HERBERT WARREN WIND (LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT)Career Highlights: Massachusetts native best-known for long, descriptive essays about golf's people and places in The New Yorker, where he worked from 1947-54 and 1962-90. Author of The Story of American Golf and collaborator with Ben Hogan on Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf. While covering the Masters for Sports Illustrated in 1958, coined "Amen Corner" to describe holes 11-13 at Augusta National.When Herbert Warren Wind was a freshman at Yale, he chose to write his English thesis on "a brief history of golf." As anyone familiar with Herb's later work knows, he never wrote BRIEFLY about anything.But on this occasion, what may have been his first essay about the game, he confined his research entirely to a reading of the golf entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica.He got a good grade, but years later he distinctly remembered the professor's written comment. "What I like most about your history of golf is that it is completely different from anything that one might find in the Encyclopedia Britannica."Herb was completely different. Born in 1916 in Brockton, Mass., a golf town, he said. His father owned a company that manufactured shoe components. After Yale, he studied for two years at Cambridge University in England, where he played rugby and golf for his college and met the late British essayist Bernard Darwin, the only other pure writer in this Hall of Fame. Herb was a pretty good golfer himself. As he said, he once made his way to the first round of the British Amateur.During World War Two, Wind served in the U.S. Army Air Corps in China. During the occupation of Japan, he wrote a script for the first radio show that gave a true account of the war to the Japanese people called, "Now It Can Be Told."In 1947 he joined The New Yorker as a staff writer during the literary magazine's halcyon days of E. B. White, James Thurber and A. J. Liebling. One of his first profiles was about Robert Trent Jones, the architect.He switched allegiances to a brand-new magazine called Sports Illustrated in 1954 and worked as its golf editor until 1960. He then consulted on Shell's Wonderful World of Golf, writing many of the show's scripts, before returning to The New Yorker and taking over the Sporting Scene column. I edited him at Golf Digest, where he contributed regularly from the 1960s into the 90s. He wrote many books on golf, but the one that stands above the others is a continuation of his freshman English paper. It's called The Story of American Golf, required reading for anyone serious about the game. He wrote the autobiographies of Gene Sarazen and Jack Nicklaus, two classics, and he collaborated on the best instruction book of all time, Ben Hogan's Five Lessons.I was looking through my own library the other night and came across one of Herb's books called, The Realm of Sport, a wonderful anthology of sporting non-fiction. I bought it second-hand. When opened, I saw it was signed by Herb to an old friend, in his beautiful penmanship: "You'll love the stuff on fox-hunting," he wrote, "but the modern pieces are weak. All good regards, Herb Wind"I'm afraid that's the opinion he'd have of modern golfers and golf writing, the game's governing bodies and equipment regulation -- You'll love the original stuff, but the modern pieces are weak.If Herb were here today, he would say that the ball goes too straight, the drivers go too far, the wedges spin too much, the putters are too long, and the number Tiger's chasing is not Jack's 18, but his 20 major championships, because he'd count the U.S. Amateurs.My favorite line ever written about a golfer is Herb's description of Bobby Jones, which told the story of a lifetime. He wrote: "As a young man [Jones] was able to stand up to just about the best that life can offer, which isn't easy, and later he stood up with equal grace to just about the worst."He had an ear for the strategy of golfers, like no one before him: About the 11th hole at Augusta National, he once quoted Hogan as saying: "If you ever see me on this green in two, you'll know I missed my second." Today's pro will write a whole instruction book that doesn't say as much as that one sentence.HERBERT WARREN WIND (LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT)Career Highlights: Massachusetts native best-known for long, descriptive essays about golf's people and places in The New Yorker, where he worked from 1947-54 and 1962-90. Author of The Story of American Golf and collaborator with Ben Hogan on Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf. While covering the Masters for Sports Illustrated in 1958, coined "Amen Corner" to describe holes 11-13 at Augusta National.Herb wrote not with the humor of Dan Jenkins, or the flourish of Charles Price, or the wit of Peter Dobereiner -- all of whom deserve their place in this hall eventually. Herb wrote with an elegant, spare and knowing style that made him the most important American golf writer of the 20th Century. With Herbert Warren Wind now in, the World Golf Hall of Fame just got smarter.-- Jerry TardePhoto By Dom Furore
