TINSLEY WAS ON the practice range at the country club, giving a lesson arranged months before to a couple from Germany. A member approached, then stopped some distance away, which made Tinsley uneasy. Tinsley excused himself from the golf lesson. “Your father passed away,” the member told him.
Back on Fawn Creek Path, friends streamed through the front door to console Helen, Kathryn, and Tinsley. Kite and Betty Ann Penick, Tinsley’s wife, greeted Harvey’s friends in the bedroom. “They just wanted to see him one more time,” she said. They remained with Harvey until the funeral director appeared. Kite had come from the third hole at the country club.
No one talked a great deal. Kite and Betty Ann Penick watched the men and women who learned golf from Harvey pause at his bedside for a final, private moment in his presence. “He and I sat in that room for what seemed like hours,” she said. Then, before he left, Kite slipped outside and stood on the wooden deck with the telephone in his hand.
Everyone agreed that he should make the call. It was nearing six o’clock when he dialed the number to Augusta National Golf Club, where the fifty-ninth Masters Tournament would begin in four days.
The maitre d’ handed Julie Crenshaw a slip of paper. “Call Tom or Christy Kite,” it read. Julie sensed immediately what had happened. She went outside, leaving their guests, Masters chairman Jack Stephens and CBS broadcaster Pat Summerall, and dialed Kite. When she got the news, she motioned for her husband to join her on the porch, where she told him Harvey was dead. The two of them cried.
The couple returned to the house the family rented each April in Augusta. Later that evening Crenshaw called Kite, who suggested they play practice rounds Monday and Tuesday and charter a flight Wednesday from Georgia to Texas for the funeral. Crenshaw agreed.
Kite left for Augusta in the morning. By the time he coasted down Magnolia Lane on Monday, the first major championship of the season was already feeling less like a celebratory springtime reunion of the best golfers in the world and more like a wake for one of the better teachers the world had ever known, if only, for so many people, through his omnipresent books.
The Austin American-Statesman devoted its above-the-fold space on page 1 to Harvey’s death. “Penick remained a hidden treasure until he gave author Bud Shrake the pages of a journal in a red notebook that he carried with him for 60 years,” wrote sports reporter Mark Rosner. “With the exception of many No. 1 books by Austin transplant James Michener, Penick is believed to be the first person from this city to have a book top The New York Times best-sellers’ list.” The long story, accompanied by a color photograph of Harvey in his cart with Kite and Crenshaw, holding a golf club, noted that the publication of the red and green books had lifted Harvey’s spirits late in life. “If you had seen him a couple of years ago, you would have thought he wouldn’t be around in two or three months,” Tinsley Penick told Rosner. “He was incoherent. I guess part of it was determination. But there is no doubt in my mind that it [the book] helped. What motivates him is the need to be needed.”
Harvey’s death was mentioned in the New York Times itself. The newspaper selected eight short passages from the Little Red Book to publish in a box next to the obituary: “Harvey Penick, 90, Golf’s Top Author, Dies.”
The Times also commissioned a tender tribute from Shrake, who opened with this line: “Heaven is a better place today. Harvey Penick is there.” Shrake had long accepted that Harvey had little time to live, but he still struggled with what he wanted to say and how he wanted to say it. What would he want readers to know? What could he write that hadn’t already been written?
“What is it about Harvey that the world fell in love with?” Shrake wrote. “I think it is his spirit. Always quietly powerful. Always positive. God is in the positive thoughts, the Devil in the negative. Also, I think, the world fell in love with Harvey’s goodness, with his yearning to reach out and help, with his purity. Only the pure are strong enough to be simple. When Harvey spoke, in simple words, you listened, and sooner or later you understood.” Shrake must have liked that passage from the essay he wrote, which appeared on page 23 of the Times sports section. He borrowed some of the same words to say at the funeral.
On the morning of the service, Kathryn and Tinsley met their mother at the house on Fawn Creek Path. Clouds threatened. Kathryn and her husband, Billy Powell, drove the short distance to Austin Country Club, where someone had left a brilliant spray of red roses at the foot of the statue of Harvey. Powell recorded a video as his wife walked slowly around the figure of her father. Thunder rumbled. “Trying to rain, the day of the funeral,” Billy Powell said, narrating the moment.
The two-and-a-half-hour flight Wednesday morning from Bush Field in Augusta bounced Kite and Crenshaw through a thunderstorm. “It was surreal,” Kite said. “We’d have stories and we’d talk about stuff. And then it would just be long, long moments of silence. Everybody’s thinking.” The Citation jet carrying the old friends and former teammates landed in a light rain.
One passenger had watched Crenshaw closely on the flight. “Harvey had always asked me to keep an eye on Ben,” said Chuck Cook, the instructor, who was on the airplane with Kite and Crenshaw and their wives. “He was a total mess,” Cook said. “He was distraught.” Also on the flight was television executive Terry Jastrow, who had spent those two summers with Harvey in the 1960s.
Crenshaw first went home to find a muted navy suit to wear. He got to Amey Funeral Home a few minutes before the 11:00 A.M. service. As he approached the casket—it was open, surrounded by vivid flowers—his friends braced for his reaction. But Crenshaw betrayed little emotion that morning. He later explained to friends that his time with Harvey’s body filled him with serenity.
