The azaleas will not be in bloom for the Masters this year, spring having come early to Georgia. Nor will Arnold Palmer will be there on the first tee for the official opening of the tournament. Palmer, a presence at the Masters every year since 1955, died last September at the age of 87. He had won the Masters four times, tying him for second all time with Tiger Woods, who will not be playing this year.
So there will be a different feel this year, but it will still be the Masters, the iconic golf tournament, the one that even people who don’t care about golf tune in avidly to watch. Especially on Sunday, the final day, when often as not someone mounts a charge or, as seems almost inevitable, someone else falls apart on the back nine. The Masters rewards audacity, perhaps excessively. Golf is, after all, supposed to be a game where consistency and good judgment pay off. Don’t short side yourself. Lay up and walk off with your par. Keep it below the hole.
If the Masters favors the bold, it also punishes the careless. Last year, Jordan Spieth was leading by five shots with nine to play. He then bogied the 10th and 11th holds. Stepping onto the tee at 12, his lead was down to one shot. By the time he moved on to the 13th tee, that lead was no more.
That 12th hole is the apex of what even people who don’t know golf recognize as “Amen Corner.” Three holes of golf that players approach as though they are engaged in hand-to-hand combat. The 11th is a par-four that just begs the players to go for it and, once it has seduced them, swallows up their approach shots in a pond on the green’s left. “If you see my ball on the green in two,” Ben Hogan once said, “then you’ll know I missed the shot.” The play is to the right and then you endeavor to get up and down and move on, reminding yourself that sometimes par really is a good score.
Then comes 12. At less than 160 yards, it is a short par-three; especially given how long players these days are accustomed to hitting the ball. But there are bunkers front and back, and then there is the water, Rae’s Creek, which has drowned the hopes of a lot of great golfers, including Arnold Palmer, whose errant tee shot there in 1959 cost him a chance at consecutive Masters victories. Greg Norman also found the water at 12 when he was on his way to an epic meltdown in 1996. He shot 78 that day and lost to Nick Faldo.
Before reaching 12 last year, Jordan Spieth had held the lead for seven and a half rounds. He had gone wire to wire to win the previous year and had led at the end of every day so far in 2016. But he put his tee shot at 12 in the water. Well, it happens. He dropped another ball. That shot was worse and he was wet again. On his third try from the tee, Spieth found a bunker. He finished the hole with a quadruple-bogey seven and lost the tournament to Danny Willett.
That is 12. Thirteen, the last hole on Amen Corner, is a par-five, and there are stories about it, too. The big hitters of today routinely go for the green in two, but that was the bold play in 1958, when Arnold Palmer believed he would likely need to make that shot to win the tournament. He had scored either a three or a five on 12, depending on the outcome of an official ruling. Being Palmer he might have gone for it in any case, but the uncertainty about the ruling settled any doubt. He pulled a three wood and the shot stopped 18 feet from the hole. The eagle putt seemed almost a formality.
That was the year Herbert Warren Wind came up with the phrase “Amen Corner,” in an article for Sports Illustrated. He was trying for a phrase that worked for those three holes, which in those days everyone referred to as, simply, “the corner.”
“So I was trying to think of something like the hot corner in baseball or the coffin corner in football,” Wind explained later to the New York Times. “Then somehow my mind did land on a jazz record I had bought in college by a Chicago bandleader named Mezz Mezzrow. One side was ‘Shoutin’ in Amen Corner,’ a jazz version of a spiritual. And I thought, ‘Gee, that is as good as you can get.’ ”
Well, the phrase certainly works, and it would be good for the game (as they say) if this year’s tournament were to produce some of that “Amen Corner” drama and a winner in the mold of Palmer or Jack Nicklaus or Gary Player. One of those three won every Masters between 1958 and 1966, except the one in ’59 when Palmer put his tee shot in the water on 12. They were the undisputed giants of the game, and the Masters is a tournament that should be won by giants.
The game needs a new star and a clutch of dominant players of the kind people will want to watch, on Sunday, when the action comes down to Amen Corner. With the decline of Tiger Woods, who last won in Augusta in 2005, the game has been losing its appeal even as it looks to globalize it appeal. There was a recent event in Mexico City, but the ratings were disappointing. As they were, also, for the Bay Hill Invitational—Arnold Palmer’s tournament—in mid-March. Some of the game’s prominent players did not even bother to show up for that one.
They will, however, all be there in Augusta today. Dustin Johnson has to be the favorite and his winning would establish him as the game’s dominant player. But neither he, nor any among the handful of his young rivals, have the kind of star power, so far, to be the next Arnold Palmer or Tiger Woods that the game needs.
But this is the tournament where those kinds of players announce themselves and come of age, the way Palmer did with that eagle on 13 in 1958 and where Woods did, when he won his first Masters in 1997 by an astonishing 12 strokes.
Palmer is gone and Woods won’t be playing. But even without the azaleas, Amen Corner is still there . . .
Waiting.
Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.
Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Greg Norman lost to Nick Faldo in a playoff. The item has been revised to reflect that change.
