St. Bobby : Sixty Years Later, Jones’ Spirit Lives On at His Favorite Course--St. Andrews

When the British Open is played out this week on the Old Course of the Royal and Ancient, as sure as chilling winds will come swirling in off the North Sea, the ghost of Bobby Jones will hover over this Scottish seaside village that is the birthplace of golf.

It was here 60 years ago that Jones began his odyssey of winning golf’s original Grand Slam with his victory in the British Amateur.

Jones was St. Andrews’ adopted son, a man so cherished, so loved and so idolized by the Scots that he was as much at home among the wind-swept gorse as he was among the azaleas and peach trees of his native Georgia.

It was not love at first sight.

Jones came here first in 1921, a mere stripling of 19 but already a golfing prodigy, to play in the British Open. He despised what he saw--a barren pasture laden with hidden horrors. He shot the front nine in 46 in the third round, and after following that with a double-bogey six on No. 10, he picked up on No. 11 when his third shot on the par-three hole was still in a bunker.

“My ball came out of the bunker in my pocket, and my scorecard found its way into the River Eden,” he recalled later.

From that day on, however, through the 1926 Walker Cup matches, 1927 British Open, 1930 British Amateur and a friendly match in 1936--six years after he retired--Jones never lost a match or a contest at St. Andrews.

“The more I studied the Old Course, the more I loved it, and the more I loved it, the more I studied it, so that I came to feel that it was for me the most favorite meeting ground possible for an important match,” he wrote in his autobiography, “Golf Is My Game.”

“Truly, if I had to select one course upon which to play the match of my life, I should have selected the Old Course.”

Scots understood and appreciated the feeling.

After Jones sank his final putt to win their Open in 1927, cheering Scots hoisted him on their shoulders and carried him--clutching his famous Calamity Jane putter high in the air--to the Royal and Ancient clubhouse.

If there was the slightest rancor toward a foreigner winning their favorite tournament, it disappeared forever when Jones said, at the victory ceremony: “Nothing would make me happier than to take home your trophy, but I cannot. It was played for here 30 years before I was born. Please honor me by allowing it to be kept here at the Royal and Ancient Club where it belongs.”

In 1958, Jones was honorary captain of the U.S. team in the first Eisenhower World Team championship, which was played at St. Andrews. During his stay, the city made him an Honorary Burgess of the Borough, an honor accorded only to Benjamin Franklin 193 years earlier.

Already suffering from the painful spinal disease, syringomyelia, that crippled him

in the years before his death at 69, Jones accepted the Freedom of the City from the town clerk in an emotional ceremony before 1,700 who packed the Younger Generation Hall of St. Andrews University.

“It is a wonderful experience to go about a town where people wave at you from doorways and windows, where strangers smile and greet you by name, often your first name,” he said. “I could take out of my life everything except my experiences at St. Andrews, and I would still have a rich full life.”

As Jones made his way through the crowd, walking with a cane and assisted by his son, the assemblage broke out in song, “Will Ye No’ Come Back Again?”

He never did. Jones died 13 years later, a citizen of St. Andrews as much as of Atlanta.

The quest for what Jones’ literary sidekick, O. B. Keeler of the Atlanta Journal, persisted in calling the “Impregnable Quadrilateral” began at St. Andrews in May of 1930.

The British Amateur was the one part of the Grand Slam that had eluded the Georgian. He had won the United States Open three times, the British Open twice and the U.S. Amateur four times--nine major championships in seven years between 1923 and 1929--but not the British Amateur in two tries.

Jones, with his wife, Mary, and Keeler sailed for Britain in April on the Mauretania so he could captain the U.S. Walker Cup team at Sandwich before the Amateur. Among the passengers was Douglas Fairbanks, a close friend of Jones who went along as a golf fan.

In what was then a typical performance, Jones and his partner won their four-ball match, 8 and 7, and Jones won his singles match, 9 and 8. Between the team matches and the Amateur, Jones stopped off at Sunningdale to win a 36-hole invitational against the world’s best amateurs, setting a course record of 68 in the process.

Match play has a way of upsetting form, as Jones learned when an unknown from Nebraska, Johnny Goodman, sent him home early from the U.S. Amateur at Pebble Beach in 1929. And it nearly happened to him in the first round at St. Andrews.

Sid Roper, a coal miner, was his opponent--a public course player from Nottingham in Robin Hood country, who showed up in an old coat, flannel trousers, a slouch cap and ordinary street shoes with hobnails. He didn’t even have a caddy familiar with the course. A friend from Nottingham, who had never seen St. Andrews, carried his clubs.

Jones, as usual, was impeccable in white shirt, tie and plus fours.