Mourners arriving under black umbrellas were handed a one-page service program at the front of the funeral home. It included a passage from act V of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “His life was gentle, and the elements / So mix’d in him that Nature might stand up / And say to all the world, ‘This was a man!’” On an easel nearby stood the original portrait that Golf Digest had published on its cover in 1993, the year of the green book. There he was, sitting in a canvas deck chair with his long legs crossed, his cane in his left hand, his right hand on his knee, wearing that bucket hat of his, a tie knotted under his sweater, tanned and eternal that morning, his face creased with quiet pride. Harvey smiled for all who came to mourn his death.
Neither Kite nor Crenshaw spoke at the service. That duty fell to Shrake, who told the room, now at capacity, about that recent Sunday afternoon when the Crenshaws visited Harvey after their brunch at Cisco’s. “Harvey was having a bad day,” Shrake said.
For the first time in the years I’ve known him, I couldn’t understand what he was saying. Then Ben and Julie Crenshaw came over with their two little girls. Ben talked golf, and Harvey said, “Go get a putter.” Using Harvey’s old wooden-shafted Sarazen putter, on the carpet beside what was to be his deathbed, one of the world’s outstanding teachers was giving a lesson to one of the world’s outstanding putters. Harvey’s eyes were bright, the fog of his age and pain rolled away, and he was back in his own world again, doing what he loved best. Ben said, “I love you, Harvey,” and Harvey said, “I love you, Ben. I’ll always be watching you.”
Shrake told the mourners that the Sarazen putter was in the casket with Harvey. Kite had given the club to John Amey, the funeral director who picked up Harvey’s body. “Harvey can’t go without having this,” Kite told Amey.
It made for another lovely, tidy, fitting story and closed another circle. It seemed appropriate for the putter to be buried with Harvey’s body, to spend eternity with a man who regarded golf clubs in the same manner a priest might regard a chalice. Shrake remarked that Harvey could employ the Sarazen putter in his heavenly lessons. The story sounded so perfect that morning at Harvey’s funeral. But it wasn’t true.
Tinsley discovered the Sarazen putter in the casket before the service. Mistakenly thinking the funeral home had placed it inside, Tinsley removed it, partly out of a sense of duty to Crenshaw. Tinsley wanted Crenshaw to have the Sarazen because he knew Crenshaw kept a collection of golf relics at his home in Tarrytown.
It belongs with Ben, Tinsley thought. He was closing the circle in a different way.
The cortege of dark cars left the funeral home for the short drive to Memorial Park Cemetery. The procession stopped in section 8 of lot 22, where Kite, Crenshaw, and six other pallbearers wearing white carnations on their lapels—including Billy Munn, who played for Harvey at Texas and had brought his two friends from Midland to see Harvey a year before—placed Harvey’s casket under a canopy on four posts.
No rain fell now. The sun emerged, drying the mud. The gravedigger placed Harvey’s casket into the soft ground, under an old and spreading Texas live oak, next to his parents and his four brothers, near the graves of Morris Williams Sr. and his son Morris Jr., and close enough to the old Austin Country Club and the two-story house on Cedar Street that it seemed like he already was home. Harvey wore his favorite black alligator shoes.
Kite and Crenshaw departed the cemetery for the seven-seat Citation waiting to return them to Augusta and the Masters. Their route to Robert Mueller Municipal Airport took the city streets, away from Davenport Ranch and Austin Country Club. Had Kite and Crenshaw seen the club grounds that day, they would have noticed something touching and poignant on the Pete Dye greens.
The flags on the greens were at half-stick.
The two players slept through most of the flight to Georgia. “They said a few words about how nice the service was, but they were just worn out,” said Crenshaw’s friend Scotty Sayers, who was on the plane. They landed in Augusta late in the afternoon. There was enough time for Crenshaw to stop at his rental house on Aumond Street for a sweater. He drove to Augusta National, where he saw Love and exchanged sympathies. Love had learned of Harvey’s death from his wife, Robin.
Sayers said Crenshaw’s caddie, Carl Jackson, was waiting for him on the range, and Crenshaw went to find him. The two spent a few minutes there, loosening with some lazy, rhythmic iron shots. They moved to the practice green, where the current U.S. Amateur champion, a young Masters rookie named Tiger Woods, shook Crenshaw’s hand on his way to the Amateur Dinner in the Augusta National clubhouse.
“There was nobody else on the course,” Sayers said.
Crenshaw rolled solemn putts until the overcast skies turned charcoal. “He wanted to decompress,” said Julie Crenshaw, who watched quietly from a white table near the green. Crenshaw later confided that he was simmering with a quiet but unmistakable confidence. He’d told his family after Harvey’s service about an adjustment he’d made on the range at Augusta, where Jackson had suggested that he make a tighter shoulder turn and move the ball slightly toward his right heel at address. Crenshaw hit four balls, knew he had found something, and told Jackson that was the best practice session he had executed since his start to the season four months earlier.
“It just felt good,” Julie Crenshaw recalled. “It just had this beautiful glow. It was calm. It was serene. He was just on his own. It was the perfect place to end his day.”
