You expect to find Jim Nantz waiting for the Masters champion in Butler Cabin on Sunday evening, but it must be a surprise to find God is in there with him, too. But, as Bernhard Langer explained after finishing his 136th and final competitive round at the Masters on Friday evening, apparently that’s what happened to him when he won the tournament for the first time in 1985, back when it was Brent Musburger asking the questions on CBS. In one of the more extraordinary revelations, Langer told the press that he saw the light right by the side of the 18th green here at Augusta National.
“I never mentioned it to the public but this tournament actually was very instrumental in me becoming a Christian,” Langer said, in a somewhat incongruous reply to a question about the fact that he was the last man to win a major using a persimmon driver. Apparently the club went by the name “the Last Supper”, which must have been what got him thinking about it. “I grew up Catholic, and I thought I was a Christian. But I basically used Jesus Christ in a very bad way in my first interview in Butler Cabin.”
You can go back and watch the clip. “Did you notice the pressure?” the club chairman, Hord Hardin, asked him. “I was just trying to stay cool and play my own game,” Langer said back, “and once in a while I looked up on the leaderboard and I saw these numbers going up with Curtis Strange, six and seven under, and I thought: ‘Jesus Christ! You’re not playing that bad yourself and you’re four or five behind!’ you know?”
Hardin seemed to think it was funny enough, but someone else must have decided that if he was going to use that kind of language on live TV Langer needed to brush up on his catechisms, and dragged him along to a Bible study group at Hilton Head three days later. “And that was when I learned that, you know, you should be born again spiritually. So I bought my own Bible and started going to Bible studies, and shortly after that, a couple months later, I became a Christian and gave my life to Jesus.”
Well, as Bob Dylan said, you’ll find God in the church of your choice. You scoff if you want to, but turns out the Almighty was a pretty good swing coach. “Eight years later, I was a Christian, and I won on Easter Sunday, which was very emotional and very meaningful for me because that’s the one day we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. And that’s what Christianity is all about. So this tournament was more meaningful to me than most people know, even in a spiritual sense.”
They do say he moves in mysterious ways. Langer got a reminder of this himself on the 15th on Friday. “I actually hit a beautiful wedge in, right to the middle of the green, and it spun all the way back in the water, and I made seven. I hit a perfect golf shot, literally, and I made seven, which is very annoying,” Langer said, as he reflected on his final round. “That’s how golf is. It can be the greatest game, and sometimes it can be very brutal. It’s a very fine line of, you know, hitting a great shot or ending up in a terrible place.” At 67, and after a lifetime of play, he’s still as baffled as the rest of us by the vagaries of game.
Langer was a great golfer who only got better as life went on; he has dominated the Champions Tour, where he has won at least one event for 18 consecutive years. He could probably get away with playing another few years in the field here, even after what happened on 15 he would have made the cut if he had only holed a six-foot putt on 18. But he just feels the course is too long for him to enjoy playing these days. “I’m a competitor. I want to be in the heat. I want to be on the leaderboard. I want to have a chance to win. On this golf course, I don’t feel I can win anymore. I can maybe make the cut if I play really good.
“I’m hitting such long clubs into these greens, I can’t stop the ball where I need to stop it, and it’s a golf course designed to be hit with medium to short irons.” That said, he still scored a 74 and a 73, which was a sight better than plenty of younger, stronger, longer golfers. He was treated to all the roars and applause Augusta always offers its favourites as he made his way off the 18th green for the final time. “How will they remember me?” Langer said. “Hopefully, you know, as a good golfer. But hopefully also a man of faith and a man of family and somebody that treated people well.” So he goes, the man who was born again in Butler Cabin.