America's Gift to Golf: Herbert Warren Wind on the Masters

By Herbert Warren Wind

The dean of American golf writers pays tribute to the nation’s greatest tournament

Over the course of his forty-year career at the New Yorker and Sports Illustrated, Herbert Warren Wind covered the game of golf from many different angles, providing readers with eloquent insights on the iconic courses of Scotland as well as Bing Crosby’s lifelong love affair with the sport. But no aspect of golf was closer to Wind’s heart, or more intimately associated with his name, than the annual Masters Tournament at Augusta National Golf Course.

Recounting Arnold Palmer’s victory in 1958, Wind coined the phrase “Amen Corner” to describe the fateful stretch of golf course including the 11th, 12th, and 13th holes. To celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the first Augusta National Invitation, held in 1934, Wind eloquently recounted a half-century’s worth of highlights, from Bobby Jones’s original vision of an informal competition between his old friends and the game’s rising stars, to Ben Crenshaw’s impressive defeat of Tom Watson in the 1984 tournament.
 
Full of the grand traditions—including green jackets, purple azaleas, and white jumpsuits—and dramatic moments that have made the Masters the most entertaining of the four major championships, America’s Gift to Golf brings the history of this majestic tournament to vivid life and testifies to the enduring legacy of Herbert Warren Wind.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Media
• Release date: Jan 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504027663

Herbert Warren Wind

Herbert Warren Wind (1916–2005) was a longtime staff writer at the New Yorker and a writer and editor for Sports Illustrated. The dean of American golf writers, he coined the term “Amen Corner” to describe the famous stretch of the Augusta National Golf Course and co-authored books with Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, and Jack Nicklaus. A native of Brockton, Massachusetts, Wind graduated from Yale University and earned a master’s degree in English literature from the University of Cambridge. He began playing golf at a young age and competed in the 1950 British Amateur Championship. His elegant, richly detailed prose matched his meticulous golf course attire of a tweed jacket, shirt, tie, and cap—even in the warmest weather. Wind wrote or edited fourteen books during his lifetime, including The Story of American Golf (1948), The Gilded Age of Sport (1961), Herbert Warren Wind’s Golf Book (1971) and Following Through (1985). The United States Golf Association’s annual book award is named in his honor, and in 2008 he was posthumously inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame. According to his friend Ben Crenshaw, “every time you read Herbert Warren Wind, you get a history lesson, a golf lesson, and a life lesson.”  

Book preview

BILLY JOE AND THE SUPER-PROS

SPORTS ILLUSTRATED "DUMMY ISSUE"—1954

Two of the greatest golfers of modern times fought it out for the Masters championship. Snead beat Hogan in the play-off. But the result might have been different if an unknown North Carolina amateur had stayed home.

It was a perfect Georgian golfing day, the sun warm, the wind mild. Surrounded by a genuinely respectful gallery of 6,000 persons, Ben Hogan and Sam Snead teed off last Monday afternoon in the 18-hole medal play-off that would decide the Masters Tournament. The match, like the day, was calm; the thunder that characterized both weather and play earlier in the tournament was missing. Sam Snead won it with a 70. Hogan had a 71. In a sense, Hogan lost it twice. His first defeat had come earlier, when an incredible and unknown amateur forced him to change his tactics. That is the real story of Augusta.

It was a bizarre tournament. Snead, the ultimate winner, was never in command until the play-off. From the beginning it was a Hogan tournament—Hogan versus the field, just as in the late 20’s it was Jones versus the field.

Ordinarily the first two days of the Masters are played in a convivial and lighthearted atmosphere that is conducive to low scoring. Apart from being second only to the National Open in prestige, the Masters is old home week for the crack golfers of the past four decades. Anyone who has ever wona U.S. or British Open, a U.S. or British Amateur, a P.G.A. or a previous Masters receives an automatic invitation.

In line with the splendid measure for merging the old with the new, the honor of being the first twosome to tee off was accorded to Freddy McLeod, a Scot who won our Open in 1908, and Jock Hutchison, another transplanted Scot who went back and won the British Open in 1921. As the two veterans strolled down the first fairway, the typical atmosphere of the first two days prevailed. Members of the Augusta National, dogged out in their bright green blazers, chatted with their house guests on the lawn before the stately ante-bellum clubhouse. Nearby, on the huge putting green which stands before the Southern colonial cottage that President Eisenhower has made his vacation White House, the players soaked in the morning sun as they warmed up their putting touches.

The course itself, the most beautiful meadow-land layout of them all, possessed a slightly different complexion than usual. Its fairways were a little heavier, its greens covered with a chalky patina due to the invasion of poa annua, a bluegrass which bursts into a small white flower.

In this idyllic scene it was hard to foresee the appearance of pressure, but it did not wait until the third day. It broke out immediately, and tangibly. Its premature arrival was obviously due to the presence of Ben Hogan, who had arrived in Augusta to begin his practice rounds two weeks before the tournament.

When he won the 1953 Masters with a record score of 274, Hogan played practically errorless golf. Commenting on his performance shortly afterwards he had analyzed his striking success being 20% ability and 80% skillful management.

This year, to apply his own formula, Ben reached the play-off almost purely on management. There was only one sustained stretch in the four rounds of the tournament proper-the second nine on the third round-when his shots had the metallic, machine-made assurance that one expects of him.

For all his troubles, Ben’s halfway total of 145 placed him only one stroke behind the leader, Billy Joe Patton. Oddly enough, Patton, a 31-year-old lumber salesman from Morganton, N.C., seemed the least affected of any player by the Hogan pressure. No one then guessed that he would soon apply the pressure—indirectly but disastrously—to Hogan.

It was the field against Ben Hogan, and the pressure was on from the start. Some players hurled their clubs, others blew up, but Billy Joe Patton didn’t have enough at stake to worry him. He shot great golf, stole the galleries, and in the last round got a hole-in-one that changed the shape of the tournament. Patton won a silver and gold cup as the best amateur and made friends for golf everywhere.

