Amen’s Other Corner

I know better than to argue with Herbert Warren Wind, a golf writing hall-of-famer whose typewriter I’m not qualified to carry. But I was listening to some 1930s jazz recently (it’s a long drive from Philly to Augusta) and if he was still with us today, I might push him on his ear for music. I’d probably just ask him for an autograph and forget that the song at the heart of one of his most legendary sentences would have been a better fit for another corner at Augusta National.

Most can tell you that Amen Corner’s origin is attributed to Wind and a Masters recap story he wrote in Sports Illustrated. Fewer might know that the story was titled “The Fateful Corner” (far less catchy; it’s hard to imagine patrons scooping up FATEFUL t-shirts and hats in the Masters shop today), or that his celebrated “Amen” line was something of a throwaway. As described by Bradley Klein in Golfer’s Journal No. 13: “The best example of [Wind’s] impact came from an April 21, 1958, dispatch on that year’s Masters…in which Wind coined the term “Amen Corner” to characterize holes 11 through 13. Legend has grown around the phrase in the decades since, but perhaps most amazing is that it stuck at all. Wind used it in the story once and without explanation, buried in the middle of a 61-word opening sentence..” And even fewer will have heard the song from which Wind borrowed his label that would last, a bouncy ditty about the ills of righteous grandstanding and religious hypocrisy.

In a 1984 Golf Digest story, Wind described his inspiration for what would become golf’s most evocative placename. Holes 12 and 13 figured large in the 1958 Masters: Overnight downpours had soaked the course and a local rule was in place, allowing players relief from embedded lies in the fairways and rough. Arnold Palmer knew the rule, but according to Wind, the rules official on 12 did not. A small kerfuffle about Palmer’s plugged ball behind the 12th green ensued, in which Palmer defied the official by invoking his right to play two balls and await a ruling from the committee (he made double-bogey from his sunken lie, but chipped close and made par on the second ball). He’d go on to make eagle on 13 and was soon vindicated on 15 when he was informed that his par on 12 would stand.

Palmer would win his first major that year, besting his playing partner Ken Venturi by two shots. Venturi had defended Palmer’s right to relief but disagreed about Palmer playing a second ball without stating that intention before hitting his first. Palmer always maintained that he’d been clear with the official about his plan to play two balls, but as the author of 2019’s The Masters David Sowell explains, “For the rest of their lives what happened [on 12] would be a point of contention between them.”

For Wind writing in 1958, it all added up to a stretch of holes that required a worthy moniker. Corner worked, but it needed a modifier. “The only phrase with the word corner I could think of (outside of football’s ‘coffin corner’ and baseball’s ‘hot corner’) was the title of a song on an old Bluebird record,” he explained. “The more I thought about it, the more suitable I thought the Amen Corner was for that bend of the course where the decisive action in that Masters had taken place.”

That song was “Shoutin’ In That Amen Corner” by Jazz Age crooner Mildred Bailey, and while I listened to its lyrics and pondered my personal and religious shortcomings, I imagined an edge of Augusta National that better fit its tone of moral caution and consequence.

I’m not the only viewer with a rubber-necking appreciation for the looming wreckage of holes 4, 5, and 6. Lucas Glover spoke of them this week as the most important and difficult stretch of holes on the front nine, and it’s no accident that the Masters app offers featured coverage of this nasty triptych. Yet they are often undervalued by viewers: SI.com just ranked them among the four least exciting holes on the property, and our own Broken Tee Society showed them little love in our Masters survey. But I wonder how they might be appreciated now if Palmer had suffered an embedded ball and bad ruling on 6 instead of 12; if Wind had aimed his prowess slightly westward and granted them a catchphrase.

