By the late nineteen twenties he was already thinking about building a golf course,
and he had already set his sights on the property that is now Augusta National
Golf Club. And in thirty or thirty one he met Clifford Roberts and together
they formed a corporation to buy the property, and then he started the Masters
tournament. He did not particularly care for the title of the Masters. He
preferred the title Augusta National Invitational. I think he didn't like the Masters Yes,
because a it was pretentious and b While Bob would not be said to
be progressive in any way, shape or form, he certainly remember he had
a real strong sense of fairness, and I think even then he would have
had something of a prescient sense of how tough it would be to name something
the Masters in the Deep South. Hi, this is Chet Hurwitz from Atlanta,
Georgia, and I play at Atlanta Country Club. This is Golf Smarter
number nine forty two, The Masters and a Bobby Jones history lesson through the
eyes and heart of his grandson, doctor Bob Jones. The fourth. This
is Golf Smarter sharing stories, tips and insights from great golf minds to help
you lower your score and raise your golf IQ. Here's your host, Fred
Green. Welcome back to the Golf Smarter Podcast, Doctor Bob. Great to
be with you, Fred. As always, as always, it must be
April, doctor Bob Jones. The fourth is here and it's time for the
Masters. So we want a history lesson as always and love getting your perspective
on all things South in that era, the era, the area. Yeah,
and on the road. But before we do that, I gotta tell
you, so, we were supposed to get together and you would We had
been talking about this for what eight nine months of getting together When I came
down to Atlanta. I was doing a civil rights tour and we were going
to get together and you had to be at it, just last minute stuff,
and we didn't get to do it. So this is the first time
we get to see each other and talk to each other since then. I'm
sorry we missed each other. Well, Fred, you have to understand the
only thing that had us miss each other. I mean, if it had
been anything other, well, I'll be honest about it, if it had
been anything other than having brain surgery to remove a benign tumor, that's the
only thing that could have kept me from getting together with you. So they
were in your mother in law's birthday in Florida and my mother in law's birthday
and Florida and crappy weather and crapy. We were hoping to play we were
going to play golf and the weather was yes, yes, so brain surgery,
mother in law and crappy weather. So and you're not kidding about those
things. So I'm glad to know that you're doing better, doing very well.
Thanks to a large extent, I'm doing very well. I was really
appreciated the support of a mutual friend of ours, doctor Joe Parent So really
yep. I went back and looked at his book, texted, emailed him
a couple of times. He gave me some good advice and just a nice
guy. Oh, I'm so glad I can make that introduction. Yeah,
me too. That's awesome. That's awesome. So while we were there,
we met up with a friend of my wife's who she actually went to high
school with and was friend of a friend. You know, they weren't really
close, but he's a golf smarter listener, and then realized that my wife
was his friend from high school. And then Joanne's book came out back in
June. We talked to her about that. He and his wife read the
book and his wife really related to it. So we got together with this
couple while we were there, and he was telling me that one of his
regular playing partners belongs to the Atlanta Country Club, and one of his regular
playing partners is apparently a good friend of yours, Charlie Yates. That's right,
That's exactly right. I've known Charlie. Actually, you know, I
was thinking about that when you asked me that. I was trying to think
of how long I've known Charlie, and I think if you were to ask
us both, we are of the age where we really don't know how long
we've known each other. And Charlie is his father was for a long time
the oldest living member of Augusta National. His father, Charlie Yates, Yeslie
British. His father won the British Amateur in nineteen thirty eight and was also
a member of the Walker Cup team that year. Really outstanding, outstanding golfer
and an incredible leader of philanthropy in the city of Atlanta. He was instrumental
in the building of the Woodruff Arts Center here in Atlanta. He was also
very very prominent in the development of the Bobby Jones Scholarship Fund that funds in
exchange between Emory and the University of Saint Andrews in Scotland. His son,
Charlie Junior, who is my dear friend, Charlie is. He would never
want me to say this, but Charlie is every bit is impactful I think
on our city, as was his father. He was very big in the
promotion of the YMCA here in Atlanta and also has had a huge interest in
the Jones Scholarship and also in the Gosh. He's also been active with the
Atlanta Opera, which taking it from basically forgettable to being one of the top
ten companies in the United States. And not to mention that he just has
a heart of gold and has a good friend And unfortunately if he hears this
now, you know, he'll he'll get a big head and that he'll just
be unlivable. But everybody really won't tell him great guy, great guy.
Well, it's fascinating because you know, and we're going to get him on
the show at some point because this this history of homegrown Atlanta golfers between Bob
Jones and Bobby Jones and Charlie Yates. But it was an era when amateur
play was far more important than professional golf. I mean, the majors that
Bobby Jones won he won as an amateur, he did and to it,
and he won the amateur championships. Well, that's correct, the amateur championships
were major championships, and really all the way up into the nineteen fifties,
amateur golf in many ways was kind of the equal to the professional game.
