Legends of Print (#2)

With the next installation of "Legends of Print," I present Herbert Warren Wind and his famous 1958 Sports Illustrated article "The Fateful Corner."

Most known for its naming of holes 12,13,14 of Augusta National as "Amen Corner," the article presents the epitome of Wind's golf-writing style -- a unparalleled passion for the game.

My favorite passage:

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.

David Remnick of the New Yorker writes of Wind:

 "Wind was equally acute on the complexities of the game and on the characters of the players. He was, in spirit, prelapsarian, uninterested in the issues of money, endorsements, or scandal of any kind. If he had a hero in golf, and even in life, it was certainly Bobby Jones, who won thirteen major championships as an amateur between 1923 and 1930 and then went on to help design the ne plus ultra of American courses, Augusta National, the site of the Masters. Jones was an educated athlete, a lawyer, a writer, and a reader, and the two men became friends, talking about books and the intricacies of golf. Wind learned a great deal from his subject. “About three days before Jones’s death, when he knew he was dying, he said to the members of his family, ‘If this is all there is to it, it sure is peaceful,’ ” Wind wrote in 1972. “That is good to know.”

Wind is considered by many as the quintessential golf writer of the latter-half of the twentieth century. Where Wind succeeded in cadence, prose, and style, he mastered the ability to line his writing with his unbridled affinity for the game -- with every passage, with every article, with every book Wind non-hesitantly told the world of his love of golf.


Photo(s): Herbert Warren Wind