Memory Lane

By Bill Fields
Photo by Michael Thad Carter April 6, 2009

Tally the weeks Ben Crenshaw has spent competing at the Masters and it adds up to more than nine months of his life. Each of those 37 springs, going back to his debut as a shaggy-haired 20-year-old amateur in 1972, has offered hope, and two of them delivered magic. "When you think of Augusta, you think of Arnold and Jack, but shortly after that, you think of Ben," says 1987 Masters champion Larry Mize. "He loves the place so much."

Twenty-five years since the first of his two Masters titles—a pair of the most popular victories in the tournament's history—Crenshaw will make his 38th journey down Magnolia Lane this month. Where groupies (Ben's Wrens) used to gather to watch him, grandmas now admire the father of three who still plays the game the way it ought to be played. He doesn't figure to factor in the outcome, because a 57-year-old golfer who drives the ball only 260 yards effectively is carrying a cap pistol against a bunch of guys shouldering bazookas. But for someone at Crenshaw's station in the game—and those who enjoy watching him play—the Masters isn't about winning, it's about savoring.

You won't be able to miss him. He'll be the compact man, built much like his golf hero, Masters co-founder Bobby Jones, making his way up Augusta National's immense hills. At times visible smoke will waft from a cupped left hand, the exhaust of a habit he hasn't been able to kick, and at others you will be able to sense the invisible steam after his trusty putter, older than most of the other players in the field, has done the unthinkable and let him down.

Crenshaw's history at the Masters is one both of statistics that can be counted and emotions that can't be measured. His 37 appearances are the 11th most in tournament annals, and he has made the cut 25 times, fourth behind Jack Nicklaus (37), Gary Player (30) and Raymond Floyd (27). In addition to his victories in 1984 and 1995, Crenshaw was runner-up in 1976 and 1983 and has finished in the top 10 seven other times.

Late on Wednesday afternoon before the 1995 Masters, the week his longtime mentor Harvey Penick died and the day of his funeral, Crenshaw flew back to Georgia from Texas, and stopped by the club to hit some balls under the watchful and informed eye of his longtime caddie, Carl Jackson. Then he went around to the practice green. "It was dusk but sort of hot, a lovely evening," remembers Crenshaw's wife, Julie. "It had been dreary and wet in Austin, where we had just buried Harvey, and now it was so beautiful. There is nothing better than to be in Augusta on a pretty spring day, looking at that beautiful golf course. Seeing him in that setting, it was like Ben belonged there."

Golfers average a shade less than 32 years old when they win their first Masters, so Crenshaw, at 32, wasn't really behind the curve when he arrived in 1984. But most golfers—even major champions—hadn't been what Crenshaw was when he was 21: a three-time NCAA champion at Texas, sure-fire heir to Nicklaus, a genial talent who respected golf's past while shaping its future. "He was the guy," says Larry Nelson, who went through Q school with Crenshaw in 1973. "Ben may have been the biggest thing to come out after Palmer and Nicklaus and before Tiger."

It wasn't as if Crenshaw was without success by the time he drove into Magnolia Lane in 1984—he won his first event after getting his tour card and had collected eight more PGA Tour victories by then—but he hadn't won a major championship or achieved anything close to Nicklausian dominance. "I couldn't believe some of the things that were written about me," Crenshaw says, reflecting on his early years as a pro. "But I never thought comparisons to people or what I was expected to do was a burden. I harbored dreams of winning big tournaments, but I had plenty of contemporaries—Lanny Wadkins and Johnny Miller, for example—who could really play the game. They were more consistent than I was."