JONES, ROBERT "BOBBY" TYRE, JR. 1902-1971
Celebrated amateur golfer
Amateurism
In a decade when athletes were frequently lured away from amateur athletics by the small fortunes promised by professional sports, Bobby Jones spent his entire golfing career as an amateur. He felt that his potentially violent temper, fueled by his desire for the perfect shot and directed toward himself, worked against his succeeding as a professional. Consequently, although he was a consummate golfing artist and acclaimed worldwide, he did not earn money from his sport until after he retired from competition at age twenty-eight.
Accomplishments
In his entire fourteen-year career, Jones played in only fifty-two tournaments, twenty-three of which he won. He hated to practice and sometimes went as long as three months without playing golf at all. He averaged no more than eighty rounds a year, and when he did play it was most often with his father or friends, as if he were any other weekend golfer. Jones did not win a single national tournament in his first ten attempts, but in the summer of 1923 his career took off when, at the age of twenty-one, he became the U.S. Open champion, playing against both professionals and amateurs. He then won the 1924 and 1925 U.S. Amateur titles and, in 1926, became the first player to win the British Open and the U.S Open in the same year, an accomplishment that earned him his first ticker-tape parade down Broadway. He again won the British Open in 1927, the U.S. Amateur in 1927 and 1928, and the U.S. Open in 1929. In all, he took thirteen major titles—four U.S. Opens, three British Opens, five U.S, Amateurs, and one British Amateur. His greatest golfing triumph occurred in 1930, when he won the British Amateur, the British Open, the U.S. Open, and the U.S. Amateur-—the Grand Slam of Golf—a feat that no other player matched. In 1950 an Associated Press poll judged Jones's Grand Slam "the Supreme Athletic Achievement of the Century."
Early Career
Jones was introduced to the game while he was recovering from a series of childhood illnesses at East Lake, a resort near his hometown of Atlanta. His only golf lessons came from watching and copying the East Lake club professional, Stewart Maiden. Jones won his first children's tournament at East Lake at age six. At nine he took the Atlanta Athletic Club Junior Championship, beating a sixteen-year-old, and at thirteen he won, in Birmingham, Alabama, an invitational tournament in which his father also competed. At fourteen he reached the third round before losing to the defending champion in the U.S. Amateur.
Later Career
From 1923 to 1930 Jones won thirteen of the twenty-one national championships he entered in the United States and Great Britain. During this period he captured five of the eight U.S. Amateur titles for which he contended, all three of the British Opens he entered, and one of the two British Amateurs in which he played. No amateur golfer ever beat him twice in match play, and the two leading professionals of his time, Gene Sarazen and Walter Hagen, never won an Open in which Jones also completed, although Hagen beat him in their only matchup, a seventy-two-hole contest in 1926. During 1923 to 1930 Jones played in only seven tournaments that were not national championships: two amateur events and five tournaments now part of the professional tour; he won four of these events. In a qualifying round for the 1926 British Open, Jones played a "perfect" round of 66—33 out and 33 in, 33 shots from tee to green, 33 putts. In 1928 he played 12 straight subpar tournaments rounds, in only two of which he scored over 70. That same year he broke within a single week four course records in the Chicago area.
Education
After winning the Grand Slam in 1930, Jones felt that he had nothing else to accomplish in competitive golf and thus retired from the game at age twenty-eight. He had no difficulty occupying himself in retirement. While dominating golf Jones had also attended college, earning a degree in mechanical engineering from Georgia Tech, taking another degree in English
literature from Harvard, and finally pursuing a law degree at Emory University. In the middle of his second year of law school, he sat for the Georgia State Bar exam to find out how difficult it was; passing easily, he left law school to join his father's law firm.
Retirement
Designing the first matched set of irons for Spalding in 1932, Jones also turned his interest to golf-course design. With Clifford Roberts, a Wall Street broker, and Alister Mackenzie, a British golf architect, Jones began construction on the Augusta National course in 1931 and completed it in 1933. The course became known as The Masters, though Jones thought the title pretentious. Its first Invitational Tournament was held in 1934. Additionally, Jones wrote extensively about golf, including Down the Fairway (1927, with O. B. Keeler) and Golf Is My Game (1960).
Final Years
In 1948 Jones began to suffer atrophy and pain on his right side. In July 1956 his ailments, unrelieved by two surgical procedures, were diagnosed as syringomyelia, a nervous-system disease similar to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which killed Lou Gehrig. A member of the World Golf Hall of Fame, Jones has often been called the greatest golfer of all time.
Source:
Ron Fimrite, "The Emperor Jones," Sports Illustrated, 80 (11 August 1994): 104-116.
