Apologies to Frank for the target, but this is beyond a fanciful thread premise, whose volume only speaks to why click bait is a thing... its nearly impossible to speak with any fundamental logic or rational evidence tp answer, just inscrutable opinion.
Did the US Open appearances make Bethpage a better course (forgetting alterations and that debate) an architectural wonder or was it always special (even in a rough-hewn state 20 years and back)?
Is Prestwick Prestwick any less because it "lost" the Open? How about the other UK courses - treasures - that never had or long ago had an Open? Are they empirically less because they don't have an Open?
What about Chicago Golf Club...no one sees that, would it be better than ANGC if it had the Western Open every year or some such? Is it better now, but the Masters amplifies ANGC?
And to speak quickly to Kalen...Pine Valley does fling it doors open once a year - for the Crump Cup - and many thousands do not go...as exclusive, as perenially ranked and as visually wonderful as it is.
But let's be honest, if there was no Augusta National but instead another Mackenzie course in GA, whose design Bobby Jones commissioned and participated in, where Marion Hollins participated, Perry Maxwell, and RTJ had done major work on, the Olmstead Bros landscape-planned and who had an exclusive membership of national industrialists and local Southern wealth, with genteel customs and ante-bellum aesthetics, the cognescenti would still all take notice...and this is mostly all pre-Masters in launch, we would be similarly agog at what was made.
This is a fantastic course, moreso in first design iterations...so many different shots are tested...the routing has a circadian rhythm...the average man is still reported as able to "play his game" there...there are loose versions of templates...dramatic playing contours...thin margin of error...audacious greens...heroic and strategic play in full relief...penal play at a minimum...it ticks all the boxes that we expect from courses which don't have a Masters or pros regularly playing...we might be MORE desperate to see it, experience it, cite it as a feather if there were no Masters.
If anything the strain of technology and the Masters Tournament has compromised (or falsified) the "great anytime, in any vision" ethos of the course...
But lastly there is this
George,
I've got to take you to task. In what way did the course elevate the event? What is special about the course that elevated the event that is not present in other equal courses who's events haven't been elevated?
You must be jet-lagged from Mars... How can you deny that 11, 12, 13, 15, and 16, where the panoply of double-bogey to eagle razors edge - available on that ANGC course and that course alone -- hasn't made the Masters?...not to mention the temptations to ruin, to force birdies like on 3, 6, 8 and 14 or sweat out 4s, shot by shot on 1, 5, 7 (now), 10 and 18...
Like PB provokes such interesting play due to architecture from 11 - 16? put a US Open on it and the stringent set-up is the only thing that becomes compelling about it? It's like once they putt on #10...wake me when they are putting on 16...!
cheers vk