William J. Patton (he was soon Billy Joe to the whole south) got his invitation to the Masters on the shoestring qualification of having been an alternate on the 1953 Walker Cup team. Before heading for Augusta, Patton had the premonition that he was in for a week of hot golf. He purchased a white flannel blazer appropriate for wear when receiving the cup. He also came with the firm plan to go for the pin on each of the 72 holes regardless of the cost.

Billy Joe began his week by winning the driving contest with a clout of 338 yards. Continuing to hit the ball with the same abandon, he shared the lead with Dutch Harrison after the opening round on Thursday with a 70, two under par. Patton gained the undisputed lead on Friday with a 74, but most observers still believed he would break wide open. A remarkably intelligent young man who in his golf togs looks like a Harvard instructor vacationing on Cape Cod, Patton concurred with this assessment. Everybody says I’ll shoot an 80 tomorrow and I probably will, he said softly in his Carolina drawl. He shot a 75 instead. This gave him a Saturday night total of 219 at the three-quarter mark and left him five strokes behind Hogan who had come onto his game with a 69, and two strokes behind Snead, who had a 70 added to his 74, 73. Sam had been hitting the ball well but once on the greens he lived up to his reputation as the poorest-putting great golfer since Harry Vardon.

Sunday a gallery of 15,000 persons who had paid $7.50 apiece gathered at the first tee for the final. Snead went out first, at high noon, a half hour before Patton and an hour before Hogan. Coming to the seventh he was one over par and when he missed an easy four footer there, the gallery gave him up for gone and drifted over to the third tee to pick up Hogan and watch him play one of his heady lead-protecting rounds. Par would see him in nicely.

As the gallery moved up the third fairway, a tremendous roaring shout went up from the sixth green. The unbelievable Patton had holed his tee shot: it had been a perfect five-iron. The ball had struck the pin six inches above the hole and dropped vertically to wedge itself between the pin and the rim of the cup.

The shot changed the entire tournament. It put Patton two under par and placed him within three strokes of Hogan. Most men fall apart after the excitement of a hole in one. If anything, Patton appeared even more relaxed than he had been before, and from the beginning he had been as loose as ashes, confiding his feelings to his galleries and enjoying himself almost indecently for a man knee-deep in a major golfing tournament. On one tee, for example, sighting the narrow tree-lined fairway ahead, he had shaken his head gravely and exclaimed, Well, as Byron Nelson says, in golf you can’t pass like you can in bridge. You’ve gotta hit.

Now, with the heat on, Patton made his par on the seventh. Then, while his swelling gallery went wild with excitement, he went under par for birdies on both the eighth and the ninth to finish the first nine in 32. He added two fine pars on the 10th and the 11th. He reached the 12th tee at the same time that Hogan was just completing his first nine. Ben had gone out in 37. The two were even at the end of 63 holes.

Patton was a stroke over par on the 12th and—doubly determined to get the lost stroke back on the 13th—he slashed a spoon for the pin and landed in the creek. He took off his shoes and socks, and after experimenting with his stance in the water, decided to lift the ball and sacrifice a stroke. He then played a faltering pitch that barely cleared the creek, chipped again and two putted for a miserable seven.

The moment of crisis was at hand—not for Patton, but for Hogan. Ignorant of what had befallen the remarkable amateur, still believing that Patton was three under par on this round, Hogan did something that he had not planned to do. He abandoned his carefully thought-out, cautious strategy and shifted to a risky alternate. On the 11th hole, eschewing the safe route to the green, he went boldly for the pin. His shot hooked into the water. He took a six.

That six put the forgotten man, Sam Snead, back into the running again. Alone and unnoticed, Snead had finished with a 72 for a total of 289. After going one over par on the 15th, Patton needed a birdie to tie Snead’s mark. It was beyond his powers. Hogan, in the same position with four holes to play, drew even with Snead on the 15th. On the 17th green, Hogan again had the tournament in his hands: he had a five-foot putt for birdie. He missed it by an inch. He played an orthodox par four on the final hole to tie Snead with 289, and make a play-off necessary.

But it was not Hogan’s tournament, nor even Snead’s. The 1954 Masters belonged to Billy Joe Patton, the unsung amateur who finished one stroke behind two great super-professionals. Patton had made the tournament; the play-off was anti-climactic after the high excitement of the last day.

I don’t feel bad about that 6 at 15 and I don’t feel bad about that 7 at 13, Billy Joe drawled into the microphones when he stepped up in his white flannel coat to receive the low amateur awards from Bobby Jones at the presentation ceremonies. And I don’t want my rooters to feel bad about that. I told myself I wasn’t going around after the tournament thinking I could have saved a stroke if I had played it bold. So I played it bold and the way I made those birdies was the same way I got that 6 and that 7. I’ll tell you one thing. I hope I can come back here again next year. If I can nudge it up a little higher, we’ll really have ourselves a roaring good time.

