What was his game like? Crenshaw could not say.

“I never saw him hit a golf ball,” he said.

‘The Hardest Work’

It took a long time for Wind’s self-esteem to catch up to his stature. After receiving a dinner invitation from the British journalist Alistair Cooke, Wind told Macdonald, “He must have tried 30 people, and then he called me.”

Wind dressed in tailored clothes, but his jacket lapels and ties often sported stains. His appearance was a metaphor for his life: glamorous from afar, but messy upon closer inspection. In a letter to the mother of an impressionable teenager asking for insight into the sportswriting life, Wind answered with the unadorned truth.

“Many of us in sports and in writing have found our enthusiasm fading quite early in our careers — as early as the middle thirties,” he wrote.

“Lots of reasons for this, but it seems that one changes as one grows older, and the glamour of sport doesn’t always last. I have found golf a wonderful world but a good many of the other sports offer many tedious and disappointing standards. In truth, there are days — many of them — when I wished I made my living in some easier way than writing. It is the hardest work I know of, and while the satisfactions are considerable, we often wonder if it is worth it all.”

But Wind had no regrets. He made that clear in the letter’s closing paragraphs.

“I know in my own case that no one could ever have stopped me from going into writing,” he wrote. “I just had to do it, for reasons I didn’t completely understand at the time.”

Wind worked at The New Yorker into his 70s. He retired in 1989 and spent his final years in an assisted living home, with dementia, before he died from pneumonia at 88.