CRAIG WOOD (PGA TOUR BALLOT)Career Highlights: After several close calls in majors -- including a playoff loss to Gene Sarazen in the 1935 Masters after Sarazen's famed final-round double eagle -- in 1941 became the first golfer to win the Masters and U.S. Open in the same year, two of 21 PGA Tour wins. Known for his generosity to fellow players.Golf wins more often than a golfer, which was a fact Craig Wood knew all too well, although he was too much of a class act to take out his bad breaks on anyone.A native of Lake Placid, N.Y., who was bequeathed the strength of his lumberman father, Wood won the 1941 Masters and U.S. Open, the first man to capture those major championships in the same year (only Ben Hogan, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods have followed suit). The two major triumphs and three Ryder Cup appearances (1931, 1933, 1935) highlighted Wood's 21-win PGA Tour career, which also included a number of heartbreaking major losses. Gene Sarazen's victory, set up by his dramatic and unlikely double-eagle, over Wood in the 1935 Masters is well known. But Wood also had close calls in the 1933 British Open, where Denny Shute beat him in a playoff; the 1934 Masters, where he came up one stroke behind Horton Smith; the 1934 PGA, where he lost on the 38th hole of the final to Paul Runyan; and the 1939 U.S. Open, where he lost a marathon playoff to Byron Nelson.Through all the "almosts," Wood had the respect of his peers and the admiration of galleries. His swing, which featured a powerful delayed hit that presaged the action of current stars such as Sergio Garcia, was ahead of its time. But his personality -- charismatic, generous and friendly -- was timeless. Wood always had time for fellow pros, men who were trying to beat him and those on the way up, including a young Claude Harmon."If World War II hadn't interrupted his reign," Harmon's son, Butch, wrote in The Pro, "Craig Wood might have been the Arnold Palmer of his era."Even so, he was special. Sam Snead told Golf World in 2001, "He was the nicest guy I think I've ever met."--Bill FieldsCRAIG WOOD (PGA TOUR BALLOT)Career Highlights: After several close calls in majors -- including a playoff loss to Gene Sarazen in the 1935 Masters after Sarazen's famed final-round double eagle -- in 1941 became the first golfer to win the Masters and U.S. Open in the same year, two of 21 PGA Tour wins. Known for his generosity to fellow players.Golf wins more often than a golfer, which was a fact Craig Wood knew all too well, although he was too much of a class act to take out his bad breaks on anyone.A native of Lake Placid, N.Y., who was bequeathed the strength of his lumberman father, Wood won the 1941 Masters and U.S. Open, the first man to capture those major championships in the same year (only Ben Hogan, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods have followed suit). The two major triumphs and three Ryder Cup appearances (1931, 1933, 1935) highlighted Wood's 21-win PGA Tour career, which also included a number of heartbreaking major losses. Gene Sarazen's victory, set up by his dramatic and unlikely double-eagle, over Wood in the 1935 Masters is well known. But Wood also had close calls in the 1933 British Open, where Denny Shute beat him in a playoff; the 1934 Masters, where he came up one stroke behind Horton Smith; the 1934 PGA, where he lost on the 38th hole of the final to Paul Runyan; and the 1939 U.S. Open, where he lost a marathon playoff to Byron Nelson.Through all the "almosts," Wood had the respect of his peers and the admiration of galleries. His swing, which featured a powerful delayed hit that presaged the action of current stars such as Sergio Garcia, was ahead of its time. But his personality -- charismatic, generous and friendly -- was timeless. Wood always had time for fellow pros, men who were trying to beat him and those on the way up, including a young Claude Harmon."If World War II hadn't interrupted his reign," Harmon's son, Butch, wrote in The Pro, "Craig Wood might have been the Arnold Palmer of his era."Even so, he was special. Sam Snead told Golf World in 2001, "He was the nicest guy I think I've ever met."--Bill Fields