Sports Illustrated

April 19, 1954

THE FATEFUL CORNER

SPORTS ILLUSTRATED—1958

On the afternoon before the start of the recent Masters golf tournament, a wonderfully evocative ceremony took place at the farthest reach of the Augusta National course—down in the Amen Corner where Rae’s Creek intersects the 13th fairway near the tee, then parallels the front edge of the green on the short 12th and finally swirls alongside the 11th green. On that afternoon, with Bob Jones investing the occasion with his invariable flavor, two new bridges across the creek were officially dedicated: one (leading to the 12th green) to Ben Hogan, commemorating his record score of 274 in the 1953 tournament; the other (leading back to the fairway from the 13th tee) to Byron Nelson, commemorating his great burst in the ’37 Masters when, trailing Ralph Guldahl by four strokes on the last round, he played a birdie 2 on the 12th and an eagle 3 on the 13th, made up six strokes on Guldahl (who had taken a 5 and a 6 on these holes) and rolled on to victory. While Nelson’s exploit is certainly the most striking illustration of what can happen at this particular bend of the course, history has had a way of affixing itself to these two holes and especially the thirteenth, a 475-yard par 5 which doglegs to the left, a beautiful hole scenically and a triumph of strategic design since a first-class golfer must always choose between attempting to carry with his second shot the arm of Rae’s Creek that guards the green or playing safely short on his second and settling, in most cases then, for a fairly modest par. Rebounding from his disappointment in 1937, Guldahl virtually clinched the 1939 Masters when he gambled on on carrying the creek with his second and picked up an eagle for his intrepidness when his superb spoon finished 4 feet from the flag. In more recent years, it was on the thirteenth that Billy Joe Patton met his Waterloo in ’54 when he caught the creek with his perhaps overbold second and ended up with a 7, it was there the same season that Sam Snead may have won his playoff with Hogan when he birdied the hole and took a lead he never relinquished, and it was there in ’55 that the eventual winner, Cary Middlecoff, nursing a very hot streak on his second round, brought it to a roaring climax by getting home in 2 and then holing a putt from the back of the green that could have been no less than 75 feet long. What a player does on the seventeen other holes—or, if you will, on the sixty-eight other holes—is always significant and often critical, but the point is that no one is pushing the facts around when he remarks that the events which take place on the thirteenth have an odd way of proving to be strangely conclusive in the Masters. They were this year once again.

On the final round, the new champion, Arnold Palmer, the co-leader with Sam Snead at the end of the first three rounds, was paired with the bona fide sensation, Ken Venturi. The two young men were the first contenders to go out, which is important to keep in mind. Although a dozen players were grouped between 211 and 215 as the final day began, by the time Palmer and Venturi came to the 12th hole it seemed fairly certain that the winner of their duel might well turn out to be the winner of the tournament. I limit this to fairly certain for—though many of the contending dozen had ruined their chances on the first nine—Stan Leonard (215), Doug Ford (215), Fred Hawkins (214), and Bo Wininger (213) were working on the subpar rounds at that moment in the long afternoon and were very much in the picture. Arithmetically, however, Palmer was still out in front when he and Venturi prepared to play the twelfth, and it looked like they would be pushing one another on to tremendous golf. Venturi had cut one stroke off of Palmer’s one-stroke lead by going out in 35 and had cut a second shot off it on the tenth (where Palmer went one over). With seven holes to go, then, only one shot separated them.

The 12th at the Augusta National, 155 yards long, can be a very delicate and dangerous affair when the pin is placed at the far righthand corner of the green (which it was) and when there is a puffy wind to contend with (which there was). You’ve got to be up, over Rae’s Creek—that’s for sure. But you can’t take too much club, because the green is extremely thin and on the far side a high bank of rough rises abruptly behind the apron—and you don’t want to be there either. Venturi and Palmer both hit their tee shots over the green and into the bank. Venturi’s ball kicked down onto the far side of the green, presenting him with a probable 3 (which he went on to make). Palmer’s ball struck low on the bank about a foot or so below the bottom rim of a bankside trap and embedded itself. It had rained heavily during the night and early morning, and parts of the course were soggy.

Now the drama began to unfold, and because of the unusual setting it was indeed charged with the quality of theater: Only the players, their caddies and officials are allowed beyond the roping around the 12th tee, and one could only watch the pantomime activity taking place on the distant stage of the 12th green and try to decipher what was happening. To begin with, there was an animated and protracted discussion between Palmer and a member of the tournament’s rules committee, obviously on the subject as to whether or not Palmer could lift his ball without penalty. Apparently the official had decided he couldn’t, for Arnold at length addressed the half-buried ball and budge it about a foot and a half with his wedge. It ended up in casual water then, so he lifted and dropped it (patently without penalty) and then chipped close to the pin on his third stroke. He missed the putt and took a 5. This put him a stroke behind Venturi.

Then the situation became really confusing. Palmer did not walk off the green and head for the 13th tee. He returned to the spot in the rough just behind the apron where his ball had been embedded and, with the member of the rules committee standing by, dropped the ball over his shoulder. It rolled down the slope a little, so he placed the ball near the pit-mark. Apparently, now, the official had not been sure of what ruling to make and Palmer was playing a provisional or alternate ball in the event it might later be decided he had a right to lift and drop without penalty. He chipped stone-dead again and this time holed the putt for a 3. Now the question was: Was Palmer’s score a 3 or a 5?

This question was still hanging in the air heavy and unresolved when, after both players had driven from the 13th, Palmer played the shot that, in retrospect, won the tournament for him. A bit shorter off the tee, Venturi, playing first, had elected to place his second short of the creek with an iron and to take his chances on getting down in 2 from there for his birdie. Palmer, a very strong young man who drives the ball just about as far as anyone in golf (always excepting an on-form George Bayer), was out about 250 yards on his tee shot, a much longer poke than the mere yardage would indicate, for the fairways at Augusta are extremely lush to begin with and the heavy rains had added to their slowness. In any event, Palmer was out far enough to go for the green on his second shot. Earlier in the week, after good drives on this hole, he had played his second with his two-iron. This time, while he probably could have reached with a four-wood, to make sure he carried the creek he took a three-wood, going down the shaft a half-inch or so with his grip. He settled into his stance for the slightly sidehill lie and moved into his swing, very smoothly. He came through with a really beautiful shot. It started out a shade to the right of the pin and, as it rose in its fairly low trajectory, you could see there was a helpful little bit of draw on it that was carrying it away from that twist-back in the creek that hugs the right side of the green. The ball landed comfortably over the hazard and finished hole-high, 18 feet to the left and slightly above the cup.

Then another scene in this unusual and now contrapuntal drama took place. Bill Kerr, a member of the Augusta National Club who is very experienced in rules, although he was not serving on the rules committee this year, had been hurried down to the 13th to lend what assistance he could in clearing up the controversy over Palmer’s proper score on the 12th, a terribly important factor at this stage for Palmer, for Venturi, and for everyone in contention. After Palmer had hit his second, Kerr ducked through the ropes onto the fairway, and Palmer related the facts to him. They talked it over for two or three minutes. In Kerr’s unofficial opinion, Palmer had had a right to lift—it would still have to be officially decided. As Palmer headed for the green, shouts broke out all along the line as the grapevine communicated the news to the thousands clustered along the hillside that Palmer had been given (however unofficially at this point) a 3 and not a 5.

