weekend of April, had no rough at all. Indeed, when its tournament committee finally introduced a light rough around some of its fairways, they couldn't bear to call it by its name, instead christening it "the second cut" of the fairway. Their squeamishness gives some indication of how ardently Augusta honors its idiosyncratic traditions. Most infamously, the club, which was founded by the legendary golfer Bobby Jones in 1933, didn't admit a black member until 1990, and for decades all of the caddies that the club provided at the tournament were black. Even now, the club refuses to allow women to join.

Yet even as it clings — for better and for worse — to the past, the Masters has a gift for reinventing itself and embracing technological innovation. The tournament uses manual, not electronic, scoreboards, while simultaneously running a website offering up-to-the-second updates. Sandwiches at the venue cost no more than $2.50, even as tickets swap hands for hundreds outside the gates. Spectators are kicked off the property if caught using a cell phone, even though buried under the course's fairways are thousands of feet of high-definition television cable, irrigation pipes wired to an on-site weather radar, and automatic suction systems designed to remove surface water from the greens.

Change has also been forced upon Augusta by a revolution in the game itself. When the Masters begins on April 10, competitors will play a course that is 520 yards (475 m) longer than the one that hosted the tournament in 1997. That was the year in which Tiger Woods, a prodigiously long hitter, ushered in golf's modern era with a score of 270, still a record in Masters history. His performance, remarkable in itself, also coincided with two other innovations: experts from defunct cold war ballistics programs began designing space-age golf clubs, and new video-analysis technology enabled coaches to deconstruct Woods' swing into thousands of frames, precisely comparing his technique with that of their students. Within a few years of Woods' breakthrough victory, a new generation of professionals — armed with swollen, explosively powerful golf clubs and almost flawless swings — began arriving at Augusta with games that matched Woods in length, if not in inspiration. Golf had changed, and the course had to catch up.

Augusta National responded by lengthening almost all of its holes, but it did so with a focus on maintaining what the tournament committee calls the "shot value" of each hole. According to this strategy, holes on which golfers would have hit a 6-iron approach shot 40 years ago were lengthened so as to demand the same club for the approach today. Butch Harmon, Woods' former swing coach, says this fixation on "shot value" robbed the tee shots on several holes of their nuance, since golfers do not need to draw or fade the ball with their drivers when they are simply trying to hit it as far as possible down long, straight landing strips. "The days of hitting big, sweeping hooks off the tees are gone," he says. "I like the changes though, because it keeps the emphasis on the approach shot."

Augusta's addition of the thin rough was likewise both radical in its break from tradition and subtle in its impact. The best golfers soon figured out how to adapt. Nick Faldo, a three-time Masters champion, says the longer grass may actually assist players as rough reduces backspin, which can cause balls to scurry off Augusta's treacherous greens like startled mice. "The rough is so short and the greens so challenging that players can potentially use it to their advantage," he says. "You can hit intentionally into the rough to take the spin off your approach. Players are comfortable with that."

Most past Masters champions agree that Augusta provides almost the identical test of golfing skill that it did a generation ago. But the fact that it has gone to such lengths to ensure this consistency touches on a debate in the sport about whether professionals are now hitting the ball too far, and whether the game's governing bodies should place tighter restrictions on their equipment. Many other championship venues have undertaken expansions, and new courses with aspirations of hosting professional events are now built with much higher yardage totals. Longer golf courses require more resources for building and maintenance, and some designers say it would be wiser economically and environmentally to shorten the distance that a golf ball is allowed to travel. "I love that Augusta has succeeded in ensuring that players have the same experience there as I did," says three-time Masters champion and course designer Gary Player. "But the reason the tournament can adjust is because it has a massive amount of money. Wouldn't it make more sense to just change the golf ball rather than the whole course?" There's certainly some precedent for such a move: in 1986, changes were made to the aerodynamics of javelins amid fears that they would sail into the stands.

In the debate over the future of golf, as in so many sports at present, excitement over progress competes with reverence for the past. At Augusta, though, it's no contest — nostalgia has been the driving force behind the changes to the course, and also explains the tournament's wider efforts to foster a throwback feel. Part of the appeal of any sport is the link it provides to previous generations. But because the Masters is the only major golf tournament to return to the same course every year, the notion of following in the footsteps of one's forebears is literal: at Augusta, golfers walk over the Hogan, Sarazen and Nelson bridges, and the tournament is opened each year by "honorary starters" — past champions too infirm to play 18 holes but fit enough to drive off the ceremonial first tee shot.

This reverence for past generations may also account for the distinctly patriarchal feel of the Masters. The tournament's defining image of the 1980s was Jack Nicklaus' victory in 1986, when he took the unusual step of choosing his son to carry his bag, rather than a professional caddy. An indelible memory of Woods' victory in 1997 was the bear hug he gave his waiting father behind the 18th green. And, of course, at the award ceremony, the winner is not given a trophy but instead is presented with a green jacket by the previous year's champion — more a rite of initiation than an accolade. (Even at Augusta, however, there are limits to the old-fashioned quaintness: the jacket also comes with the very modern sweetener of around $1.3 million in prize money.)

It has often been argued that the appeal of watching great athletes compete is that they seem to manage, in their attainment of the ostensibly impossible, to transcend mortality. Perhaps the Masters' success in fostering its own glorious illusion of immortality helps to explain the tournament's enduring popularity. One thinks of the call of the on-course ranger before a golfer hits a shot. At Augusta, the request seems to be directed at the passage of time itself: "Stand still please."

• EBEN HARRELL
• Few sports events are so steeped in tradition, yet the Masters has reinvented itself as golf has changed