Her husband’s twenty-third year on the tour had begun that January with rare early-season sparkle. Crenshaw, now forty-three, tied for fifth in Hawaii. He shot 64 in the second round of the Phoenix Open at the end of the month. He finished with a share of third. He tied for thirteenth a week later at Pebble Beach, where he shot a final-round 66. It was his strongest start since his early years on the tour. He arrived that February at the Buick Invitational with no concerns about the way he was playing golf.
But then his game withered. His next six starts plunged him into another crushing slump. He tied for forty-first at Torrey Pines and sixty-first at Riviera. He left California for Florida, where he missed two cuts in three tournaments. Crenshaw failed to play the weekend in New Orleans, where he had won in 1994. Then Harvey died.
Crenshaw seemed ambivalent about golf early in the week of his teacher’s funeral. When Love sought his counsel about whether to attend Harvey’s service, Crenshaw encouraged him to stay in Augusta to practice because he thought Love had a chance to win. “The way I’m playing, it doesn’t matter what I do,” Crenshaw told him, Love later recalled.
The tip from his caddie Tuesday morning changed his bearing. The quiet moment at Harvey’s casket the next day calmed his heaving emotions. In two days, much had changed.
Crenshaw shared his optimism with his father and brother before he returned to Georgia for his twenty-fourth start in the springtime invitational in the pines. “I really think I’m on to something,” Crenshaw told them as he left.
Harvey’s family returned to Fawn Creek Path after the burial at Memorial Park. The house was filled with flowers and friends, including Shrake and Kathy Whitworth. The mood lightened. More friends arrived. They grazed from a spread of fruit, vegetables, and sandwiches. Outside, on the wooden deck streaked with rain, Harvey’s favorite plant, a potted hibiscus, began to dry in the sun.
Later, when almost everyone had gone, Helen sat in her husband’s velour chair by the window. “Harvey’s now at peace,” she said. Helen cried, in sadness and relief. “He was suffering so much,” she wailed in her funeral dress.
“He’s not anymore,” her son-in-law replied.
The Masters Tournament commenced Thursday morning, the sixth day of April, with rain falling from graphite skies. Colorful umbrellas speckled the grounds, dotting the green bleachers like flowers in a pot. Crenshaw and Jackson reported to the first tee for his 11:03 starting time to play with 1991 British Open Championship winner Ian Baker-Finch.
The round began sullenly. Crenshaw missed the green and made bogey on the first hole. He converted three birdies, however, and turned at 2-under 34. On the par-5 thirteenth, Crenshaw dropped from casual water, which took longer than it should have. The Master rules official put his pairing on the clock for slow play. Irritated, Crenshaw played the rest of the round without a birdie as others in the field passed him on the leaderboard.
He still shot 2-under 70, a gritty round on a dismal afternoon. Kite shot 72, and Love 69.
The first-round leaders—José María Olazábal, Phil Mickelson, and David Frost—ravaged Augusta National with rounds of 66. Crenshaw, Kite, and Love played through their lingering sadness, showing no signs of the drama to come. “I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since Sunday,” Kite said after his round. Jackson said he was proud of Crenshaw’s determination. “Ben’s got a soft heart,” Jackson said. “He did well today. A lot of guys came up to him before he teed off and talked to him. He understands Mr. Penick was old and lived a good life.”
Woods opened with an even-par 72. He was a story. Fifty-five years old and nine years removed from his historic back-nine brilliance that led to his sixth Masters title, Jack Nicklaus shot 67. He was a story. Privately, Crenshaw was relieved that the attention was beginning to drift from him and Kite and Love to the players who finished high on the leaderboard. Crenshaw naturally missed Harvey and thought about him constantly. But he was ready to stop answering questions about his grief. He just wanted to get on with the tournament, to remind himself out there to turn a little more tightly over a ball a little farther back in his stance.
“Ben was in a complete mind of his own,” said Colin Montgomerie, the Glaswegian, who shot 71.
The Crenshaws hosted a barbecue Thursday night at their rental house, then retired early. Crenshaw lunched on Friday at the Augusta National clubhouse, where he saw Dave Marr, Dan Jenkins, and Bob Drum, the former golf writer for the Pittsburgh Press who chronicled the career of Arnold Palmer. They shared salutations and a few welcome laughs. “I think it relaxed him to see people he knew,” Sayers said.
Crenshaw played the second round on a cloud. He opened with a birdie, the first of seven. His shots puréed the air. His putts hugged their lines. He felt his hands lead his stroke through the ball, just as Harvey had reminded him on their last visit together. He felt Harvey in the shadows of the loblollies.
Crenshaw later spoke of the role of unexplained luck in the 1995 Masters. Luck was part of the game. Harvey regarded it as something to accept, just as he instructed his pupils to embrace misfortune as a part of the game. On the third hole Friday, Crenshaw shoved his tee shot under the limbs to the right of the par-4 fairway. The shot from there would require a certain amount of finesse merely to chase the ball up near the canted green. His shot, a low and carving cut, bounded toward a Masters volunteer positioned near the ropes, nearly striking him, and then, instead of settling in one of a million potentially impossible lies, the ball curled down the slope and stopped ten feet behind the hole. Crenshaw made the birdie putt.
He shot 67. He’d last shot 67 there in 1988, when he finished fourth.
“I was beginning to get a feeling,” he wrote years later. “Everything felt seamless.”