Palmer is a very resolute customer. From the beginning, believing himself to be entitled to lift on the 12th, he had argued his opinion forcefully but not to the point where he had allowed it to upset him. He had hit his great second on the 13th with no particular show of bellicosity but perhaps with a visible pinch more of his always-formidable determination. On the green, he proceeded to cap the absorbing crescendo of excitement by holing his 18-footer for an eagle 3. Venturi, having pitched eight feet from the cup on his third, made a very gallant effort to hole for his birdie—and did. However, instead of being a stroke ahead as had appeared to be his position on the 13th tee, he was now two strokes behind with five holes to play.

On the 14th—both players talked the rules question over on the tee with Bob Jones—Venturi fell another shot behind when he three-putted. On the 15th hole Palmer and Venturi were unofficially notified that Palmer’s score on the 12th was a 3. Down the stretch both of them wobbled a bit. Venturi three-putted both the 15th and the 16th, though he finished with a fine birdie on the 18th or a 72 and a four-round total of 286. Palmer went 1 over par on the short 16th and three-putted the 18th for a 73 and a total of 284. Palmer’s somewhat loose finish ultimately presented two of his pursuers, Fred Hawkins and Doug Ford, playing together, incidentally, with a chance to tie if either could birdie the 18th. Hawkins, who had come sprinting down the stretch like Silky Sullivan with birdies on the 15th and 17th, missed the 16-footer he had to get on the home green. Ford, the defending champion, missed from 12 feet. Ford had previously failed to hole a five-foot putt for a birdie on the 17th, but his best chance, ironically, had come back on the portentous 13th. Nine feet from the cup in 2, the man who is perhaps the finest clutch putter in golf had taken three to get down on the breaking surface of this fast, subtly contoured green. Ford’s first putt was running dead for the cup when, a foot from the hole, it slid a hair off the line to the left. The putt he was left with coming back couldn’t have been over 16 inches. It broke like a whip, caught only a corner, stayed out.

The rules of golf are very touchy and troublous things to administer, and my own feeling on the subject is that if a man is notified he has been appointed to serve on the rules committee for a certain tournament he should instantly remember that he must attend an important business meeting in Khartoum and tender his exquisite regrets to the tournament committee.

Granting the difficulty of the job, it was none-the-less unfortunate that the member of the rules committee working the 12th hole sector didn’t know his job well enough to make an immediate and proper decision on the buried ball. In truth, as rules go; it wasn’t a really tough one or an involved one. Because of the soggy condition of parts of the course after the heavy rains, the tournament committee had invoked for the final day of play a local rule permitting the players to lift, clean, and drop without penalty any ball which became embedded through the green in its own pit-mark. (You will find this explained under Local Rules on page 58 of the 1958 USGA rules book.) Since the term through the green takes in all parts of the course except the tees, greens, sand traps, and water hazards, it clearly applied to the rough in which Palmer’s ball pitched and stuck. One possible explanation of the indecisiveness of the official who was handling the 12th was the fact that the ball was embedded only a foot or so below the bankside trap and, since some of the sand had been washed out of the traps by the rains, he may have been uncertain whether or not the area in question was rough or part of the hazard. However, the ball clearly lay below the well-defined outline of the trap.

All in all, it was unfortunate that the rules question arose at such a crucial juncture of the tournament, and it was extremely fortunate that the confusion which developed did not untowardly affect the play of the contenders or the ultimately winning and losing of the tournament.

Sports Illustrated

April 21, 1958

THE CALL OF THE MASTERS

THE NEW YORKER—1962

During his long and remarkable career, Bernard Darwin, the English golf writer, often had occasion to ruminate on the magic that certain railway junctions had for him—those at Leuchars, Ashford, Minster, Preston, and Birkenhead Park, for example. Their names, he once wrote, sound in my ears as chimes, ringing me home to my own country. Leuchars summoned up for Darwin the sound of the porter calling out, Change for St. Andrews!, and Ashford Change for Rye! Minster meant Sandwich; Preston, St. Annes; Birkenhead Park, Hoylake. In this country, travelling to the golf courses where the major championships are held has seldom, even in the days when one bore down on them gently by rail, had anything like the cozy quality that warmed Darwin. The relative size of the two countries has something to do with this, naturally. So has the fact that the top British tournaments are almost always played over the same dozen or so courses, which have long made up what is called the championship rota, while here it has long been the practice of the United States Golf Association, which conducts the National Open and the National Amateur Championships, and of the Professional Golfers’ Association, which handles the P.G.A Championship, to move these annual events around the country, so that golf fans residing in the various sections have a chance to take them in. Periodically, the National Open returns to a traditional Open course, such as Oakmont, outside Pittsburgh, where it will be played this June and was last played in 1953. Ordinarily, though, the interval between National Opens at any one course is nearer twenty years than nine, and to hear the chimes ringing you home after an absence of this length requires the historically oriented eardrums of an Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., or a Casey Stengel.

