At a quarter past six on Friday evening, Ben Crenshaw strolled up to the 18th green for the 138th and final time in his Masters career, moving easy on his heels, soaking up the last ovation of his competitive career. He was, at that point, 31 over par for the tournament. Soon to be 32. His second shot had landed 30 yards shy. Then his pitch flew by, 15 feet past. It bit on the lip, stopped and started to curl, rolled right back towards the flag. And hard as everyone gathered around tried to will it on into the hole, it stopped short enough to leave him needing two putts to get it in. He shot 85 in his final round, six shots better than he had done the day before. ”Those are tough decisions to step down,” he said. “But my God, it was way past time for me.”
There was some truth in that. It’s been eight years, and 20 rounds, since Crenshaw last went round Augusta in par. His last five rounds have all been up in the 80s or worse. Looking at such numbers, the cynics – and you’ll find more than a few of them in the media centre – say he has no more right being in the field here than John McEnroe would at Wimbledon. But one of the more endearing traditions of Augusta is that they allow their champions to come back and play whenever they’re willing. At the Open they cut the over 60s. “A tradition like no other” as they say here, a phrase the club is so fond of that they have taken out a trademark on it. And if their myth-making is all a little too calculated, the sentimentality laid on a touch too thick, there’s still no doubt that Augusta does these things well. “It’s rich in lore and it always will be,” Crenshaw said. And it is, because the club do so much to make it so.
By the time he took his final putt, Crenshaw had the green all to himself, his playing partners, Bill Hass and Jason Dufner, having already holed out. They had gone to join the honour guard, led by Augusta National’s chairman, Billy Payne, including too Crenshaw’s wife, his three daughters and his good friend Bubba Watson, and dominated by the tall frame of his caddie, Carl Jackson. He was too ill to carry Crenshaw’s bag this week but well enough to make it out to the green to join him for the final minute of his professional career. Perhaps the club had orchestrated the weather, too. Dark clouds were coming in, and so Crenshaw’s final shots were accompanied by distant thunder and his hug with Jackson by the first few raindrops.
It was Jackson’s brother, Justin, who caddied for Crenshaw in his final two rounds here. But he made way when the men met at the 18th. He walked off to one side while they embraced and traded a few words with each other. “I told him: ‘I love you,’ Crenshaw said. “And he said: ‘I love you,’ back. Can’t be any more succinct than that. We feel each other that way. We’ve always been that way. We know how much each other has meant to the other one, and it’s very powerful”.
Crenshaw and Jackson have been a team since 1976. Together, they won the Masters twice, in 1984, when Crenshaw finished two strokes ahead of Tom Watson, and 1995, when he was one stroke ahead of Davis Love III. “Together” is the right word, as Crenshaw says. “I’ve told so many people I couldn’t have done half the things I’ve done here without him.” Jackson, 68, has been working as a caddie at Augusta since 1961. He was 14 when he first carried a bag here. That was for Billy Burke, who won the US Open in 1931. This is his last Masters, too, and he got an ovation of his own when he walked on to the 18th green.
Jackson’s expertise lives on in the advice he passed on to Jordan Spieth’s caddie, Michael Greller. Spieth says that they use Jackson’s reads on the greens. Crenshaw has been something of a mentor to Spieth himself. The two are both graduates of the University of Texas. As Crenshaw said: “I’ve got to pull for my fellow Longhorn.”
But for most of the round, Crenshaw explained, his thoughts weren’t on what was happening around him now, or rather ahead of him, given that he was so far back in the scoring, but everything that had come before. On each hole, he said, he was “thinking about things that have happened” in the years gone by, the shots he had once pulled off, the men he had played with, beaten, and lost to. The best of them, Crenshaw said, was Jack Nicklaus. No doubt about it. In Nicklaus, he had met “the greatest of all time”, a man “supremely confident and extremely patient”, who made his opponent feel as if he were “two down on the 1st tee”.
Soon, no doubt, Crenshaw will take Arnold Palmer’s place and join Nicklaus and Gary Player as one of the tournament’s three honorary starters. A better place for him than the bottom of the leaderboard. “It’s meant a huge bit in my life. I have not only had to win here but to learn about it and to be proud of it, ” Crenshaw said. “And it has been fun. It’s been so much fun. It’s been wonderful.”
