We’re only 13 days away from Masters week.
If you’re a golf fan, there’s not a sentence out there that could bring you any more joy. There’s truly nothing better than turning on your TV in mid-April and seeing the course’s beautiful azaleas blooming, hearing Jim Nantz’s soothing voice tell you that someone just made a birdie on Hole 15, or getting a glimpse of the grass that’s so green, it can sometimes look too good to be true.
There’s truly so much lore Augusta National Golf Club: the past champions, the champion’s dinner, the tradition of the Green Jacket. As they say, it’s a tradition unlike any other… yet somehow in 2025, fans of the Masters are still finding out more and more about everyone’s favorite major tournament and the golf course that hosts it.
I certainly thought I knew everything there was to know about the Masters and Augusta National Golf Club… that is until I came across a lesser-talker-about story from the hallowed grounds of the golf course in Augusta, Georgia that featured President Ronald Reagan and a gunman that took various people hostage inside Augusta’s pro shop.
While Reagan was serving as the Commander in Chief, he was invited to play at Augusta National by Secretary of State George Shultz, who was a member at the exclusive golf club. Reagan and Shultz, along with White House chief of staff Donald Regan and U.S. Senator Nicholas Brady, got together and decided to play the treasured golf course in October of 1983.
President Ronald Reagan on the green while playing at Augusta National Golf Club pic.twitter.com/ULpRFcT2SN
— GOP (@GOP) July 26, 2022
As the story goes, word got around the President of the United States was traveling to Augusta to stay and play at the golf course. A local resident by the name of Charles Harris – who had been through a number of tumultuous life events at the time – decided it would be the perfect opportunity to talk with the POTUS. The 45-year-old man found an unmanned gate to the golf course and rammed his Dodge truck right through the locks and drove right up to the clubhouse.
While Reagan was out on the course playing in his foursome, Harris was taking a club employee hostage at gunpoint. The man walked right into Augusta’s pro shop with the hostage and demanded to speak with President Reagan. Harris ended up taking four other people in the club house area hostage, and then manned the phone and waited for a call from Ronald Reagan.
The president got wind of the situation unfolding at the club house while he was on the Par-3 16th hole at Augusta National Golf Club. Using a very early-stage mobile phone (the cell phone had only been invented 10 years prior), Reagan called up to the pro shop and it’s believed that he spoke these three sentences:
“This is the President of the United States. This is Ronald Reagan. I understand you want to talk to me.”
Side note: that’s incredibly bad ass.
However, the phone call from the President was apparently hard to hear for the man holding people hostage in the pro shop, and because he couldn’t talk to the Ronald Reagan, he allegedly pulled the phone out of the wall. But that wasn’t the end of the situation. Harris held the hostages for another two hours , until he was finally apprehended and surrendered.
Reagan and the rest of his foursome were safely transported away from the golf course while still in their golf attire.
These pictures of Ronald Reagan’s Secret Service at Augusta are pretty sick pic.twitter.com/dHVOAdKmMH
— Michael Brown (@mikesbrowns) April 8, 2023
President Reagan came back the next day and played the iconic Augusta National Golf Club once more (with no interruptions). As for the man that wanted to speak to the POTUS, he never exactly got that opportunity. Instead, he was charged with kidnapping, false imprisonment, and criminal damage to property (for ramming his way onto the property). Harris was eventually sentenced to 10 years in prison, and ultimately only served three of those years.
It’s truly a wild story, and one that isn’t often advertised leading up to the beloved Masters Tournament. Augusta National Golf Club has certainly beefed up their security since then, and all in all, it’s another notch in the belt of Ronald Reagan stories. Just think about it… Reagan was out on one of the most famous golf courses on the planet, someone informed him that a man had broken onto the property and taken hostages, demanding to speak with the president.
And how did Reagan basically respond to the madness?
“Let me talk to him.”
Legend.
