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Bobby Jones dominated golf, by winning
nine major championships. In 1930, he won the Grand Slam. First,
Jones conquered England, winning the British Amateur and Open.
Then he conquered this country, winning the U.S. Open and Amateur.
No one else has ever won a Slam (for years, the two major amateur
tournaments have been replaced by the PGA Championship and the
Masters, which Jones helped design). Robert Tyre Jones Jr. (he
was named after his grandfather) was born on March 17, 1902
in Atlanta. At 6, Jones was swinging sawed-off golf clubs. At
7, he was mimicking the swing of Stewart Maiden, the country
club pro. At 11, he shot an 80 on the old course at East Lake.
His father looked at the card, then his son, and with wet eyes
hugged him. At 14, he played in his first U.S. Amateur, winning
two matches before being eliminated in the third round. After
Jones had won his first major it started him on his magnificent
eight-year run against the best golfers in the world. The first
stop for the Grand Slam in 1930 was St. Andrews, site of the
British Amateur. Of his eight winning matches in the tournament,
he won three of them. Two weeks later, he teed off in the British
Open on the links of Royal Liverpool at Hoylake. He won his
third British Open in five years. At the U.S. Open at the Interlachen
Country Club in a Minneapolis suburb, Jones won his fourth U.S.
Open championship. He won his fifth U.S. Amateur, which was
played outside Philadelphia, in a breeze. Jones retired with
13 majors, a record that would stand for more than 40 years.
Jones, who had graduated from Georgia Tech and Harvard and was
a lawyer in Atlanta, played lots of friendly golf, but he emerged
from his retirement only once a year to play The Masters. In
his last years, Jones was confined to a wheelchair because of
syringomyelia, a fluid-filled cavity in the spinal cord that
caused him first pain, then loss of feeling and muscle atrophy.
The illness became a slow death for Jones, who weighed somewhere
between 60 and 90 pounds when he died on Dec. 18, 1971 in Atlanta.
"As a young man, he was able to stand up to just about
the best that life can offer, which is not easy," Wind
wrote, "and later he stood up with equal grace to just
about the worst." |
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