Kite missed the cut. Love paired a second-round 69 with his first, and Crenshaw started his third round two shots behind Jay Haas, whose uncle, Bob Goalby, won the Masters in 1968. The people around Crenshaw that week allowed themselves to imagine the extraordinary. Sayers even began taking notes out of view of his friend. “I thought something might be happening,” Sayers said.
That third round unspooled on a crisp spring Georgia afternoon, presided over by one of the most compelling leaderboards in the fifty-nine-year history of the invitational. Crenshaw continued his graceful play with a 3-under 69, securing an appointment in the last group Sunday with Masters rookie Brian Henninger at minus 10. Haas, Mickelson, ’92 Masters winner Fred Couples, Scott Hoch, and Steve Elkington finished a stroke behind them.
Two-time U.S. Open champion Curtis Strange and the South African David Frost were two shots out of the lead. Love and Greg Norman were behind by three. It was a tournament of many plots, all appealing, some potentially historic. And no one could ignore the most poignant one of all.
A reporter asked Crenshaw about the gravity of the final round, given the death of his teacher. Crenshaw replied that he preferred not to think about it. He told the reporter: “I’ll carry Harvey in my heart until the day I die”—a sincere response that carried no risk of overthinking.
Nostalgia and something more than the usual anticipation reigned that Saturday evening on the club grounds. As the golf writers filed stories for their Sunday editions, they knew a meaningful narrative when they saw one. “Writers are not supposed to pull for teams or players,” recalled Ron Green Jr., who wrote from the Masters that year for the Charlotte Observer. “But we all tend to pull for the story. That was the perfect script he [Crenshaw] gave us.”
Crenshaw often described the Masters as the most emotionally charged major championship in golf. Nothing touched him like the refined arrangement of the surroundings, the antiquity of the interior spaces, the portraits on the walls and the artifacts on the tables, the explosions of color in the landscaping, the locker he shared with Jimmy Demaret, the everlasting presence of Bobby Jones. Augusta National had appealed to Crenshaw the first time he saw it in 1972. It was everything he wanted out of golf. He revered it for what it was and what it had been and what it always would be. To Crenshaw, Augusta National was a course that wasn’t merely seen or played, but a place that was felt.
However, as David Frost said, “Drama like that can let you take your focus away from your game.” Crenshaw, too, wondered how he would govern his focus on Sunday afternoon. He had been at the Masters many times before, so he thought about what Harvey would tell him to do. Trust your swing, Harvey would say. Trust your judgment. Play hard. Hope for the best. Harvey would emphasize the elusive simplicity of great golf. He would remind Crenshaw to take dead aim. And even though Crenshaw had heard those three words so many times before, he knew they would sound different to him this time. This time they would have new meaning.
The phone rang often that Saturday night at the Crenshaws’ rented brick house on Aumond Road. Ben’s father called from Austin. His friends called from everywhere. Julie Crenshaw called Charlie, Ben’s brother. “You need to get on a plane,” she told him. “Your brother needs you.”
The occupants of the house—Ben and Julie, Scotty and Julie Sayers, friends Pat and Julie Oles—scrambled for ways to fill the time, which seemed not to budge. They packed their suitcases. They watched the third-round highlights. They avoided the subjects of winning the Masters and winning it for Harvey. “We were doing everything we could to keep his mind off of the next day,” Sayers said.
Charlie Crenshaw arranged a flight Sunday morning to Augusta. When he arrived at his brother’s house around noon, he found Crenshaw in the yard, slapping at pinecones with a wedge. Ben had finished two breakfasts. “We were so bored,” Julie Crenshaw said. Her husband paced. It was hard enough to lead the Masters, especially under these circumstances. It was harder still to wait for that final starting time, when the starter in the green jacket would raise his arms and say, “Fore, please. Now driving.”
Nevertheless, Crenshaw seemed to his brother, wife, and friends far more collected than he had in 1987, ’88, or ’89. He took a walk down the driveway, stopped near the end, and stood by himself in studied repose.
He tried not to think but failed. He pictured Harvey. He pictured shots that would give him a chance to win. He said a short prayer. He petitioned only for the ability to accept what would happen that afternoon, nothing more. “That’s where Harvey came into it,” Sayers said. Harvey would have told Crenshaw to play the game he loved and to remember why he loved it.
After thirty minutes at the end of the driveway, Crenshaw returned and said, “Let’s go.”
He selected a periwinkle-blue Bobby Jones shirt, invoking sepia-toned memories of Jones from 1930, when he won the U.S. Amateur and Open championships and the British Amateur and Open. He wore pleated, bone-colored trousers and brown saddle shoes. On this crisp, windless, and charged afternoon in eastern Georgia, he eased down Magnolia Lane, parked, and looked for the familiar figure of Jackson, his white-suited caddie.
Crenshaw and Jackson marched to the range. On the other side of the clubhouse, crowds in linen and seersucker and broad, floppy hats swelled around the first tee to see if the man with so much on his mind that week could ignore the size of the job at hand.
Julie Crenshaw waited for her husband to finish on the putting green. She thought he looked settled. She did not worry. She knew he already had bargained with himself on the driveway, to accept the conclusion of this Masters Sunday before he took his first swing. “Harvey was with him every step of the way,” Julie said.