All this comes to mind because another Masters tournament—the twenty-sixth, brilliantly won by Arnold Palmer—has just come to a close at the Augusta National Golf Club, in Augusta, Georgia. It is clearer today than it ever was that this comparatively young event not only is a full-fledged classic but already may have surpassed the National Open in the hold it has on the imagination of the sports public. Attendance figures are never the whole story, or anything close to it, but this year, for the third time, a total of well over a hundred thousand people watched the four days of play of the tournament proper—more than twice the record turnout for the three days of the National Open. (In addition, twenty million people are estimated to have tuned in to each of the telecasts from Augusta.) The Masters has a great many things going for it, some planned and some fortuitous. It is played on a superb and scenic course that inspires the fine field of players to spectacular feats and offers singularly good vantage points for spectators. It is held at a wonderful time of year, when practically every golfer, after a long hibernation, finds his fancy turning to thoughts of supinating the left forearm or some other such crucial action that will make the season at hand the big one he has been waiting for. It has flavor and innate prestige, since it is permeated with the personality of the founder and president of the Augusta National, Robert T. Jones, Jr., who is that rare sort of hero—in sports or any other field—a man whose actual stature exceeds that of the mythological figure he has been made into. In the judgment of quite a few old golf hands, however, the element that has made the Masters the Masters is that it is played on the same course year after year. For players and galleries alike, the tournament has a familiar, homecoming atmosphere, which none of the peripatetic championships can hope to match. Fewer than a hundred golf enthusiasts, I would guess, regularly follow the National Open from venue to venue, but there must be several thousand persons who, in the manner of Chaucer’s pilgrims posting to Canterbury, head for Augusta early each April.

Most of those who come to the Masters from any appreciable distance make the journey by plane. Few flights are scheduled directly from faraway cities to Augusta, for although the sleepy old town has recently been aroused by the establishment of several new industrial plants, there are fifty-one weeks of the year in which travellers can hardly be said to descend on it in substantial numbers. Atlanta, accordingly, serves as a junction. It is not, of course, the sort of junction Darwin had in mind; no porter shouts Atlanta! Change for Augusta!, and a large air terminal, with its long, hollow corridors and its semi-lost transients, hardly conjures up the feeling that the promised land is at hand. Still, Augusta is only fifty minutes by air from Atlanta, and when you land at Augusta’s pleasant little airfield, everything is just as you have remembered. The air is sweet and soft; you never fail to see a few familiar golf faces around the terminal; and the man at the car-rental desk once again can’t seem to find a record of your reservation and can’t quite fathom how anyone could have written you a confirmation.

The main entranceway to the Augusta National Golf Club is a narrow drive, some three hundred yards long and lined with unbroken rows of magnolia trees, which interlace overhead. A slow progress down this lane to the sunlit white clubhouse is the first of three moves that a very high percentage of the Augusta regulars apparently must make each year before they feel really at home again. The second is a walk around the clubhouse to the terrace at the rear, from which one can gaze down at the eighteen holes, which Jones and Alister MacKenzie, his co-designer, laid out over the slope of a natural amphitheatre. It is the prettiest vista in golf, and the returning regular wants to make certain it’s still there. Indeed it is. Rye grass sown with the Bermuda grass is still imbuing the fairways with a distinctive lustre. As befits a property that was once one of the South’s leading nurseries, some of the flowering shrubs along the fairways are in full bloom. The pines towering behind the tenth green are just as tall as memory had them. Yes, it’s all intact, the regular says to himself. He is then ready to make the third, and last, move in his annual process of reacclimatization. He watches a twosome of golfers he particularly likes drive off the first tee and follows them out onto the course. After observing the approach shots on the opening hole, a moderate-length par 4, he doesn’t bother to find a position near the green but walks directly to a spot at the edge of the rough along the right side of the second hole (555 yards, par 5), about 275 yards out, at just about the point where the fairway begins to tumble downhill to the green. He takes in the two drives. He takes in the two second shots. Somehow this seems to do it—watching one pair of golfers play their tee shots and their long approaches to the second hole. From that moment on, the itinerary of one Augusta regular may have nothing at all in common with that of another. Each man (or small group) plays it by ear. Some go on to the second green, watch their twosome putt out, and perhaps stay with them all the way, if either player happens to be working on a hot round; others wait on the hillside to watch a few more pairs come by, getting their eyes limbered up meanwhile by switching their attention from the putting on the distant green to the second shots played directly in front of them and then back to a new pair driving from the tee; still others head at a brisk trot for the scoreboard near the third green and tune up their arithmetic by studying the scores between quick looks at the action on the third, a short par 4, and side glances at the tee shots on the fourth, a dramatic par 3, 220 yards long, where the pin is usually placed behind a deep key bunker that noses into the heart of the slanting green. Most regulars stay out on the course until late in the afternoon, resting and roving by instinct, and sustaining themselves with pimento-spread sandwiches and the golf itself. The only time they tend to reconvene at a single spot comes when one of the leaders nears the riskiest bend on the course, down by Rae’s Creek, for then nearly everyone—as many as fifteen thousand people on some days—perches on a slope that serves as a grandstand for the two make-or-break holes, the twelfth and thirteenth.

This feeling of extraordinary kinship with the Masters is not restricted to those who go to Augusta. In general, golf fans cerebrate and talk about their preoccupation as no other sports group does, and the talk of the returning pilgrims about the Masters—abetted to a considerable degree by the telecasts and by the year-round rhapsodies of the golf-writing press—has created such an inordinate wave of interest in the event that many men who have never set foot on the course have acquired a knowledge of it that really is amazing. You would expect golf fans everywhere in the country to be fairly well acquainted with the last four holes, for these are covered by the television cameras, but somehow they know the terrain and the strategic demands of all eighteen, and can rattle on about the new green on the eighth, and that long arm of the creek on the thirteenth that caught Patton’s second in ’54, and those gusts of wind that puff up on the short twelfth and give Palmer so much trouble every year, and the low branches of the pines that kill you on the seventh if you drive it down the right side of the fairway. Only one other course in the long history of golf has ever been comparably familiar to the golfing public at large—the Old Course at St. Andrews. No self-respecting golf club in Britain would think its bar complete unless a print of the famous MacKenzie map of the Old Course hung on the wall, and when you add this handy reference to the decades of chatter about what old So-and-So did on the Road Hole and the trouble young What’s-His-Name met up with on the eleventh, it becomes almost understandable—almost, but not quite—that so many Britons know each bunker at St. Andrews by its designated name and could probably walk out blindfolded from Leuchars to any one you mentioned.

