“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.”

— Herbert Warren Wind in Sports Illustrated

Herbert Warren Wind wrote thousands of words about Augusta National Golf Club and the Masters Tournament.

Two of them stand above all the rest: Amen Corner.

It was Wind, then the golf writer for Sports Illustrated, who came up with the phrase to describe the action at the 11th, 12th and 13th holes at Augusta National.

Wind had covered golf for several years going into the 1958 Masters, but his account of the action on those holes in the final round that year cemented his connection with Masters lore as Arnold Palmer sought his first major victory.

Heavy rains soaked the course overnight, and a local rule was adopted for Sunday’s round allowing players to lift and drop an embedded ball without penalty.

At the 12th hole, Palmer’s tee shot flew the par-3 green and plugged into the bank. After consulting with the rule official on the hole and playing partner Ken Venturi, Palmer played the ball as it lay and made a five. He then played a second ball, taking the free drop, and made par.

Uncertain about which score would count, Palmer decided to go for broke on the par-5 13th. He reached the green in two and sank a putt for eagle; two holes later, he was informed that his drop at No. 12 was correct and that the par would stand.

Palmer went on to claim the first of his four Masters wins by one shot over Doug Ford and Fred Hawkins.

Wind, who was accustomed to writing lengthy essays, combined his passion for jazz with his love of golf in writing the article. In the April 1984 edition of Golf Digest, he recalled how he came up with Amen Corner.

“I felt that I should try to come up with some appropriate name for that far corner of the course where the critical action had taken place,” Wind wrote.

He recalled a band led by Chicago clarinetist Milton "Mezz" Mezzrow and a record called "35th and Calumet." Wind remembered the reverse side as "Shoutin’ in that Amen Corner."

However, two years after Wind died in 2005, a fellow jazz buff made a discovery about the origins of Wind’s phrase.

Richard Moore had autographs of Wind and Palmer and decided he wanted to add an Amen Corner exhibit to his home museum. So he set off in pursuit of "35th and Calumet."

But Moore couldn’t find the record. He ran into one dead end after another, even after consulting with jazz experts.

Further research revealed that the flip side of "35th and Calumet" was actually "Old-Fashioned Love." It turned out that Mezzrow had never recorded "Shoutin’ in that Amen Corner," and that Mildred Bailey had actually done a version of the song that Wind had reviewed.

“Herb Wind bogeyed his memory,” Moore said in 2008.

However, the error doesn’t diminish Wind’s work or his legacy at the Masters. He is still well known for his lengthy essays, mostly on golf, that later appeared in The New Yorker. Wind wrote more than a dozen books and helped spearhead the "Classics of Golf" series that introduced a new generation to the game’s literature.

“You look back on how golf has been written over the years and there have been three or four guys who really stood above the rest,” Jack Nicklaus said at the time of Wind’s death. “He was certainly one of them.”