Crenshaw holed his last practice putt and wheeled to find Jackson.
They walked through the corridor of spectators wishing for redemption.
They smiled for strangers hoping for miracles.
They stopped when Crenshaw saw his wife.
“Go have fun,” she said.
He touched her hand. They kissed.
Crenshaw opened with a par on the long first hole, one of the most difficult at Augusta for its sheer length up the hill and also for what it meant. He made birdie on the par-5 second after a wedge to eight feet. He bogeyed the fifth. A partially blind hole with a green that moved like folded cake batter, the fifth was a hard par. Crenshaw recognized that. He pocketed his ball with neither anger nor remorse.
When he addressed his shot at the par-3 sixth, Crenshaw stared down the hill at the voluptuously contoured green. The slightest miss could result in a bitter struggle for par. He swung without fear. His ball rose. No one moved, and Crenshaw kept his eyes on its journey to the finish, five feet from the flagstick. A roar rose.
Hands ahead.
Birdie.
Crenshaw made another birdie on the ninth with a crisp sand wedge from one hundred steps. Back in Austin, Helen Penick watched the CBS broadcast with a close friend, Carrell Grigsby. An Austin photographer and Austin Country Club member, Grigsby often watched televised golf at the Penick household on Fawn Creek Path, regardless of who was winning. She felt like family there. But watching the tournament for the first time without Harvey seemed incomplete, if richly poignant, given Crenshaw’s play that week. Helen sat in Harvey’s chair by the glass door. She soon would migrate to the sofa, where she and Grigsby would have to hold hands and link arms to survive the next three hours of golf.
“Look at this!” they heard Ken Venturi blurt as Crenshaw’s approach shot cozied up to a foot from the front-right hole at No. 9. “You need shots like that to win,” Venturi said.
Henninger had vanished from contention in his first Masters Tournament. Crenshaw owned a one-stroke lead. He processed toward Augusta’s famed back nine at 2-under for the round, at 12-under for the tournament, and on the cusp of the most sentimental Masters rally since Nicklaus’s in 1986.
Helen and Grigsby heard the CBS announcer, Jim Nantz, say: “There you have it. The front nine is clear.” Neither woman wanted to speculate out loud. Their imaginations whirled.
Ahead, Norman birdied the par-five thirteenth, and the excited commotion of the spectators could be heard through the pines. The Australian, who’d lost in a crushing playoff in 1987 to Augusta native Larry Mize, was a shot behind Crenshaw now. He and Love, playing together, marched to the fourteenth tee.
Crenshaw gathered himself. The back tee of the 485-yard tenth hole shared high ground with the clubhouse, the long first tee, the big oak tree, the lawn on which families and friends of players took their lunch and iced tea, Butler Cabin, and the practice putting green where Crenshaw had spent that meditative, healing Wednesday evening after Harvey’s funeral. The vista swept out over the old orchard property like a panoramic still, drawing the eye from the fairway of the first hole bending to the right at the crest—empty now—to the wall of trees that guided players up to the eighteenth, to the hill between the tenth and eighteenth leading down to what waited for him in the lengthening shadows.
There was the par-4 seventeenth. Farther still, the fifteenth, the reachable and critical par-5. The thirteenth green. The sixteenth. It was impossible to discern through the pines, but down there lay Herbert Warren Wind’s Amen Corner too.
Crenshaw made par at No. 10.
Three holes in front of him, Love, playing the par-4 fourteenth with Norman, nearly holed his second shot from 120 yards. The birdie tied Crenshaw’s lead. Haas drove into the pine straw on the par-5 thirteenth. His chances ended there.
Back in Austin, Helen Penick watched the proceedings with her friend. “We have a huge battle,” she heard Ben Wright, the British-born CBS broadcaster, intone gravely as Crenshaw bent to tee his ball at the eleventh tee.
Norman and Love attacked the par-5 fifteenth with brave second shots to the green, Love with a 9-iron from a mere 165 yards. Both shots finished near enough to the hole to inspire hopes of eagle.
Both missed.
Love took a fleeting lead at minus 13 with his two-putt birdie. Norman and Crenshaw now were tied for second. Crenshaw claimed pars at the eleventh and then the twelfth.
At the par-5 thirteenth, Crenshaw slung an exquisite tee shot around the right-to-left turn in the fairway. He stood over his 200-yard second shot to the green. In 1984 he had chosen to play to the back-nine par-5 holes in three studious shots, to not even risk a bold attempt over the creek. Caution had prevailed. So had he. Today, however, Crenshaw never doubted his choice. He aimed his 4-iron at the center of the green. “There he stands, destiny in front of him,” a reporter declared on the CBS broadcast. In Austin, Helen and Grigsby waited, hands clasped. What might that destiny hold for Harvey’s boy?
Crenshaw fired. The shot steered left. “God, don’t pull it!” he admonished himself, momentarily in crisis, losing for an irretrievable second the composure he somehow had managed all afternoon. His ball skipped through the green and hung on the bank behind it, in the longer grass between two bunkers. Crenshaw studied his options.
He chipped—under the bench, under the bench—to twenty feet. He plumb-bobbed the swinging left-to-right putt for birdie. He took two practice strokes and let go. Hands lead, he thought. The ball scampered in.
