Herbert Warren Wind's Golf Book

Herbert Warren Wind

Jan 2016 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

Elegant and perceptive musings on the world’s greatest game from the dean of American golf writers

This illuminating collection features many of Hebert Warren Wind’s most famous essays, including “Jones Breaks Through,” his masterful portrait of Bobby Jones’s first major championship, won in an epic eighteen-hole playoff against Bobby Cruickshank at the 1923 US Open, and “North to the Links of Dornoch,” an evocative travelogue that established the venerable course in the Scottish Highlands as one of golf’s premier destinations.
 
Wind captures Ben Hogan, Sam Snead, Byron Nelson, and Ken Venturi in their prime, and brings readers back to an earlier era when Harry Vardon ruled the links. He profiles golf’s female pioneers—Mickey Wright, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, and Joyce Wethered—and sings the praises of Bernard Darwin, “the greatest writer on golf the world has ever known.” In his Sports Illustrated deadline ode, “The 1958 Masters: Palmer at the Fateful Corner,” Wind brings Arnold Palmer’s first major championship to vivid life and coins Augusta National’s most iconic and enduring term: “Amen Corner.”
 
Lyrical, evocative, and insightful, Herbert Warren Wind’s Golf Book is a must-read for students of the game and fans of classic sports journalism.

 

About the author

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.”