When I was living in Manhattan more than a half century ago my eye was often caught by stories in the New York Herald Tribune by a T. Waverley Root. I was unsure whether Waverley Root was a man or a woman, and down the years have forgotten whether he/she had a particular specialty (turns out he was a food writer of some renown). One thing I haven’t forgotten is the byline.
Ten years later and now back in London I came across another belter of a byline: Herbert Warren Wind, who was writing in The New Yorker, often about golf, one of the three sporting loves of my life. From that day on I scoured newspaper stands and newsagents in London for copies of the famous American magazine. There was a good newsstand at Paddington station, I remember, one outside Sloane Square tube station and one on the King’s Road in Chelsea that stayed open until the early hours of the morning. If I found a New Yorker that had a piece by Herb in it, I felt as Charlie Bucket did when he found the Golden Ticket in Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”
To this day I have a thick file in my office titled “Herbert Warren Wind” that contains a cache of his articles, many written under the headline “The Sporting Scene.” The first was a long profile of writer and playwright P.G. Wodehouse (The New Yorker, May 15, 1971). Then came “Return to Merion” (July 17, 1971) and “One of the Great Opens” (July 26, 1976) and “A Master and the Masters” (June 7, 1976).
From the day I read my first piece by Herb I was smitten. I liked Herb’s writing because the construction of his sentences was the way I was taught to write sentences at school. They were sometimes long, sometimes very long, but you never had to reread a Herb sentence because you didn’t understand it the first time. He didn’t stretch in his writing; he didn’t show off. He didn’t try to make jokes or write self-evidently clever sentences packed with dependent clauses. He didn’t speckle his pieces with references to Charles Dickens and Dickensian characters as Bernard Darwin was wont to do. Even if he had been writing about fluctuations in the rare metals market on the Beijing stock exchange I would have lapped it up.
“I was drawn to Herb. Why? Because it was fact-based. It wasn’t a joke. It was reporting. It was presenting old information in new ways, presenting tournaments as three-act dramas because it was long and you could get lost in it. So what if it was wordy, long? If you enjoy it, who cares?” — Michael Bamberger
Wind’s pieces on golf, which were said to be compulsory reading in not just The New Yorker but also Sports Illustrated, were foundational to the craft of long-form storytelling. As such, we at Global Golf Post now look to Wind, who did his undergraduate work at Yale before getting his master’s in English literature at the University of Cambridge, as a sort of lodestar as we launch Second Wind, a long-form storytelling initiative of our own. Our use of his surname in our new fortnightly offering is a tribute to one of the greatest of all golf writers.
“A lot of people my age – I’m 65 – grew up reading Herb and Dan Jenkins if they liked golf,” Michael Bamberger, the golf writer and author, said. “Dan was Dan and that’s a whole other thing, but I was drawn to Herb. Why? Because it was fact-based. It wasn’t a joke. It was reporting. It was presenting old information in new ways, presenting tournaments as three-act dramas because it was long and you could get lost in it. So what if it was wordy, long? If you enjoy it, who cares? Put ‘The Godfather’ movies together and you get about nine hours’ worth of movies. Great. What’s wrong with that?”
Jenkins, Wind, Charles Price and the Britons Bernard Darwin, Peter Dobereiner and Henry Longhurst, all of whom are now dead, are considered the six best full-time golf writers of the past three quarters of a century. “Herb’s number one for me for the depth of his knowledge and for his lifetime commitment to trying to understand the game,” Bamberger continued. “He told stories. What’s his book about American Golf called? It’s not a history of American golf. It’s called ‘The Story of American Golf.’ He told stories and I don’t think he is appreciated enough for that.”
Best of all, he gave the reader a picture of the person he was writing about so they could store it in their mind’s eye. This was a reminder of what Pat Ward-Thomas, the golf correspondent of The Guardian newspaper, had once told me: “Get out on the course and remember you must always tell the reader which way the wind is blowing.”
