A Final Amen at Amen Corner

Herb Wind's Amen Corner: The second shot to the 11th, the par-3 12th and the tee shot at the 13th.
Illustration By Jayson Lee

For whatever reason, Wind, who died in 2005 at 88, didn't use the phrase in a New Yorker piece until writing about the 1971 Masters, won by Charles Coody: "At this point, I rushed ahead down to the Amen Corner -- the popular name for that reach of the course . . . "

The fact that Wind brought Amen Corner out of storage in the May 8, 1971 issue of The New Yorker is interesting because Sports Illustrated's legendary golf writer Dan Jenkins had used it for the first time in one of his Masters accounts a couple of weeks earlier, in the April 19, 1971 issue. "The 12th is part of Amen Corner," Jenkins wrote, "the bend of the course that actually begins with the par-4 10th hole and concludes with the par-5 13th. It is the place where the Masters has been won and lost over and over again."

Wind and Jenkins were old friends who met at the Masters in the early 1950s when Jenkins was breaking into sports journalism with The Fort Worth Press on the Ben Hogan beat. "Herb took me under his wing and introduced me around at Augusta," says Jenkins. "He was awfully nice to me, and I appreciated it."

Jenkins' casual writing style, underpinned with informed humor that could nail a subject or a situation in a brilliant one-liner, contrasted with Wind's exhaustive, measured, more formal approach. "I never liked Herb's style," Jenkins says. "He was a great historical writer. But I was a newspaper guy, a deadline guy. Get it done and get to the tavern. Herb would bleed and worry and write in longhand."

For decades, though, both men were the must-reads in golf. "You always wanted to see Herb's article and what Dan Jenkins would write," says Jack Nicklaus. "They were exactly the opposite, both great, for different reasons."

The common denominator was an acknowledgement that golf didn't start yesterday. "Herb was the first guy I ever heard call something a 'major championship,' " Jenkins says. "Back in the middle '50s, he said you judge golfers historically by their majors. I don't know if he was the first guy to start calling them majors, but I certainly did a minute later. He made me think historically, which I might have done innately, but the whole major-championship thing gave me an attitude that I didn't have before."

Wind patterned himself after British golf-writing legend Bernard Darwin: Assess the play, but don't attack the protagonists. As rooted as Wind was to the game's history and traditions, he wasn't averse to challenging convention. After Roberto De Vicenzo lost the 1968 Masters because of a scorecard error that gave him a par at the 17th hole instead of the birdie he made, Wind took a common-sense stance in his post-tournament article that broke against tradition. He argued Rule 38 "is seriously anachronistic where modern tournament golf is concerned" -- because hundreds of people in person and millions more on television see what a player does -- and urged change. "It should be the responsibility of the tournament officials as well as of the golfer to see that the score he returns is the right score," Wind wrote. "If an error is discovered, the important thing is to see that it is corrected. No penalty should be imposed. Golf, like every other sport, is meant to be a test of athletic ability and not of bookkeeping."

"He was so fair in his estimates of everybody," says Robert Macdonald, a book publisher who met Wind in 1968. "He said Gene Sarazen when he was young was a pain in the ass but that he was one of those people who got better as he got older, that he turned out to be a really good guy in the end. Herb gave you the inside poop." Wind's thoroughness might have been exhibited best when it came to his approach to writing Thirty Years of Championship Golf: The Life and Times of Gene Sarazen in 1950. "When Herb wrote that book with Sarazen, it was sort of an experiment," says Macdonald. "He wanted to capture Sarazen's voice as completely as he could. He rented a room in a house next to Sarazen's farmhouse. They worked on that book every day for six weeks."

Covering a golf tournament was also hard work for Wind, who, like Darwin, preferred to write about what he had witnessed on the course -- almost always while wearing a jacket and tie and taking notes in his neat penmanship. "He was very precise in how he wrote things," remembers Watson. "Very small lettering as he took his notes."

"He believed you can only tell what's going on by watching the players yourself," says Macdonald, for whom Wind wrote the forewords to the Classics of Golf book series in the 1980s and '90s. "You had to figure out who was hot or who was going to be hot. It was sort of like a chess match. But if you miss the climax, you miss the climax."

Wind was an unabashed fan of the sport and used the exclamation point in print to show his enthusiasm; he made no pretense of objectivity toward the players he appreciated. "Herb was always one of my biggest fans," says Nicklaus, with whom Wind wrote The Greatest Game of All: My Life in Golf in 1969. "Herb would always say, 'OK, just one [major victory] a year, and your record will build up.' He would give me these little tidbits. He was always that way. I loved him; he was a wonderful guy. He was of the old school, but not a prude."