He was relieved. A par there, Crenshaw knew, would equate to a shot lost on the field. He had no idea that Love had just taken three putts on the sixteenth, or that he now had a one-shot lead with five holes left to play in the Masters.
Helen Penick wept.
The lead was brief.
Love birdied the seventeenth from two feet. Knowledgeable spectators wondered again if this would be like 1988, ’89, or ’98, when Crenshaw played in the final pairing on Sunday, shot nothing lower than 71, and finished no higher than in a tie for third. “What a couple of weeks this man is having,” one of the CBS broadcasters pealed.
“I can imagine Harvey’s clapping again,” Helen heard him say.
Crenshaw heard the sound of the uprising from the seventeenth green as he addressed his drive on the fourteenth. He whipped through impact, ever slightly too soon. The ball drew hard, dove fast, and hopped toward the pine straw under the trees on the left.
But then something else happened: his ball steered right. When Crenshaw and Jackson got to it, they discovered a line to the green encumbered only by a low limb just ahead and the gathering tension of the occasion.
From 155 yards in the left rough, Crenshaw bore a hooded 8-iron under the branch to a dozen feet behind the hole. Norman bogeyed the seventeenth. The scoreboard at the eighteenth registered Love’s birdie. The crowd there thrummed. Love and Crenshaw were tied again.
Crenshaw made his par at the fourteenth. Love drove wildly left on the final hole, near the abandoned ninth fairway. His 120-yard approach collected just short of the green and spun farther from the flagstick. “No good,” Venturi said.
A breeze rippled the yellow flags at Augusta. “Just a gentle zephyr,” Wright observed. Love gamely made par at the eighteenth, signed his scorecard, and waited for Crenshaw, who had driven ideally on the par-5 fifteenth, to play the final four holes. Love steeled—hoped—for a playoff.
“Right now it’s Ben’s tournament to win,” Venturi told viewers.
Helen braced herself.
Throughout his career, Crenshaw had always sneaked a look at the Sunday leaderboard to see where matters stood in order to calibrate his planning. But through the front nine that Sunday he cast no glances in that direction. Something told him not to. He was, he remembered later, simply playing the golf course. He was Benny, the kid Harvey sent out to the Austin Country Club course on Riverside Drive with a sleeve of golf balls and instructions to embrace the pure liberation of swinging freely. He was not thinking. He was not trying. Crenshaw was playing on instinct and intuition.
He was playing himself.
Crenshaw pounded his second shot from 220 yards through the fifteenth green. The ball stopped in shady, matted grass where spectators had been standing since the gates opened very early that morning. He allowed himself his first view of the scores as he examined his circumstances. Seeing that Love had shot 66 moments earlier to post a 13-under-par 275, he knew what he had to do.
His third shot bumped short of the collar surrounding the green. Worse, it stayed there. Crenshaw winced when he failed to birdie the final par-5 on the course. He nonetheless strode freely through appreciative applause to the sixteenth tee. He and Love remained tied. Norman and Haas shared third, two shots behind. Crenshaw wanted one more birdie. Just one.
“The wind’s freshening a little,” Wright noted.
The tee of the par-3 sixteenth hole at Augusta can feel like a busy train stop. Spectators sit on each side from the bleachers, near enough that distracted players can hear the crinkle of cellophane if someone unwraps a sandwich. Crenshaw was not distracted. He calculated the 183-yard distance to the hole, the slope he wanted his ball to catch, the breeze summoning, the adrenaline coursing through him, the acceptance pending. He pulled the 6-iron from his bag.
Crenshaw later heralded those ten seconds of evaluating the conditions—the tension of his grip, the deliberation of his breathing, the execution of his move to the ball—as his finest calculation of the round. The shot fell at just the right time, rolled just the right distance, tumbled left from the soft spine in the green at just the right place. Norman and Love had missed that ridge, leaving dangerous putts from the high shelf of the slope. But Crenshaw’s ball commanded it perfectly, rolling to the back-left flagstick as if directed by providence. “A lot of courage in that!” Wright exclaimed.
The five-foot birdie putt cascaded into the hole.
Some of the players who’d finished congregated around televisions in the Augusta National clubhouse. Harvey’s watching over him, thought Peter Jacobsen as Crenshaw and Jackson reached the sixteenth green. Many years later, Jacobsen remembered feeling the properness of what happened that afternoon. “It just kind of had been lining up for Ben,” Jacobsen said. “What happened there was the right thing that needed to happen.”
Crenshaw had two holes to play and a one-shot lead. He tried again not to think. He tried again not to project. He tried not to try. His drive on the par-4 seventeenth afforded him an aggressive play to the hole, which he embraced with no hesitation. Venturi informed Helen, her friend Grigsby, and the rest of his viewers that afternoon that only one consideration mattered: “What club do I need to clear the bunker?”
Crenshaw chose his 9-iron. He assumed his stance and glanced at his target twice, then a third time. The club whooshed through the turf. The approach left Crenshaw thirteen feet for another birdie. He judged the left-to-right turn of the putt and kept his hands in front of the ball, just as Harvey had told him to.
Another birdie.
In Austin, cheers rose on Fawn Creek Path. “We definitely felt Harvey the whole time,” Grigsby said. But they really felt him now. In Augusta, Crenshaw swiped the ball from the seventeenth hole and held the pose in a gesture of triumph, conviction, and tribute to his teacher. “I played it like a dream,” Crenshaw said.