The eminence the Masters has gained and the bonanza it has become have certainly not been lost on the men who run other golf tournaments that take place over one set course each year—tournaments that have, however, remained strictly minor, low on cachet and low on cash. In their eagerness to discover the secret of the Masters’ rise, they have assiduously copied many of the features originated in Augusta by Jones and Clifford Roberts, the perennial chairman of the Tournament Committee. For example, the Masters was the first considerable tournament in which the players were invited to compete—generally speaking, a golfer qualifies for an invitation if he has ever won a major championship, or if he has finished well up in the big events of the preceding year—and the sponsors of these lesser affairs have adopted the invitational system. However, only the Tournament of Champions, in Las Vegas, in which the field is limited to players who have won one of the weekly events on the professional circuit during the previous twelve months, has come up with a method of qualification for an invitation which is both fresh and functional. Again, since the very name of the Masters carries a connotation of importance and sweep, other tournaments have sought to achieve a quick impressiveness by knighting themselves with resounding titles. These last few years, the word Classic has been all the vogue, and today we have the Palm Springs Golf Classic, the Houston Classic, and the American Golf Classic, in Akron, the last of which has a glorious tradition spanning the breadth of one full year. (The Masters, incidentally, began modestly as the Augusta National Invitation Tournament, and took to calling itself the Masters only after Grantland Rice had introduced the name and everyone else had taken it up.) Even the peripheral Masters touches have not gone uncopied. Members of the Augusta National wear bright green jackets, and so a club blazer has become de rigueur at the other tournament sites. (The most splendiferous of these blazers—a vibrant tartan with lots of red in it—adorns the members of the Colonial Country Club, in Fort Worth, the home of the Colonial National Invitation Tournament; golf is, of course, an old Scottish game.) These attempts to duplicate the success of the Masters—they bring to mind the old Hollywood cycle, now standard in TV as well, in which a smash hit sets off a series of zealous imitations—have predictably, with only a few partial exceptions, been failures. The trouble is that these tournaments have tried to copy the wrong things. The Colonial Invitation, which comes closer than any of the others in this group to being a major event, has achieved its status because it takes place on a course of championship calibre, regularly attracts a strong field, and puts a great deal of effort into handling the hundred and one bothersome details that are involved in staging an elaborate affair. Make no mistake about it, these are the three things that count: a first-class course, a good field, and efficient administration. Moreover, although Ben Hogan is not as closely linked with Colonial as Jones is with Augusta, the fact that it was his home club for years and that he always plays in its tournament and has won it five times definitely gives the event added substance.

In any case, we will soon have a chance to find out just how much a major championship profits from being played annually on the same course. Two new courses are now being built at a spot called Palm Beach Gardens, about four miles north of West Palm Beach, and, according to present plans, one of them will serve as the permanent home of an annual P.G.A. match-play championship—a historic event that was abandoned in 1957—and, in addition, may conceivably serve as the home of the P.G.A.’s annual medal-play championship, which replaced the old match-play meeting. In this expensive age, nobody just goes out and builds a golf course, and, to be explicit, the situation is this: Palm Beach Gardens is a residential development that a real estate man, John D. MacArthur, is now putting together and that will include the two golf courses, both designed and constructed by Dick Wilson, who at this moment, to judge by his newly opened Pine Tree course, in Delray Beach, Florida, may well be the world’s finest golf architect. The P.G.A. will receive from MacArthur the use of both courses, one of which has been specially designed to test the top professional golfers, and in return MacArthur will be able to offer prospective members of his colony the opportunity to buy lots fronting on an authentic, glamorous championship layout, which they can play on except at tournament time. The bulldozers and graders have been in action for two months now on the new courses, and they are to be opened in December.

In basic design, the P.G.A. championship course is not at all reminiscent of the Augusta National, but Wilson has been wise enough to incorporate into his thinking a few of the lessons the National has taught. There is no doubt, for instance, that the succession of threatening water hazards on Augusta’s second nine—water either guards the entrance to the green or skirts the green of five of these holes—charges the play of the leaders with tremendous drama, for nothing can destroy a round as decisively as a misplayed shot that finds the water. Wilson, who has always been strong for water hazards anyway, is using them on no fewer than eight holes of the championship course, taking full advantage of the one great blessing enjoyed by the architect who builds in that part of Florida: the circumstance that the water table lies only some ten or fifteen feet below the level of the land. Wilson has also gone to school, to use one of the touring pro’s favorite phrases, on another of Augusta’s most effective innovations—the construction of slopes, mounds, and other contours designed primarily to give a large gallery a good view of the action at certain strategic spots. (In golf’s tremendous expansion over the past fifteen years, by the way, the spectator has been the forgotten man. As tournaments have become more and more popular, he has been able to see less and less of the shotmaking.) The present, and quite tentative, schedule calls for a P.G.A. match-play championship at Palm Beach Gardens sometime in 1963, and, as I say, it will be extremely interesting to see the effect that returning regularly to the same course, and an excellent one, has on this renascent tournament.

When any institution is elevated to the top of the pile, as the Masters hasbeen, it is bound to have its detractors. While granting that the Augusta National is a fine test of golf, its critics believe that to call it, as many people do, the best course in the United States is excessive. (To pacify all the dedicated souls lobbying for the superiority of their favorite course, it has become the policy of sophisticated golf circles to bestow on each reasonable claimant a top rating in a specified field: Pebble Beach is the best seaside course, for example, and Merion the best parkland course, Augusta the best meadowland course, Pine Valley the most difficult course, and so on.) In much the same way, some critics of the Masters think that the tournament itself is overrated. They feel that it has grown too big and too commercial—has become more of a spectacle than a sports event. They much preferred life at Augusta before and just after the war, when only a few thousand people attended on the first two days and the atmosphere was so low-pressure that no spectator felt he was being forward in chatting with the players between shots. There is something to all this, to be sure, but, taking everything together, what an admirable achievement the Masters is! Each year, if the weather is inviting, the crowd that pours in on both the Saturday and the Sunday is around thirty-five thousand. No other course and no other tournament would be able to cope with such an army, but the administrative apparatus of the Masters keeps purring, and the course is somehow able to absorb the crush.

