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.

Eisenhower insisted 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. As the well-known story goes, Clifford Roberts, the longtime club chairman, stood up and declared Eisenhower out of order.

“Meeting adjourned,” Roberts announced and left the room.

The tree is still alongside the 17th hole. It is not the only thing that has remained the same at Augusta National.

Discreet, prudent and exceedingly wary self-rule has always been the operating principle 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.

The two new members announced Monday are outsiders, too, in more ways than one.

Condoleezza Rice, the former Secretary of State who is now a professor at Stanford, and Darla Moore, a South Carolina-based financier, became the first women to join Augusta National.

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

Inside Augusta National’s 365 acres, everything is punctiliously groomed, with nothing out of place. Plants are grouped by number and measured twice a year. The hundreds of trees are assessed not just for their health but for how their limbs might spread and affect play. There is a vast, subterranean ventilation system for the grass, which, unlike a lawn or a ball field, is always mowed in exactly the same direction.

The meticulousness extends to the interior of the club building as well, where every picture is hung on two hooks so no picture is askew.

During the Masters, cellophane sandwich wrappings sold to spectators — persistently called patrons by the club — are green so they will blend into the grass if dropped.

The members are called greencoats locally, alluding to the green sport jacket awarded to winners of the Masters. That is because members also wear the green coats, but never outside the club. Taking a green jacket off the club’s grounds is forbidden by internal doctrine. Expulsion from the club would be the penalty if someone did.

Bobby Jones, a worldwide 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’ impact was most felt on the Masters tournament since he alone approved and rejected the television broadcasters, barring some not just for what they did or did not say but also for personal peccadilloes like their choices in ties, shoes or hairstyles. Roberts dictated 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.

From the beginning, Roberts actively recruited corporate chiefs as members. But these men of power were not given power to run the club. That remained Roberts’ job, and when he died in 1977 by committing 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 is necessary to establish policy in many cases.

Members were told repeatedly to exercise circumspection 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 campaign of 2002, the club barely acknowledged it.

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