Verne Lundquist, meanwhile, had left his position at the twelfth hole to watch the finish at the CBS compound on the far side of the Par Three Course. His friendship with Crenshaw dated back to the 1960s, when Lundquist, a graduate of Austin High School and Texas Lutheran University in nearby Seguin, began broadcasting sports for Channel 7, the CBS affiliate in Austin.
He had known Crenshaw since his earliest days at the country club, back when he was Harvey’s boy. With quiet pride, Lundquist watched Crenshaw and Jackson arrive at the eighteenth tee.
“It was mesmerizing,” he said. “There wasn’t a soul in there who didn’t hope that Ben would win.”
He saw Crenshaw rope a hustling 4-wood up the rising, calamitous fairway: the last march of the Masters.
The walk toward the green released the feelings Crenshaw had kept so carefully in check until now. He inventoried the events of the last seven days and wondered, briefly, about the significance of accomplishing something that had seemed impossible the night his wife told him Harvey had died. A CBS camera followed him, but Crenshaw ignored it. He inhaled deeply 145 yards from the flag and waggled an 8-iron.
“I don’t know how it happened,” he said later that evening. “When you’re forty-three, you don’t know how many more chances you are going to get again. You know how this tournament has gone. Fate is what decides it a lot of times. It was like someone put their hand on my shoulder and sort of guided me.”
Guided. Harvey loved that word. He used it often when talking about his life’s work.
Crenshaw made a bogey on the final hole—his fifth one in seventy-two holes. His blocked approach fell short, his chip onto the green steered away from the slopes with the most peril, and his first putt, from ten feet, slipped left. Crenshaw settled over his eighteen-inch putt to win. God, he told himself, if you can get through this little foot-and-a-half putt, then you can go ahead and cry. The putt fell.
Crenshaw slumped. His hat tumbled. He covered his face with his hands, and he could barely breathe. “That picture, I can still see it,” remembered Nick Price, the popular South African, who missed the cut in ’95. “That was pure emotion, determination, and guts.”
Crenshaw heard Jackson’s voice: “Are you all right?” He felt Jackson’s big hands grip his heaving shoulders. He rose and put his arms around his caddie. They left the green together. “That picture speaks for itself,” Venturi said.
You can go out there, a member told Julie.
“No,” she replied. “It’s their time.”
Back in Austin, Helen Penick uncorked a special bottle of champagne, a 1983 magnum of Dom Pérignon. It was the one Simon & Schuster had sent for her husband’s ninetieth birthday. There had never seemed a more appropriate occasion until Crenshaw holed that little putt to finish at 14 under par to win the Masters.
“Obviously we had our hopes up,” Grigsby said. “But we were just as shocked as the rest of the world at how it happened.” The two women drank until the bottle was dry.
Nantz’s rich baritone narrated the sequence as the two-time champion shook Henninger’s hand. “He’d been holding back the emotion, keeping it in check all week,” Nantz said. “Until now.” He added: “There is no greater tribute to the man he loved, Harvey Penick.”
Officials escorted Crenshaw to Butler Cabin for the jacket ceremony. Someone from the media committee took Love to the press building alongside the fairway of the first hole. Inside, Love tried to explain what had just happened at the Masters. “It couldn’t be a better end for Harvey Penick’s life to have Ben win on the same week he passed away,” Love said. “I don’t think there was anything stopping Ben today.”
In his televised interviews in the famous cabin, and later in the Masters press room, Crenshaw attempted to explain what had just happened outside. He mentioned his concentration. He discussed the tee shot on the sixteenth and the putt a hole later. He mused about fate. More than once, he just shook his head and said he was lucky—luckier than anyone else that afternoon.
What he really was saying was that he did not know how he won that day. But he was convinced that the spirit of his teacher had something very real to do with it.
“I had a fifteenth club in the bag,” Crenshaw said, “and it was Harvey.”
In the press building, the writers tapped away at their keyboards. They wrote about the weight Crenshaw had carried that week. They wrote about his fondness for the tournament and the course and its founder. They wrote about his critical putt on the thirteenth hole and the birdies on the sixteenth and seventeenth and the tears on the eighteenth green. They wrote about the “fifteenth club.” “It did feel almost touched, the way it happened,” said Green, the golf writer from Charlotte. That year’s Masters would remain one of his favorites.
Crenshaw, his wife, and his friends changed for the Champion’s Dinner in the Trophy Room, where the menu included pompano, lamb chops, and a New York strip. They had to hurry. Their flight was waiting. Then someone delivered a note to the table. No one pointed out the coincidence that exactly one week earlier the same maitre d’ had brought a message from Austin to the same dining room.
The tone of this note was very different.
“Helen and Harvey Penick send congratulations and love on this special day,” it read.
It was from Helen.
The Crenshaws left before midnight—before dessert—with a police escort to the Augusta airport. Someone brought a cake for the trip home, and Crenshaw called Helen Penick from the air. As the flight descended into Austin, the University of Texas Tower came into view outside the windows of the jet, just as it had in 1984. It glowed in orange light to commemorate what had already become known as “The Little Red Masters.”
