Herbert Warren Wind – 1916- 2005

Herb Warren Wind, the distinguished writer on golf for The New Yorker and Sports Illustrated, died in May at the age of 88.

He had been a member of the Association since 1973. Wind was the man who coined the term ‘Amen Corner’ at Augusta National. In the 1958 Masters, the result hinged on Arnold Palmer’s play on the 12th and 13th holes, the eventual champion grabbing an eagle at the latter.

Robert Macdonald, Wind’s friend, explained: “Herb felt he should try and come up with some appropriate name for that corner of the course where the critical action had taken place. He was fond of jazz and the only phrase with the word ‘corner’ he could think of  came from the title of a song on an old Bluebird record recorded by a band under the direction of Milton (Mezz) Messrow, a Chicago clarinettist, called Shouting in the Amen Corner.” Wind also collaborated with Ben Hogan on the seminal instruction book Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf.

John Hopkins’s obituary from The Times, reproduced with kind permission, follows:

AS WELL as having one of the most distinctive names in golf, Herbert Warren Wind was the game’s most elegant chronicler and America’s finest golf writer. Wind made his name with his seminal book, The Story of American Golf (1948), which he wrote while he was on the staff of The New Yorker. Despite its modest sales, it became a classic and established Wind as a golf writer. He was the man who named the 11th, 12th and 13th holes at Augusta National Golf Club, the scene of the annual Masters tournament, Amen Corner.

Herbert Warren Wind was born in Brockton, Massachusetts, in 1916, and learnt to play golf at Thorney Lea, a club in Brockton, during school holidays. In the summers he went to Camp Zakelo in Maine, where he and his friend John Horne Burns, who would go on to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, published a camp newspaper. At Yale, Wind covered sports for the Yale Daily News and wrote about jazz for the Yale Record.

But it was when Wind came to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he played rugby and took a degree in English literature, that he met the men who would change his life. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, the editor of The Oxford Book of English Verse and a Shakespeare scholar, was his tutor. While at Cambridge Wind met Bernard Darwin, grandson of Charles Darwin. Bernard Darwin was the eminent essayist and golf writer for The Times, and, having fallen under his spell, Wind determined to become a golf writer.

When he returned from active service in China during the war, he settled in New York and was a staff writer for The New Yorker from 1947 until 1954. Then he joined a new weekly magazine called Sports Illustrated and served as its golf editor until 1959. In 1960 he helped to launch Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf, a successful television series, and wrote all the scripts.

In 1962 he returned to The New Yorker and became its golf and tennis writer until he retired in 1989. He also wrote about squash rackets, polo, real tennis, American football, track and field, basketball, ice hockey, skiing and pelota. But it was his long, ruminative essays on golf that made him famous. He gave his readers not only a vivid description of the tournament being covered but a lengthy discussion on the players, and the history of the game, golf course architecture, the rules, the clubs and anything he felt a golfer needed to know to be able to appreciate the game.

He worshipped Bobby Jones, the US amateur golfer who had won the Open and Amateur Championships of the US and Great Britain in 1930, a feat nicknamed “the Impregnable Quadrilateral”, and soon after this started the Masters tournament. Wind helped to create the impression that the Masters was a major tournament. He also established the concept of measuring golf greatness by the number of major championships a player had won.

In person Wind was as fastidious in his manners and dress as he was in his writing, which he did painstakingly in pencil. He was only rarely seen on a golf course without a jacket and tie and he quite often wore spats. He usually carried a neatly folded mackintosh, and a shooting stick on which he would sit and make notes. He never married. Like a monk to his religion he devoted his life to his writing — and he liked best to write about golf. Herbert Warren Wind, writer, was born on August 11, 1916. He died on May 30, 2005, aged 88.

Jim McCabe, of the Boston Globe, adds: “Herbert Warren Wind was a Brockton native whose passion for golf grew out of childhood rounds at Thorny Lea Golf Club and led to a legendary writing career at The New Yorker.

“A graduate of Yale, Wind also earned a degree in English literature at Cambridge University. It was during his time in England that he became enamoured with writing about golf, something he did brilliantly in two stints at The New Yorker (1948-53; 1960-90) and for six years as one of the first sportswriters hired at Sports Illustrated. It was in a Sports Illustrated article in 1958 that Wind dubbed Augusta National’s 11th, 12th, and 13th holes ‘Amen Corner’.

“Among his closest friends in golf, Wind counted Bobby Jones, Gene Sarazen, Ben Hogan, and Francis Ouimet. He authored 14 books, including projects with Jack Nicklaus and Hogan. ‘He certainly taught us an awful lot about golf,’ said his sister, Gertrude Scheft of Weston.”

BIRTH11 Aug 1916 Brockton, Plymouth County, Massachusetts, USA
DEATH30 May 2005 (aged 88)Bedford, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, USA
BURIALPlymouth Rock CemeteryBrockton, Plymouth County, Massachusetts, USA