Jones made one of his fastest starts: birdie-par-birdie-eagle-birdie. He was five under par after five holes but had only a 3-up lead, and Roper got one hole back on No. 8 when he left Jones with an unmakeable stymie.

(A stymie is when one player’s ball comes to rest between his opponent’s ball and the cup during match play. Instead of marking the ball--as is the custom today--a player could leave his ball on the green and force his opponent to hit around it, or in some cases, chip over it. The stymie rule was abolished in 1951 after unintentional stymies decided several important matches.)

On No. 4, a par-four, Jones pulled his drive into a bunker but holed out his second shot from 160 yards for an eagle.

The unflappable Roper shot a succession of fours at Jones and made the turn two down. They matched hole for hole until Roper ran out of real estate and lost, 3 and 2. Had Jones parred in, he would have equaled the course-record 68 he set three years earlier in the first round of the British Open.

Cyril Tolley, the defending British Amateur champion, gave Jones his toughest match. Tolley had a personal score to settle with the American. Jones beat him, 12 and 11, during the 1926 Walker Cup at St. Andrews.

A wind howling off the River Eden toward the North Sea created almost impossible playing conditions, but it did not prevent nearly everyone in St. Andrews from following the match. So riveted was the villagers’ attention to the match that it inspired mystery playwright Gerard Fairley to use the day as a setting for one of his stories.

Bernard Darwin, the noted British golf historian, wrote: “Mr. Fairley was quite right to set the scene of the murder in one of his stories on the afternoon of that match. There would have been ample opportunity to commit several murders and escape undetected through the lonely streets, though stained with the marks of crime.”

The winds were of gale force. On No. 12, a 314-yard hole with the River Eden behind it, both players drove over the green.

The lead changed hands six times by the time they reached the 17th--St. Andrews’ historic Road Hole. The scorecard called it 466 yards, but it played much longer because of a building that jutted halfway across the fairway in line with the green. It was used by Laurie Auchterlonie, a clubmaker who won the U.S. Open in 1902, as a drying shed for hickory shafts.

Both Jones and Tolley, again with the wind at their backs, drove over the shed. Jones’ second shot, with a 4-iron, headed left of the green, where it hit a spectator and dropped in good position. Tolley came up short, leaving himself a delicate chip over a pot bunker guarding the pin.

Jones chipped to within eight feet, only to watch as the huge Englishman flipped a pitch that stopped two feet from the cup. Years later, Tolley called it “the finest shot of my life.” Both made their par putts and headed for No. 18, where two routine pars sent the match into a playoff.

Scores were not indicative of the struggle between the two giants of golf. Jones shot a 36-39--75, Tolley a 37-38--75.

Tolley took three shots to reach the 370-yard first playoff hole, leaving his approach seven feet away. Jones, on in two, putted first, and the ball stopped two inches from the hole--directly in line with Tolley’s ball. The match was ended by a stymie.

“It was the kind of match in which each player plays himself so completely out that at the end the only feeling to which he is sensitive is one of utter exhaustion,” Jones wrote. “The match was primitive . . . and I think the playing conditions must have been also.”

That was the only overtime match for Jones, but he had several anxious moments against Jimmy Johnston, who won the U.S. Amateur the year before at Pebble Beach; and George Voigt, a teammate on two Walker Cup teams. The matches were quite contrasting.

Against Johnston, Jones was four up with five to play, only to lose three of four holes, forcing him to sink an eight-foot putt on the final green to win.

Against Voigt the next day, it was quite the opposite. With five holes to play in an afternoon match, Jones found himself two down. He had dispatched his morning opponent so quickly that he had time on his hands before going out against Voigt, so he suggested to his wife that they have a glass of sherry to calm his nerves.

Jones confessed after the match that the sherry affected his depth perception, and he almost gave up the idea of catching Voigt.

“I did not think that Voigt was the kind of player who would toss away this sort of lead, and I was quite certain that I was not capable of the golf needed to wrest it away from him,” Jones wrote.

But Voigt did throw it away, hitting his drive out of bounds over the stone wall at No. 14, and bunkering his tee shot on No. 16 in an impossible hazard called the “Principal’s Nose.” Jones pulled even and destroyed what was left of Voigt’s confidence with a curling 12-foot putt to save a half on No. 17. He won the final hole with a par to gain the final round against Roger Wethered, the 1923 champion, whose sister, Joyce, was one of Britain’s greatest female players.

In the 36-hole final, Jones breezed to a 7-and-6 victory. The match ended at No. 13, the farthest hole from the clubhouse, and the toughest part of the day was walking the 1 1/2 miles back to the Royal and Ancient while 12,000 cheering Scots jostled in an effort to touch the American hero.

