Wind's talent for words transcended generations

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Mark Cubbedge/WGHOF

America's poet laureate of golf, Herbert Warren Wind, used this golf-themed brass paper weight at his desk.

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Editor's note: Art Spander is an award-winning sportswriter who has authored three books and covered 42 Masters and 40 U.S. Opens, along with many other golf tournaments too numerous to count. A member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Spander found time to write about his friend, Herbert Warren Wind, who is being posthumously inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame on Monday night.

He was the man in the tweed suit with the little, flat country cap, who knew Walter Hagen and Gene Sarazen and watched Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson.

Wind

He had a Masters in literature and such a feel for golf that his writing, as John Updike, a colleague of Herbert Warren Wind, observed, "gave you a heaping measure of the game.''

Herb Wind, as we called him, or H.W. Wind, as his tripartite name was abbreviated on the bronze press badges once provided by the USGA, was as old-fashioned as the clothes he wore and as modern as a graphite shaft.

He was the Great American Golf Writer, who never could handle deadlines but handled prose with an elegance that made the rest of us jealous.

"The New Yorker,'' he once said of the magazine where he spent most of his brilliant career, "provides contributors with two things that enable a writer to delve below the surface of the subject -- space and time.''

While most of us were trying to produce descriptions Herb was creating poetry. His copy was elegant, but despite his wood-paneled country club appearance, he wasn't at all arrogant.

On the contrary. During the 1972 U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, Herb took time to acknowledge a lead I did for the San Francisco Chronicle. It was like a young golfer getting praise from Jack Nicklaus, with whom Wind did a book, or Arnold Palmer.

That Wind coined the term "Amen Corner'' for the holes at Augusta National is known universally. What many do not know is Herb wrote about athletes and competitors in baseball, hockey, basketball and in one of his final pieces, tennis.

In the mind's eye, I still see Herb in his anachronistic clothing, at the Masters or U.S. Open, pasty face lathered with suntan lotion preparing to march out of the media tent onto the course to study the scene and scenario to which only he could do justice.