Custom and ritual have ruled Augusta National Golf Club for 80 years, and chief among those traditions has been an iron-willed chairman with almost complete authority, an obsessive desire for secrecy and eccentric determination to be different.

The most powerful forces on earth have not been able to dissuade Augusta National’s leadership at times. In 1956, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a club member, rose to address a meeting of Augusta National’s board of governors.

Associated PressCliff Roberts when he was chairman of the Augusta National Golf Club.

Eisenhower demanded that the club cut down a 65-foot loblolly pine tree on the left of the 17th hole that he found particularly vexing to his game. Cliff Roberts, the longtime domineering club chairman, stood up and declared Eisenhower out of order.

“Meeting adjourned,’’ Roberts announced and walked out of the room. The tree, like many other things unchanged at Augusta National, is still alongside the 17th hole.

Private, circumspect self-rule has always been the guiding canon at the club, where the core members are not Georgians, but outsiders. Of the roughly 300 members, only about 25 are from Augusta. And the majority of those out-of-state members visit the place only three to five times a year.

For a renowned golf club, Augusta National is unlike most any other. It has few of the customary resources of a country club: it has neither a pool nor tennis courts and only a handful of social gatherings annually. It closes each year for five months beginning in May.

Although considered hallowed ground in golf, the National, as it is called in Georgia, is set alongside Augusta’s Washington Road, a clamorous collection of fast-food franchises, discount outlets and muffler shops. For many years, the most noticeable landmark near the club was a Piggly Wiggly supermarket.

Inside the heavily guarded gates at Augusta National, everything is painstakingly groomed, with nothing out of place. The grass across all 365 acres is always mowed in the same direction. Every picture displayed inside club buildings is hung on two hooks so no picture is crooked. During the Masters, the cellophane wrappings for sandwiches sold to spectators — persistently called patrons by the club — are green so they will blend into the grass if dropped.

The 300 or so members are known locally as the greencoats, a reference to the green sport jacket awarded to winners of the Masters and worn by members during the tournament. But the members are never seen in Augusta wearing the coats. Removing one’s green jacket from the club’s grounds is strictly prohibited, an offense worthy of expulsion from the club.

Bobby Jones, an international golfing legend and Atlanta resident, founded the club in 1932, but his friend Roberts, a Wall Street financier, raised the money to build the club. He then ran it as his fief.

Roberts approved and rejected broadcasters for the tournament, barring some not just for what they did or did not say but also for their choice of ties or hairstyle. He chose the camera locations for the holes and decided which holes could be shown and when.

Almost everyone found Roberts unbearably autocratic, but his Masters became the most prized and watched tournament in golf.

It was also Roberts who from the beginning actively recruited corporate chiefs as members. But these men of power were not given power to run the club. That remained Roberts’s job, and when he died in 1977 — he committed suicide on the club grounds — the club charter was rewritten to put an executive committee in charge of most Augusta National business. But a quorum of only three members was needed to establish policy.

Members were told repeatedly to exercise prudence and discretion. When one member, Thomas H. Wyman, a former chief executive at CBS and a 25-year Augusta National member, resigned because the club would not admit a female member during the Martha Burk-led protests of 2002, the club barely acknowledged it.

It was not much different when President Eisenhower boldly took the floor. He was ignored.

The Masters Tournament