We asked the Broken Tee Society to rank their favorite holes at Augusta National 🍿 pic.twitter.com/Djfk2V6Tmq

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Bailey’s tune is a cautionary tale from an era when the forces of post-war exuberance did battle with the voices of temperance and piety, and the song references the street corners on which preachers would shout the gospel to short-skirted and speakeasy sinners (it may also reference a more literal Amen Corner in New York City, where most of the bibles in America were produced at the time). It warns holier-than-thou crusaders against the vanity of their virtue: “Better think before you shout, because your sins will find you out…While you come here and pray on Sunday, then you serve the devil Monday.” Holes 11, 12, and 13 are the most exciting at Augusta, no doubt, but are they the stretch that most reveals one’s golfing soul? When it comes to escaping golf damnation, it’s 4-5-6 that offer the best test of whether one is truly walking the path of golf righteousness, or merely shouting righteousness at the range.

Flowering Crab Apple (No. 4, a 240-yard par 3) certainly sounds more menacing than Golden Bell (No. 12, 155-yard par 3), and the statistics bear out its brutality, ranking as the third-toughest hole on the course. Granted, Golden Bell is close behind at fourth-most difficult, impressive for a 155-yard one-shotter, but Crab Apple bests it without the ball-drowning pull of Rae’s Creek. No water to speak of and No. 4 is still one of the hardest outs on the property (in 88 Masters, it has yielded but one ace, lowest of Augusta’s par 3s). And then there’s the eye test: Stand behind either one and tell me which tee shot you’d rather hit. No. 12 presents menace but possibility, while No. 4 stretches toward an impossible horizon and has you wondering if that yonder pin is really your target—maybe there’s another green down in that valley? Or behind you? Unless you love hitting cut drivers into the wind over a false front to a tiered green with death looming deep…you’ll take your chances with the winds on 12 every time.

If you’ve ground out a par on Crab Apple, the fifth-toughest hole on the property awaits at Magnolia, a bending, uphill 495-yard par 4. No. 5 might get knocked for its straightforward strategy (stay right of the bunkers with your drive, find any piece of short grass with a long-iron approach) but for my money it’s the prettiest driving hole on the course (prettiest name, too). You can’t eye its perched tee box pointing you toward a wall of fairway with white bunkers hinting at some mystery around the corner and not wonder what you’d barter for the chance to hit this shot just once. The approach from the peak of the fairway might appear a bit flat and ordinary, but it’s made for some magic: Nicklaus holed out for eagle here twice in three days in the 1995 Masters at age 55, none of which was televised. Had Featured Holes coverage been around in the 90s, Magnolia might live much closer to the front of our collective Masters imagination.

The closer of this front-nine gauntlet, No. 6, the 180-yard Juniper par 3, only ranks 12th for difficulty, but that’s still tougher than Amen Corner’s finisher that rates second-easiest. Granted, nothing matches the drama of going-for-13-in-2 on a Masters Sunday, but if Amen is an old Hebrew word of spiritual affirmation (which it is), then exiting the sixth green with a two-putt is deserving of a loud one.

The air changes directions as players make their way around the U-turn at 4-5-6, and there is loads of it between the vaulted sixth tee its low-lying green—tee balls soar and hang for what feels like hours, groping for just a piece of what might be the wildest putting surface on the property, with tiers and humps abundant. Your reward for guessing the right mix of distance and trajectory is a green of no safe harbor, and after watching players practice on No. 6 this week, they’re bracing for a trial. Players typically hit a handful of chips and putt to different pin positions, but 6 was a practice-round logjam as the best in the world investigated every possible bail out, nipping spinny wedges from all angles. The key to Augusta, they say, is missing well, and as I watched players make bogeys from pin high and pars from off the green, that wisdom seemed truest here, where I wondered if some of these pins were better approached with clipped spinners than putts over the hillocks. Missing the green might sometimes be the play at No. 6, and if so—amen to that idea all day.

There is no replacing the stage that Herbert Warren Wind christened in 1958, no dismissing the powers of Rae’s Creek, and no downplaying the calamities and triumphs that Amen Corner has sung into our memories. But when the crowds around 12 won’t fit another chair, you’ll find me scooting between Crab Apple, Magnolia and Juniper where, unlike 12 and 13, you might not learn who’s going to win the tournament, but you’ll see who’s got the game, mind, and fortitude to ascend the 12th tee with a chance to do so. And you’ll discover who understands the words of a song they’ve never heard before:

You can shout with all your might,
But if you ain’t living right,
There’s no use shouting in that Amen Corner…