Jones played seven 18-hole matches and the 36-hole final to start his run toward the Impregnable Quadrilateral. The significance was not lost on the 28-year-old Georgian.

“It is an inescapable fact that I could not win all four without the first one,” he said. “and this one had always been for me the most difficult.”

In it, he defeated the amateur champions of the United States (Johnston) and Great Britain (Tolley) and the captain of the British Walker Cup team (Wethered).

Two weeks later, at the Hoylake course of the Royal Liverpool Golf Club before the British Open, Jones was asked if he might suffer a letdown after winning the Amateur.

“To my knowledge, I have never taken a golf tournament casually,” he said. “It did not make sense to me to travel 3,000 miles for a lark.”

With rounds of 70, 72, 74 and 75, his 291 broke Walter Hagen’s course record by 10 strokes, and Jones became the first since John Ball 40 years before to win the British Amateur and Open in the same season. Ball won a record eight British Amateurs between 1888 and 1912.

Every duffer in Scotland could relate to Jones’ play of Hoylake’s 482-yard No. 8, a short par-five hole. After a solid drive and a slightly off-line second shot with a spoon, his ball was barely off the green, down a slight slope where a chip and two putts would give him an easy par. A good chip would set up the birdie he expected.

But he chunked the chip, leaving it halfway up the slope, well short of the cup. The next one was not much better, the ball pulling up about 10 feet short of the cup. Like most anyone else in such a situation, he went aggressively for his par--and slid it a foot by the hole. Furious at himself for apparently making a bogey out of a potential birdie, Jones slapped at the ball and missed: A double-bogey seven.

“It was the most inexcusable hole I ever played. An old man with a croquet mallet could have got down in two,” he said.

Sixty years later, Lee Trevino had a similar experience on a par-five hole in the U.S. Senior Open: “I can go out there and par that hole with a wedge,” Trevino said afterward. “I’ll bet on it. I had a whole set of clubs to play with and I can’t make par.”

Double bogey and all, Jones’ 291 left him two shots ahead of Leo Diegel and Macdonald Smith, who won the Los Angeles Open the winter before.

Jones was only halfway to the Grand Slam, but his victories in Britain were so enthusiastically received back home, he was given a ticker-tape parade down Broadway after he and Mary returned on the SS Europa. From the Bowery to City Hall, fans cheered and filled the concrete canyon with confetti. It was his second such parade, the first coming after his 1927 British Open victory.

The U.S. Open was next, played in searing summer heat at the Interlachen course in Minneapolis. It was so hot that the perspiration caused the red tees in Jones’ pocket to stain his knickers.

Neither heat nor the world’s finest professional golfers could stop him now. Jones won by becoming the first player in Open history to break par for 72 holes, shooting a record 287.

Winning the U.S. Amateur--thereby completing the “Impregnable Quadrilateral”--was almost anticlimactic, so dominant was the stocky Georgian. The final curtain came at Merion, where in 1916, a 14-year-old prodigy named R.T. Jones Jr. played in his first U.S. Amateur.

After shooting a record 69-73 to win the medal, he closed out his matches 5 and 4, 5 and 4, 6 and 5, 9 and 8, and 8 and 7 in the final against Gene Homans. His toughest match was in an early round against Fay Coleman of Los Angeles, later to become a prominent Southern California professional.

From 1923 to 1930, Jones won 13 of the 21 national championships he entered. In 11 of his 12 Opens, British and American, he either won or finished second. Seven were victories. Two of his losses were in playoffs.

During that same period, 1923 to 1930, he played in only seven non-major championship tournaments. He won four of them.

Now he had won two Opens and two Amateurs in the same year--the Grand Slam of its time.

Jones was 28. There was nothing left to conquer, so he never played major tournament golf again.

The Grand Slam of golf has changed over the years, Jones’ Masters and the PGA replacing the two amateur championships, although those who win it still count their U.S. Amateur victories among their “major” totals.

The British Amateur has been reduced to a back-page item with its most recent champion being Rolf Muntz of the Netherlands. Eighteen Americans have won it since Bobby Jones in 1930, including Lawson Little, Frank Stranahan, Deane Beman, Steve Melnyk and a USC basketball player from Pasadena’s Annandale Golf Club named Dick Davies in 1962. The most recent was Jay Sigel in 1979.

The U.S. Amateur has become a shootout for collegians preparing for a pro career, as noted by recent winners Sam Randolph of USC, Scott Verplank of Oklahoma State, Nathaniel Crosby of Miami, Eric Meeks of Arizona and Chris Patton of Clemson, the current champion.

Meeks thought so little of it last year that he did not even defend, prefering to turn professional.