While doing his graduate work at Cambridge, Herb attended the 1939 golf match between Oxford and Cambridge and met Bernard Darwin, the famous golf writer who would become a hero of his. This is Herb writing about Darwin in The New Yorker in his “Sporting Scene” essay “A Master and the Masters” in June 1976:
“Well over six feet, and bony in build – he filled out in later years – he had an effective but hardly graceful swing … It was initiated by a backswing in which, his body bristling with tension, he took the club back well beyond the ideal position in which the shaft is parallel to the ground. Then, with something less than a relaxed, Sneadian lyricism, he uncorked his downswing and hurled the club vehemently at the ball.”
How vivid is that writing, how much more entertaining than a laundry list of birdies and bogeys sprinkled with some banal quotes?
In 1981, during the Walker Cup at Cypress Point, my friend Robert Macdonald introduced me to Herb. He was a little over medium height, pin neat in dress, with a jacket buttoned up over a button-down shirt and tie. In his hand was a shooting stick, a furled umbrella that has a handle that opens into a seat. Soon I realized that he had a notebook in a pocket in which he would take notes in pencil. In less warm climes he would have a neatly folded mackintosh folded over one arm, galoshes over his stout and sturdy shoes and a tweed cap on his head.
We had golf in common, but we bonded over a love of squash, which Herb had played at Cambridge. He understood that the contest between two people wielding a piece of wood in their hands while moving at speed around a rectangular, 32-by-21-foot box presented both mental and physical challenges. You can’t hide your true character on a squash court, I said. You are often the only person who knows whether your shot had a double bounce before you played it. Do you own up? He nodded when I explained my reasons for revering squash as a test of character.
I never went to Herb’s office on, appropriately enough, the 18th floor of The New Yorker. He worked in a small room with a bookshelf, a desk and chair, a chair for guests and little else other than a letter from Bing Crosby on one wall. Nor did I go to his memorial service on the 18th floor of the Yale Club after he had died, aged 88, on May 30, 2005.
But I met Herb many times, sometimes when we both stayed at the Partridge Inn in Augusta during the Masters, and he and Macdonald would join me, sometimes with Lynne Truss (author of “Eats, Shoots & Leaves”) over a leisurely dinner. We would have a sweepstake about the forthcoming Masters, each chipping in one dollar. Herb knew a lot about golf, as did Robert and so did I. Of golf Lynne knew hardly anything. Naturally, she won the sweepstake more than once and gaily accepted the handsome prize.
Herb was not only dedicated to his craft, but he also took a deliberate, unhurried approach that seems almost unfathomable today. Jerry Tarde, who at Golf Digest both commissioned and edited Wind, recalled a writing process that present-day editors might consider laborious at best and indefensibly slow at worst.
“Herb’s first piece for The New Yorker was about Robert Trent Jones,” Tarde said. “He began it in 1947. He finished it in 1949, and it was published in 1951. Which gives you a taste not only of Herb but also The New Yorker, too.”
Tarde continued: “I think of Herb’s summation of [Bobby] Jones – As a young man he stood up to the best that life could offer. In later life he stood up to the worst with equal grace. That summed up a heroic figure in [nearly one] sentence, which is pretty hard to do. He had this sense of the human element. He also had a sense of the mechanics of golf, which is important to understand that the game is part art and part science. Little muscles and big muscles.”
We should not forget Herb and his elegant and authoritative writing in a previous century. It is as valid now as it was then. His book, written with Ben Hogan, “Ben Hogan’s Five Lessons: The Modern Fundamentals of Golf,” is still among the game’s most consistent sellers half a century after it was first published. And Herb’s naming of the latter half of the 11th hole, the 12th and the first half of the 13th holes at Augusta National as Amen Corner is imperishable.
“One could easily find a place in the clubhouse for P.G. Wodehouse, John Updike, Michael Murphy and Dan Jenkins,” David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, wrote on Herb’s death, “but Wind himself was surely the most devoted American on the course, and the most elegant. His writing on the game, and on tennis and other sports, too (he wrote a particularly strange and wonderful disquisition on the history of football placekicking), was always spare, measured, and sure, like the man.”
It is for these and other reasons that we doff our golf caps to Herbert Warren Wind. Here’s to Herb – and here’s to Second Wind as we launch it on what we hope will be a popular, long and enjoyable life.