The Masters did not set out to become a golf classic (that is a surefire way not to become one), but when it came by common consent to be regarded as precisely that, it did not shy away from the crown and all the honors and the headaches that go with it. If no other tournament now approaches it, the reason is not only that the Masters was built on the right fundamentals but also that it works more diligently than any other sports event not to overlook anything, however tangential or trivial, that can add to the pleasure of the occasion. I think we will know that we have another event of similar quality on the day the advance press releases for that fixture contain something on the order of the third paragraph, headed Flowers, in the seventh advance release for the 1962 Masters. Last year the Red Bud bloom had almost completely disap-peared and the Azaleas as well as the Dogwood trees had passed the peak of their bloom when the Tournament began, the paragraph read. This year our nurseryman is quite optimistic about the possibility of having more Red Bud in evidence with the Azaleas and the Dogwood in full bloom sometime between April 5th and April 9th; in other words, about the middle of the Tournament.

The New Yorker

May 15, 1962

THE YOUNGEST MASTER

THE NEW YORKER—1963

Ever since 1935, when Gene Sarazen carried off the second Masters tournament on the wings of his historic double eagle on the sixty-ninth hole, the annual spring championship held at the Augusta National Golf Club, in Georgia, has produced an almost unbroken succession of thrilling finishes. In the last decade, for example, there has been only one year—1955, when Cary Middlecoff entered the fourth, and final, round with a huge lead and held on to it without going through any truly trying moments—in which the Masters has ended on a note of comparative peacefulness. In all the other years, the most astounding things have happened. In 1954, to illustrate, an unknown, upstart amateur, Billy Joe Patton, caught the two leaders, Ben Hogan and Sam Snead, with a hole in one on the sixtieth hole of the seventy-two-hole grind, and finished up a single stroke behind them. Two years later, Jack Burke, Jr., eight shots behind Ken Venturi at the start of the final round, cut one stroke after another from that seemingly insurmountable lead, and ultimately defeated Venturi by a stroke. Arnold Palmer’s closing 65 in the 1960 United States Open certainly consolidated his reputation as the greatest finisher that modern golf has known, but it was his stirring stretch drives in the Masters in 1958 and 1960 that first disclosed his ability to perform miracles at the eleventh hour. Indeed, the incredible climax, combining the most improbable elements of Dickens, Burt L. Standish, and Ian Fleming, has become such a staple of the tournament that by now, I suppose, every Augusta regular expects the unexpected to happen no less surely than April follows March. On Sunday, the day of the concluding eighteen holes, when you walk over the rolling green meadowland of the most beautiful inland course in all the world, this foreknowledge of the tournament’s traditional explosiveness keeps you restive and alert as you saunter past the azaleas and the flowering dogwood banked on the hillsides and breathe in the soft air of a Georgia spring. On the last day of the Masters, only a fool falls for that siren song of sustained tranquillity.

While it is impossible, of course, to guess what shape the final outcome will take when things begin to pop at Augusta, the history of the tournament supplies a helpful clue to the spot where the first significant eruption is likely to occur. That is on the twelfth hole, a difficult 155-yard par 3, where the long, exceedingly narrow green runs on a diagonal traverse from the fairway—like the hour hand of a watch at two o’clock. In front of the green and along its right side runs Rae’s Creek, a shallow stream six or seven yards wide. Just by itself, this menacing water hazard would make the twelfth intimidating enough, but playing Scylla to its Charybdis is a high bank of heavy rough that rises abruptly behind the green. Two sand bunkers are cut into this bank. A third bunker, set a few feet beyond the creek, commands the entrance to the center of the green. In addition to all this, the player must take into consideration, when he is planning and executing his shot, a gusty little wind that snaps across the green on most days, blowing from right to left. One stormy afternoon during the 1956 tournament, when Bob Rosburg was playing a 4-iron on the twelfth, the wind suddenly died out just as he hit his tee shot, and the ball not only cleared the green on the fly but sailed right on over the high bank, over the pine trees above it, and out of bounds—a two-stroke penalty. When the wind resumed, he played the same shot over with the same club, and the ball landed eight feet from the cup. It’s quite a hole, the short twelfth!

The first time the twelfth figured prominently in the Masters was in 1937. In the final round that year, Ralph Guldahl came to it leading the nearest contender, Byron Nelson, by four shots—a very comfortable margin, with only seven holes to play. Guldahl, however, dumped his tee shot into Rae’s Creek and took a 5. Then, on the thirteenth, a 475-yard par 5 that is reachable with two first-class wood shots, he proceeded to take a 6 when his second shot found an arm of Rae’s Creek that twists between the fairway and the green. When Nelson, not many minutes later, made a birdie 2 on the twelfth and then added an eagle 3 on the thirteenth, he picked up six full shots on Guldahl on those two holes, turned the tournament inside out, and went on to score his first major victory. During the five years between 1958 and 1962, when Palmer dominated the Masters both in victory and in defeat, the twelfth was a key hole no less than three times. In 1958, it rained hard the night before the final round was to be played, and the course was so soggy that it was decided to institute a local rule permitting the players to lift, without penalty, a ball embedded in the rough or fairway and drop it on playable ground nearby. For some reason or other, the official stationed at the twelfth green was not aware of this rule, and when Palmer’s tee shot on that hole dug itself into the base of the bank behind the green, the official instructed him to play the ball as it lay. Palmer did, and scored a 5—on in three, and down in two putts. Palmer, however, is a man of unusual presence of mind. He went back to the spot where his tee shot had embedded itself, and, giving himself the free drop he felt he was entitled to, played a second ball. He chipped it up close and holed the putt for a 3. For all the discomfiture of not knowing whether he would ultimately be credited with a 3 or a 5, he played the thirteenth as beautifully as it can be played, hitting the green with a perfect 3-wood and dropping a sixteen-footer for an eagle 3. When he was informed, on the fourteenth tee, by the top tournament officials that his correct score on the twelfth was a 3, Palmer was home. The following year, he was apparently on his way to a successful defense of his title when he arrived at the twelfth tee with a three-shot lead. He had played almost flawless golf all day and appeared to be totally in charge of the tournament. With the pin set at the back right-hand corner of the green, he hit a full 6-iron, starting the ball out over Rae’s Creek on a line a few yards to the right of the green, since it is his style to draw his shots from right to left. His timing was just a shade too fast on the shot; the draw didn’t take, and the ball fell into the water with a disheartening splash. He holed out in 6. All of a sudden—it was as if a dike had burst—it was no longer a one-man tournament. Six or seven players had a chance to win it now, and one of them, Art Wall, Jr., recognizing the opportunity of a lifetime, birdied five of the last six holes and carried the day. Last year, the twelfth was kinder to Palmer. In his playoff with Gary Player and Dow Finsterwald, a birdie there—he put his tee shot three feet from the flag—enabled him to go out in front for the first time, and from that point on he moved resolutely toward his third Masters title.

