In praise of Amen Corner

Steve Carroll finds a visit to Augusta National’s fabled trilogy of holes is good for the soul

Only the whooshing pine needles betray its secret. Here on the 12th, at the fulcrum of Amen Corner, you clasp your hands together and pray.

Don’t look to the trees for help, they’ll give nothing away. Don’t let its grace – a beauty that could make Aphrodite blush – sweep you off your feet.

Take aim. Swing. Hope. This is where Masters dreams are delivered, and where they’re also buried.

‘Amen Corner’ might just be most perfect two words ever typed about golf.

Sports Illustrated called it the The Fateful Corner. But within Herbert Warren Wind’s tract, cutting through the drama of the 1958 Masters, was a better way.

Wind was trying to describe what had taken place at three crucial holes that year – and how they kept influencing the destiny of the tournament.

“On the afternoon before the start of the recent Masters golf tournament, a wonderfully evocative ceremony took place at the farthest reach of the Augusta National course – down in the Amen Corner where Rae’s Creek intersects the 13th fairway near the tee, then parallels the front edge of the green on the short 12th and finally swirls alongside the 11th green,” he wrote.

Wind had remembered the title of an old Bluebird record – one of the cheap vinyl spins pumped out by record label RCA in the 50s. ‘Shouting in the Amen Corner’, he said, was the B side of 35th and Calumet, a band standard led by jazz clarinet Milton Mezzrow.

Words, though, take on different meanings through time. He wasn’t marvelling at the azaleas, or trying to ascribe wonder, as we do now. He was looking to add context to the drama that eventually gave Arnold Palmer his first major.

The name stuck anyway.

Amen Corner: ‘Trust your eyes, or trust what you know?’

It’s no wonder. To walk that stretch, from the approach to the pond at 11, through the most beautiful par 3 in the game, across the Ben Hogan bridge, and around the tributary of Rae’s Creek that winds sharply through 13, is to gaze on perfection.

But there is also a certain beauty in destruction. And it is the threat of triumph and disaster that makes this small stretch so spellbinding – especially on a Masters Sunday.

For every Fred Couples there is Jordan Spieth and Greg Norman.

Let’s start at 11. The tee shot is innocuous enough, sweeping downhill and left to right. Danger lurks from there. The pond that guards the left of the green is obvious. What confuses and confounds is when you miss.

Swales slope both towards the water, and away. Which way will it kick? Doubt emerges. So many bail out right.

Twelve dazzles. Excites. Enchants. Then it misdirects and deceives. “Delicate and dangerous”, as Wind described it. On Masters Friday the gusts blew through, picking up pine cones and shovelling them across the view.

Why do the treetops stay so still? Trust your eyes, or trust what you know? The green looks like a sliver – land it on a ruler and cross the fingers it comes to a halt.

Short is death. Long isn’t much better.

Thirteen feels like it moves at a left angle but the tee shot, keeping it out of the liquid on one side and the pines on the other, is only part one of the puzzle.

TV can’t show its severity – our perceptions limited by two dimensions. With two eyes it is inexplicable. The sloping camber of the fairway, and the wonder of how anything hitting the sharp bank in front of the green could ever stay above water.

Then it is over. Barely half an hour and through. But what’s taken place has shaped your destiny. Reverence and respect, they say at the Masters.

Amen to that.

Now have your say

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