The Immortal Bobby , livre ebook

Table of Contents
 
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction
 
PART I - Little Bob and Mr. Jones
 
Chapter 1 - East Lake Days
Chapter 2 - The Jewel of the South
Chapter 3 - The Keeper of the Flame
Chapter 4 - “Emotions Which Could Not Be Endured”
Chapter 5 - “By No Means Fit for the Honourable Company”
Chapter 6 - The Long Lane Turns
Chapter 7 - “My Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, Are We Downhearted?”
Chapter 8 - “It Was Perfect and That Is All There Is to Say about It”
Chapter 9 - “Like a Hero Back from the War”
Chapter 10 - “He Belongs to Us All”
Chapter 11 - “You Can Never Know How I Envied You”
Chapter 12 - “Don’t Kill the Star in the Prologue”
 
PART II - The Grand Slam
Chapter 13 - Impregnable Quadrilaterals, Then and Now
Chapter 14 - “Your Boy Is Just Too Good”
Chapter 15 - he British Amateur: “They Ought to Burn Him at the Stake”
Chapter 16 - The British Open: Great Men of Hoylake
Chapter 17 - The U.S. Open: “The Lord Must Have Had His Arms Around Me”
Chapter 18 - Homecoming
Chapter 19 - The U. S. Amateur: “Into the Land of My Dreams”
Chapter 20 - Quitting the Memorable Scene
 
PART III - The Best That Life Can Offer . . . and the Worst
Chapter 21 - Hollywood, Augusta, and Beyond
Chapter 22 - “White as the Ku Klux Klan”
Chapter 23 - “I’ve Been Having Some Numbness in My Limbs”
Chapter 24 - “Will Ye No’ Come Back Again?”
 
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Index

This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Copyright © 2005 by Ron Rapoport. All rights reserved
 
Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published simultaneously in Canada
 
Photo credits: pages 145, 149 bottom, 150 bottom, 151: copyright © U.S. Golf Association; pages 146 top, 147 top: Kenan Research Center at the Atlanta History Center; pages 146 bottom, 147 bottom, 148, 149 top, 152: Special Collections and Archives, Robert W. Woodruff Library, Emory University; page 150 top: AP/Wide World Photos
 
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Rapoport, Ron, date.
The immortal Bobby : Bobby Jones and the golden age of golf / Ron Rapoport. p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-471-47372-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Jones, Bobby, 1902-1971. Golfers—United States—Biography. I. Title.
GV964.J6R36 2005
 
2004021909
 

 
For Daniel B. Rapoport, A champion all his life, And Allanna Beth Chung, Now at the first tee
Introduction
If Bobby Jones did not exist, the mythmaking sportswriters of the Golden Age of Sports might have had to invent him. And in a sense, perhaps they did.
Just beginning to realize their power to create idols on a scale never before imagined, the writers of the 1920s stood in awe of Jones in a way that left Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Bill Tilden, Red Grange, and the other great athletes of the era behind.
As talented and popular as these others were, they were in it for the money, while Jones, who played as an amateur and never accepted a winner’s purse, was not.
They were susceptible to the temptations that fame brought with it in the new age of celebrity, while Jones, who fled to the serenity of his home in Atlanta when not playing golf, was not.
They tended toward showmanship and arrogance, flaunting their talents, taunting and belittling their opponents, while Jones, the embodiment of restraint and southern courtesy, did not.
They courted the public spotlight—or were pushed into it by promoters eager to capitalize on the riches to be found in its glare—while Jones, relying on O. B. Keeler, a hometown sportswriter whose devotion knew no limits, to burnish his reputation, did not.
Occasionally, those who assumed the task of explaining Jones to an increasingly fascinated public would assure their audience that Jones was not a saint, not perfect. But even the flaws they listed proclaimed a humanity that only added to his mystique.
Jones regularly drank alcoholic beverages, newspaper and magazine readers were told, and had a particular affection for home-distilled corn whiskey. He occasionally swore, on the golf course and off, and was known to enjoy bawdy stories. His temper was notorious in his younger days, and it was not until he learned to control it that he became a champion.
So Jones was seen as that rare combination of noble patrician and regular guy. He was courtly, well-spoken, wise . . . and humble, approachable, one of the boys. By the time the catalog was complete, it seemed almost beside the point that he was also the greatest golfer the world had ever known.
Though Jones was all but an annuity for journalists who were quickly learning that despite its stuffy, country-club origins in America, golf could be an exciting game to write about, he was especially fascinating to the most stylish writers who crossed his path. Among them were those for whom sports was a youthful fancy they would one day leave behind, such as Paul Gallico; a change of pace from weightier concerns to be indulged only occasionally, such as Alistair Cooke; or a blank slate on which something approaching literature could be created, such as Bernard Darwin.
“In all the years of contact with the famous ones of sport,” said Gallico in Farewell to Sport , the book he wrote before turning to the novels that would secure his reputation and his fortune, “I have found only one that would stand up in every way as a gentleman as well as a celebrity, a fine, decent, human being as well as a newsprint personage, and who never once, since I have known him, has let me down in my estimate of him. That one is Robert Tyre Jones, Jr., the golf-player from Atlanta, Georgia.”
“I have done a little digging among friends and old golfing acquaintances who knew him and among old writers who, in other fields, have a sharp nose for the disreputable,” wrote Cooke, the longtime American correspondent for the BBC and the Guardian who became well known in his adopted land as host of public television’s Masterpiece Theatre . “But I do believe that a whole team of investigative reporters, working in shifts like coal miners, would find that in all of Jones’s life anyone has been able to observe, he nothing common did or mean.”
It was left to Darwin, the grandson of the great naturalist and one of the first journalists to devote himself primarily to writing about golf (a friend once called him “the originator of the species”) to define the problem they all faced: “A kind friend at St. Andrews said to me the other day that he read everything I wrote except about Bobby Jones; that he never intended to read, since there was nothing to say and superlatives were tiresome things.”
These writers were drawn to Jones in part by his education, which was rare among champion athletes, then as well as now. He had a diploma in mechanical engineering from Georgia Tech; a second degree in literature from Harvard; and, after winning two U.S. Amateur and Open titles and one British Open, he returned to study law at Emory University in Atlanta. He passed the state bar in his second year and finally left school for good.
Jones loved opera, pondered Cicero—“If only I thought as much of my golfing ability (I considered) as Cicero thought of his statesmanship, I might do better in these blamed tournaments,” he wrote—discussed Einstein and the fourth dimension, and relaxed after a competitive round by soaking in a hot tub and reading Giovanni Papini’s Life of Christ .
Jones also was at the very least their equal as a writer. His autobiographical works, while not forthcoming about his life away from the golf course, are descriptive, thoughtful, and gracefully written. He is, depending on how you look at it, either the finest writer of any great athlete who ever lived or the greatest athlete of any excellent writer.
In reviewing Bobby Jones on Golf , a compilation of instructional articles that set the standard for the burgeoning industry of how-to-play-golf books, C