From the London Times
Herb Wind
Herbert Warren Wind was born Aug. 11, 1916, in Brockton,
Mass. At the Brockton High School, he played baseball, basketball,
tennis, and in the summers, at Thorny Lea Golf Club in Brockton, he
learned golf. In the summers during his high school years he went
to Camp Zakelo on Long Lake in Maine. There, Wind and a good friend,
John Horne Burns, who would win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, published
a camp newspaper under the supervision of Clarence Demar, a winner
of the Boston Marathon. Wind made the varsity teams at Yale in basketball
and track and field. He continued his interest in sports journalism
by covering sports for the Yale Daily News, and he wrote on jazz for
the Yale Record. After graduating from Yale, Wind earned a Masters
of Literature degree from Cambridge University (1937-38 and 1938-39).
He was a resident of Jesus College and played rugby for the University
team. His tutor at Jesus was Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, the editor
of “The Oxford Book of English Verse” and
a Shakespeare scholar. While at Cambridge, Wind met Bernard
Darwin and fell under his spell. He became determined to become a
golf writer. Darwin provided the model, and Wind followed it.
After two years active service with the Air
Force in China during World War II, Herb settled in New York City. He became
a staff writer for The New Yorker Magazine from 1947 to 1954. During this time
he wrote “The
Story of American Golf”, which, although it didn’t sell well, became
a classic and ensured his career as a golf writer. He was the golf editor of
Sports Illustrated from 1954 to 1959. In 1960 and 1961, he helped launch the
TV series: Shell’s Wonderful World of Golf and wrote all the scripts
for the shows. In 1962, he returned to The New Yorker and became their golf
and tennis writer until he retired in 1989. He also wrote about squash racquets,
polo, court tennis, American football, track and field, basketball, ice hockey,
skiing, and a Basque game called pelote. But it was his long, ruminative essays
on golf which made him famous. He gave his readers not only a vivid description
of the tournament being covered but lengthy digressions on the players, the
history of the game, golf-course architecture, the rules, the Scottish game,
the clubs, and anything which he felt a golfer needed to know to be able to
appreciate the game. He hero-worshipped Bobby Jones, who he got to know while
researching “The Story of American Golf” in 1948. He began to cover
the Masters in 1954 and talked with Jones every year until his death in 1970. “I
love listening to Jones”. he often said. The Masters was his favorite
tournament. He gave the name Amen Corner to the series of holes at the Augusta
National beginning with the 11th and ending with the 13th. In 1982 he co-founded
The Classics of Golf, an elegant series of reprints of the best of golfing
literature from the last 150 years. He made certain that Bobby Jones’s
and Bernard Darwin’s books appeared regularly, and they are all still
available. The Classics of Golf was the first to publish Darwin in the U.S.
Like Darwin, he rarely used superlatives and tried never to write a line that
wasn’t completely true. He never married. Like a monk to his religion,
he devoted his life to writing, and he liked best writing about golf. He was
America’s finest golf writer.