The week after the Masters, NBC broadcast the final round of the Senior PGA Championship at PGA National in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. Harvey would have watched this tournament from his velour chair with great interest, given the men in contention. Raymond Floyd led, at minus 9, chased closely by Jim Colbert, DeWitt Weaver, Harvey’s friend Jack Nicklaus, and fellow Texan Lee Trevino. The coverage broke for a reflection on Crenshaw’s triumph seven days earlier.
Bob Costas narrated the segment, which included a photograph of Harvey with Morris Williams Jr. and the Texas Junior, Texas Amateur, and Texas PGA Championship trophies that Williams won in that magical 1950 season. “Here, now, are the thoughts of Crenshaw, and another Penick protégé, Tom Kite,” Costas said.
The minute-long tribute, accompanied by gentle piano and cello music, opened with a scene of Harvey in a golf cart, flanked by Crenshaw and Kite. “Harvey meant all the good things in golf,” came the voice of Crenshaw. The segment cut to Kite in a darkened studio. “He was a great man,” he said. “You know, if you hang around good people, it’s hard to mess up your life.”
The piece pulled footage from Sunday at the Masters a week earlier. There was Crenshaw, arcing his pivotal tee shot on the par-3 sixteenth, watching his ball curl down the bank toward the hole. There he was again, stroking the left-to-right putt on the seventeenth, his hands ahead of the ball, trusting. And there he was once more, crumbling after the final putt on the eighteenth.
“I don’t know,” Crenshaw tried to explain. “I was as determined as I’ve ever been in my life. I let go. I did it for Harvey.” The camera then returned to Kite, who sighed deeply. “Mr. Penick will be with my golf game for a long time,” he said.
The piece concluded with Crenshaw reading a brief selection from For All Who Love the Game, the third book from Harvey and Shrake, the one written for women and scheduled for release that month. “It’s a little passage called ‘Home,’” Crenshaw said.
What a beautiful place a golf course is. From the meanest country pasture to the Pebble Beaches and St. Andrews of the world, a golf course is to me a holy ground. I feel God in the trees and grass and flowers, in the rabbits and the birds and the squirrels, in the sky and water. I feel that I am home.
The year of Harvey’s death became a toast to his life.
On June 1, Shrake wrote his editor in New York a quick note: “Here’s the beginning of the End.”
It was a draft of the introduction to the book for seniors, an undertaking that had assumed an almost spiritual voice. Less a handy guide to life and the future, this last book was a somber rumination about faith and the hereafter. Shrake had prepared a list of twenty-five questions to ask Harvey for the last book. Many of them dealt with the nature of God and whether Harvey believed in heaven and the Devil. Shrake wanted to ask him what he remembered from the night before the statue ceremony at the country club, when Helen feared he might die. “Did you ever feel that your spirit crossed over and met with angels or beings from another place?” Shrake wanted to ask Harvey. “Do you think extranatural forces, such as the power of prayer, can have an effect on the flight of a golf ball?”
Under that, Shrake wrote: “Answer this question seriously.”
Shrake never got his answers.
Simon & Schuster released the third book and continued to plan for the fourth. Holly Brubach, the style editor of the New York Times, liked For All Who Love the Game. “Penick has high hopes for women,” she wrote in her review, published on June 11. “He looks us straight in the eye.” Brubach found no fault in the message, but she chastised Shrake for occasionally parroting the hard-boiled delivery of Raymond Chandler, the detective novelist. “She was a classy-looking young woman, attractive, smart. She knew what she wanted, but I knew what she needed. She needed to get over her fear of sand traps.” Brubach nonetheless cheered the new addition to the Penick anthology. “It’s Penick’s voice that stays with the reader, whispering in her ear.”
The Texas House of Representatives approved a resolution that year to commemorate the Texan who taught golf for more than seven decades. “Harvey Penick was a man whose encyclopedic knowledge of the game of golf was surpassed only by his ability to communicate that information to others in a simple and instructive manner; although his warmth and wisdom are gone from us now, his unique spirit will surely live on in the hearts of the many people whose lives he touched during his time on this earth,” the document read.
The measure passed with no dissent.
In August, Tinsley Penick sent club members a one-page letter announcing his retirement. He noted that he’d made the decision more than a year before, after twenty-five years in the position. Now, with his father’s death, it was time to act on it.
“The members have always treated me and my family with respect, and more like a friend than an employee,” Penick wrote. “How lucky can a person get, to be doing something he loves around friends that he cares for, and that care for him?”
The club gave Penick and his family a lifetime membership.
“They don’t know how much it means to me,” Penick said. “I was never a great player, so I’m looking forward to being strictly a member and playing lots of golf. The only advice I would have for a young person wanting to be a golf professional is to work hard, manage your money well and make all the right investments. If you do that, you can retire at age fifty-seven—especially if your dad writes a best seller.”
For the first time since 1923, Austin Country Club would have a head professional not named Penick. The club in 1995 barely resembled the club of seven decades before, the era of sand putting surfaces and boy caddies from the neighborhood and championships known as handicaps. When Tinsley Penick retired, Austin Country Club had hundreds of golf members, annual revenues of $5.1 million, assets of $14.8 million, and one of the finest, and most punishing, golf courses in the state.
It would forever be known as the golf home of Harvey Penick.