BEN CRENSHAW NEVER won another professional golf tournament after the Masters in 1995. He made just three cuts on the PGA Tour after the sun-spackled afternoon in April when the spirit of Harvey carried him up that long, final hill to the seventy-second green.
He joined the Champions Tour in early 2002 and finished second once, in 2007. He continued to play the Masters. The lengthening of Augusta National by 510 yards after 1995, the demands of his successful golf-course architecture business with partner Bill Coore, and the steady deterioration of his own skills ensured that he never would contend again. But his annual spring return to Georgia meant more to him than a chance to be in contention. His indelible attachment to the Masters ran as deep as any other emotional bond in his life.
At the Masters tournament every year, Crenshaw would always remember and relive the week he played a difficult game on a difficult course through a difficult week in the spirit of the man who taught him to play. Crenshaw felt that when he left the Masters he would leave that too. Augusta National and the Masters had inhabited his golf soul the moment he arrived as a twenty-year-old amateur from Austin in 1972. His attachment to the place only intensified through the years, strengthening when he won in ’84, bonding like a sacred resin in ’95. It became his home of homes.
Crenshaw thought a lot about his final Masters before the second Thursday of April in 2014, when he and Carl Jackson reported to the first tee for his forty-third start in the tournament that had meant so much to him. He had made the decision long before he signed his scorecard for an 83. The next day Crenshaw shot an 85. He made bogey on the last hole, just as he had in 1995, but the consequences were different. He finished last.
He returned to the club on Saturday morning, put on his green jacket, and sat down with Rich Lerner of the Golf Channel. The two-time champion, now sixty-two, his once-brown hair now a slate shade of gray, announced his intention to play his last Masters in 2015, on the twentieth anniversary of his second title. “It is hard, very hard,” he told Lerner. “But I have been so fortunate. I have to pull over and watch. I’m resigned to being an encourager.”
He explained that he had come to the decision that Thursday. He and Jackson were on the quietest part of the grounds, the place most buffered from the swells of spectators, in that fleeting period in every round at the Masters when a man and his caddie are alone with their present, future, and past. It’s where white dogwoods become Golden Bells, which become azaleas. Players cross Rae’s Creek on the Ben Hogan Bridge. Then they walk over the bridge named for Crenshaw’s friend and fellow Texan from the caddie yard at Glen Garden, Byron Nelson. About there, Crenshaw turned to Jackson and said the words they knew were inevitable.
“Carl, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time,” the player told his caddie. They were on the thirteenth hole. It was the end of Amen Corner.
A year later, Crenshaw arrived in Augusta for his forty-fourth and final start in the Masters. He accompanied Jackson, his longtime caddie, at a ceremony Monday in which officials of Augusta presented Jackson with a key to the city. Crenshaw played a practice round with Tom Watson, now sixty-five, the champion in 1977 and ’81, and joked that it felt like the era of the gutta-percha ball. He adjourned his press conference on the Tuesday with an acknowledgment of the many mysteries of his triumphant week in 1995. “To have played that well is beyond my comprehension,” he told reporters in the Augusta National press center. “But to have won my favorite tournament for his memory will always be my best moment.” He opened the tournament on Thursday with a score of 91. Jackson wasn’t feeling well, so his brother Bud carried Crenshaw’s bag.
The next morning, Crenshaw put on a cornflower-blue shirt for his final walk in the Masters. By the time he made the turn from the ninth green to the tenth tee, Jordan Spieth, who attended the University of Texas for three semesters before turning professional in 2013, had already completed rounds of 64-66 to establish a Masters record for low score through thirty-six holes. (Spieth won the tournament. He was twenty-one years old. It was the farewell of one Texas Longhorn and the coronation of another.)
Crenshaw struck the last drive of his Masters career under a moody sky on that Friday afternoon in Georgia, through the rising tunnel of pines. He marched up the eighteenth fairway with a swirl of nostalgia and sentiment clouding his ability to concentrate. He thought about Harvey. He thought about fate. It was 1995 all over again when he reached his ball and the spectators ringing the green rose to applaud. Many of them removed their hats.
The CBS cameras found Carl Jackson, Crenshaw’s caddie since 1976. He stood with Masters officials and Augusta members Billy Payne and Joe Ford, and he was waiting there for Crenshaw in his full-length, club-issued white caddie uniform. Lead announcer Jim Nantz reminded viewers that Jackson had given Crenshaw a tip on the range in 1995. “It led to one of the truly remarkable wins in the history of the Masters,” Nantz said. The cameras panned to Crenshaw’s wife and three daughters, then to Crenshaw, handing his ball to Bud Jackson, who wiped it clean. An airplane droned overhead.
“We’re going to keep it here,” Nantz said.
Jason Dufner and Bill Haas, who played with Crenshaw in the first and second rounds, holed their putts, even though Haas was closer to the hole. It was like the also-rans clearing the stage for the champion on the last hole, which has long been tradition and courtesy on the tour. Crenshaw took one practice stroke, long and languid, hands pressed forward as Harvey had told him many times to do, before squaring his hips over his putt for par. It missed. Crenshaw later said it seemed like something else had happened on that stroke, “like I had won the Masters.” His last shot—a sliding putt for bogey, about the same length as the one he made twenty years before—initiated a hearty and sustained cascade of applause. It wasn’t a roar, not that sonic indication of an eagle or timely birdie at the Masters, and it wasn’t the polite recognition of a disappointing round that wasn’t quite good enough to win. It was the sound of a farewell.
Jackson met Crenshaw on the green. They embraced for eight seconds with their eyes closed tightly. It was ’95. It was ’84. It was a moment without regard for time. Crenshaw departed to kiss his family and find his wife’s hand. He swept his hat to the people. Friends clapped his back on his walk away from the course. Then here came his daughters. Here came his brother. Here came the spectral assurance that Harvey Penick was forever a part of the lore of the Masters Tournament. “We’re going to miss him,” Nantz said of the man who had made sure of that.
And then he was gone.