Augusta National is a weird club in many respects. It is not quite like what it was 20 years ago, let alone 50. You are right that you can't separate the club from the Masters. The members join in large part to participate in putting on the tournament. There are plenty of other exclusive clubs in this land where a rich guy can join to play a famous world-class course that never have tournaments, Seminole, Cypress Point, Chicago GC, to name a few. So the newer (in club terms, not age terms) members are there to well, have a role to play (Augusta has a large one) in the management of golf the sport. Everyone involved in that, no matter how hidebound a reactionary in other areas of life, knows the sport needs to get more diverse and younger if it's to prosper, no, to survive. So you see things like the women's amateur and the drive, chip and putt finals held there. Then there is another set of members, primarily from the Atlanta and Augusta elite (such as that one is). I call them Augusta Regional. They're the ones who don't want the club to change internally. There's not really a tension between the two, because the club works by consensus and a slow and sometimes grudging ability to compromise.
Covering a Masters in person was a real revelation to me. It is a much more relaxed atmosphere than is presented on television. I think that might be just a tradition members feel like fighting about. Or maybe Jim Nantz makes them do it.