In short, I think everybody who follows the Masters has learned by now to hustle down the hill to the twelfth and be on hand when the man who is leading the tournament on the final day confronts this ornery hole. In the most recent Masters, two weeks ago, that man was Jack Nicklaus, the twenty-three-year-old National Open champion. The longest straight driver in golf today, and perhaps in the history of the game, Nicklaus, after a so-so 74 on his first round, had roared into the thick of the contention on the second day with a superlative 66, six under par. On this second round, certainly one of the very finest rounds ever played over the Augusta National, Nicklaus missed the first green when he misplayed his wedge approach, and then hit all the other greens with the regulation stroke—that is, he was on the green of each par-5 hole with his third shot, on the green of each par-4 with his second, and on the green of each par-3 with his tee shot. The fact that he used a wedge for his approach on the first hole, which is four hundred yards long, gives you a fairly good idea of his immense length off the tee. However, this big, strong bear of a boy is much more than just another siege gun. An impressive student of technique, he understands every inch of his powerful upright swing and knows how to play all the shots. Moreover, he can play them under pressure; he has a poise remarkable for one so young, and a determination as fierce and unyielding as Palmer’s. Off the course, he is full of humor and crisp conversation, but his manner during the actual playing of a tournament gives you no inkling of that side of his nature. He is all business, all golf, wrapped tight in a sheath of concentration. Midway through the third round, on the Saturday, Nicklaus moved into the lead in the tournament and held it by playing the last eleven holes in eleven pars. His score for that round—a 74—was more of an achievement than it might appear at first glance. Just as you can count on a hectic finish in the Masters, you can also count on having at least one day of bad weather, and this year it came on the Saturday. A cold rain, which began the night before, fell without letup all day long, puddling the fairways and drenching the greens, and there were several anxious moments during the afternoon when it looked as if the course were on the brink of becoming unplayable and that the third round would have to be abandoned and played completely over again. Nicklaus’s 74 gave him a total of 214 for his three rounds and a lead of one stroke over Ed Furgol, two over Julius Boros, and three over Sam Snead and Tony Lema, a young circuit pro making his debut in the Masters. For the first time in six years, Palmer, six strokes behind Nicklaus, did not look as if he would be a force in the final day’s play; he was visibly not in top form, and only his putting and his purposefulness had kept him that close to the pace. The consensus was that Nicklaus would probably hold on to his lead in the critical fourth round. Since he carries the ball a tremendous distance off the tee, the spongy condition of the soaked fairways would be to his advantage. More to the point, he had clearly been playing the best golf of anyone in the field all week, and there was no reason to expect any alteration to take place, despite the mounting tension that every leader experiences on the Sunday of the final round.

Shortly before noon on Sunday, the gray skies cleared, and at one-twenty-five, when Nicklaus, paired with Boros, teed off—all his other challengers were already out on the course—it was a perfect Masters day. The sun was shining brightly, the birds were chirping, the greens were amazingly fast, considering all the water they had absorbed, and the swarming, expectant galleries were in excellent voice. Nicklaus led off with seven straight pars, bogeyed the long eighth, and then added pars on the ninth and tenth. He was not playing cautiously to get his pars and nothing more—he is far too experienced a competitor not to know that such negative tactics invariably lead to disaster—but he had failed to hole a single putt of any length. Going down the eleventh, a dangerous par 4, he was still out in front in the tournament, but Snead, the amazing fifty-year-old veteran, was only one stroke back, and Player, Lema, and Boros were also breathing down his neck. Having reached a point just off the eleventh green in two, Nicklaus was looking over his approach putt when a salvo of wild shouting rang out from the nearby fourteenth green; Snead had birdied that hole, and was now tied with Nicklaus for the lead. (The position of tournament players is figured in terms of their standing relative to par; for instance, at this juncture Snead was one shot under par after sixty-eight holes, and Nicklaus was one shot under par after sixty-four holes.) Standing on the apron of the eleventh, Nicklaus digested the news, regathered his concentration, all but holed his approach putt, and tapped in the ball for his par. As he walked to the tee of the fateful twelfth, the thousands of spectators jammed along the hillside behind the tee studied him closely. I thought he seemed a trifle more concerned and more tired than he had at any time while winning the United States Open at Oakmont in June, but this, I felt, was understandable. At Augusta, he had been the undisputed leader for the better part of two days, and that is a fearful load to carry. At any rate, it must have been a relief to him to see that the pin on the twelfth was in the easiest possible position, at the front of the green, and that hardly a breath of wind was stirring down by Rae’s Creek. He watched Boros hit a lovely shot twelve feet past the flag, and then reached for his 7-iron. As his swing neared the impact point, he came off the ball just a shade. From the thin, hollow ring the club made as it struck he ball, it was evident that he had not hit the ball squarely. Indeed, it was pushed out well to the right of his intended line, and for a sickening moment it seemed that the ball might not carry over the water. It did, but only by a matter of feet, and buried itself in the wet sand of the bunker between the