Elise Amendola / AP

Sam Snead, left, and Byron Nelson stand on the first tee before starting the Masters in 2001. The death of Nelson, who died Tuesday at 94, is a watershed moment in golf, in sports and in American culture, writes MSNBC.com contributor Mike Celizic.

Nelson coached Tom Watson and Ken Venturi and was known to call up pros he saw on television to help with a swing flaw. For years, he was among the ancients who hit the ceremonial first tee shot at Augusta National to begin the Masters. In recent years, he just came to the event and watched, always approachable and approached by armies of young pros eager to shake his hand and bask in his royal glow.

He had a tournament named after him in Fort Worth, and it was there that he grew fond of Tiger Woods, marveling always at the drive that Woods has to be the best, the drive that Nelson says he didn’t have.

For him, it was about earning enough money to buy his ranch; that’s what he always said. But to do that, he had to win, and he didn’t have to toss clubs and breathe smoke to show what a competitor he was. Suffice it to say he beat Hogan and Snead and everyone else there was to beat, if only because they stood between him and his ranch.

In doing it, he embodied the essence of the game. The story of the first tournament he stood to win will always be told. He held a five-stroke lead going into the final round, in which he was to be paired with Hagen. True to his legend, Hagen arrived 1 1/2 hours late, pulling up in a chauffeured limo, exquisitely dressed, and probably brushing blondes off his shoulders like so much lint.

Nelson was told he could tee off, but in those days when there were no automatic disqualifications for showing up late, he refused, calmly waiting for his opponent, who promptly went out and took the first-place money away from the kid from Texas. Nelson never expressed regret about that. As far as I know, he never expressed regret about anything that happened to him in golf.

The cliché is to say we’ll never see another like him, but you can say that about the greats of any era. Times change, and with them the people who inhabit them. If Nelson were starting out today, he wouldn’t be looking to buy a ranch in Texas; he’d be looking to buy the whole state. In his day, he and his fellows would drive to the nearest town to do a radio interview. Can you imagine Tiger Woods or Phil Mickelson or anybody else doing that today?

But there are constants in the world, values that the Greeks treasured in their Olympians that we prize still today. And that’s what set him apart, even in his own era.

He was humble, but in the way of a great athlete who knows exactly how good he was. If you accused him of being one of the greatest golfers of all time, he wouldn’t argue with you, because it was true. He was great, and he knew it.

Once you got that out of the way, he was as approachable as any deified athlete ever has been, talking easily in a voice that dripped Texas, never feeling an obligation to impress anyone with what he said or to be anything other than what he was.

He liked to play up being a simple rancher; when asked about Jones, whom Nelson considered the greatest golfer ever, Nelson would usually mention Jones’ great command of the English language and the erudition one would expect of a Harvard law graduate who read voraciously. Nelson marveled at such an ability to speak, saying he himself just “talked Texas.”

But he played and conducted himself in a language that transcends time and place, a language whose verbs and nouns and participles are skill and sportsmanship and the ability to thrive under the greatest pressure.

He considered himself lucky, which he was in the genetic sweepstakes. Not only did he inherit genes that gave him a long and active and deeply satisfying life, he found himself in possession of a skill that most of us can only dream of. When that skill made him famous and gave him money, he didn’t pour it down his throat or throw it at floozies; he stuck by his woman, believed stolidly in his god and worked the land.

That, in the end, was the most important thing to him. As he said in an interview, what had made him happiest was “the way people feel about me. The way they honor me, the way they think I’m a good man. A Christian man. I think that’s the thing I’m more proud of, and the other thing is having the tournament, The Byron Nelson Classic. That’s a great group of people and they do tremendous work for charity to raise, help young people ... I was born of wonderful parents ... I had a great first wife. I got a great second wife, Peggy, and then I’ve lived well. I’ve lived happily.”

Can anyone ask for a better epitaph?