And that's partially because to a large degree, there just really wasn't money in
the professional game. In the amateur game, no excuse me, in the
professional professional game. Yeah, so there was really no inducement. I mean,
if you could make, you know, back in the nineteen forties fifties,
if you could make twenty thousand or thirty thousand dollars a year selling insurance,
why wouldn't you just do that and play golf on the amateur circuit then
become professional. And then around nineteen fifty eight nineteen sixty along came a guy
named Arnold Palmer, and all of a sudden there was enough money in the
game to where anybody after that point, if you truly wanted to be competitive,
you had to consider turning pro to have your game at the sharp level
that it needed to be. But up until that time, and in fact,
up until that time, it was always customary to think of whoever won
the US Amateur Championship as having been a major champions champion. That's right,
that's right. But also let's talk about the perfect storm of golf. Arnold
Palmer television. Oh, absolutely, absolutely right. That changes everything because his
charisma just explodes off the television, and Arnie's army is created because people now
can follow him all across the country the world by seeing him on television it
could. And then also you have to add one other thing into that mix
in terms of television and Arnold Palmer, and that is you have to add
in the Augusta National Golf Club added when Palmer was winning his first most of
his tournaments. Actually the Masters was telecast in black and white, but it
was the first time that people had the opportunity to actually see the place,
and it was also the first time they had the opportunity to see the drama
of the final four or five holes. Now, the downside to it,
back in the nineteen fifty eight, sixty sixty two. Those are the first
three times that Palmer and m sixty four when Palmer won. That is that
most of the excitement was already done by the time TV came on, because
they only covered from hole fourteen through eighteen, which means that Amen Corner never
even got seen. And that's where a lot of a lot of what Arnie
did was done on holes eleven, twelve, and thirteen. So yeah,
so I never even got seen until I don't think the game End Corner got
telecast until the nineteen seventies. I think back to Charlie eight senior for a
moment he grew up. One of his heroes was Bobby Jones. Absolutely,
I mean this is what I was reading about. Oh. Absolutely. Charlie
used to always say that he used to love to slip under the fence at
Eastlake and go watch Bobby Jones play golf. And he said, what was
really the most exciting thing was every now and then, my grandfather would invite
him into the clubhouse to give him what Charlie used to call that great elixir
of Atlanta, Coca cola. And he used to always say too, he
said, you know, he made the discovery that the old saying was truly
the case, and that is a man never stands so tall is when he
stoops to help a boy. And he said that Bub, as we called
my grandfather, would always give like little golf tips. Every now and then
he'd have an extra golf ball and he'd hand that. He'd hand that to
kids. And it wasn't just Charlie, I mean, you know, Charlie's
brother Dan also grew up there, and another Atlanta icon of business, Tom
Cousins, grew up in that area. We had great, great women golfers,
Alexa Sterling, who won the US Women's Amateur at the time when that
was the national championship of women's golf, and she won that, I believe
in nineteen fifteen and sixteen, and then I think the tournament wasn't held in
seventeen and eighteen because of World War One, and then she picked it up
again by winning it again in nineteen nineteen, which is really sort of sad
because because had Alexa been able to play in a Women's Amateur in seventeen and
eighteen and had won five of them in a row, we would probably be
talking about her to this day. As one of the great women players to
ever play, but because of World War One, she's kind of been forgotten
and we've had a hard time because we've wanted at the Atlanta Athletic Club,
we've wanted to introduce Alexa for membership in the World Golf Hall of Fame,
but unfortunately, I think that two year gap from seventeen and eighteen it's going
to make it just a little bit daunting. The thing that's interesting, though,
is that Alexa, my grandfather, another Atlanta named Perry Adare, and
a lady from Chicago named Elaine Rosenthal used to travel the United States during that
same two year period during the war, and they raised over a quarter of
a million for the war relief, so Alexa was not without her accomplishments.
She later moved to Canada and married a surgeon, I believe outside of Hamilton,
and that's where she lived for the remainder of her life. She did
return to Atlanta a couple of times. One was in nineteen fifty for the
Women's Women's Amateur when it was held at East Lake. My grandfather insisted on
driving down to the train station to pick her up, even though he had
to drive with a thing that allowed him to break and accelerate using his hand
because his legs were paralyzed. Wow. And then later she came back again
in nineteen seventy six when we hosted the US Open. So yes golf in
Atlanta, and you could, we could, We could do an entire hour
just on the great golfers male and female that have just been in the Atlanta
Era area, no question, Okay, And maybe next year that's what we're
going to do. But we're gonna we're gonna take a break right now.
But before we do, I need to apologize to every listeners who's listening to
our conversation on a speaker in their house. Maybe they're folding laundry or they're
doing the dishes, and you've said, Alexa so many times that their digital
assistants are going, what what are you asking me? What are you asking
me? So well, I apologize to that. But when we come back,
I have a challenge for you, and we're going to do that right
after this. So Bob, every year the last couple of years, you
come on the show, and I love having you on the week of the
Masters, to not talk about who's playing and who played and what they're scoring
is and what they have to do. But we talk about the creator of
the Masters, the creator of Augusta National, Bobby Jones, the only one
to ever win a true Grand Slam, the true Grand Slam. Sorry,
I blanked on those two words right there in one year. Bobby Jones was
an absolute gift to the game and to help put it on the map in
so many ways. And so I wanted to challenge you. And I never
do this. I never tell the person who I'm about to record a conversation
with what we're going to talk about, Like, yeah, I got a
couple questions, it's just going to be a casual conversation. But I thought
it would be fair to let you know ahead of time that this is what
I would like to do. And so I wanted to challenge you and say,
if you were to create a curriculum on Bobby Jones, and I don't
mean be a guest speaker for a class, I mean if you were to
do a semester course or more on Bobby Jones, what would it be,
Where would you go, how would you break it up, what would be
the topics in the coverage. And so that's what I wanted to do for
this episode today, and I just put it out there to you. How
do you start that? Where do you go? I think, well,
I have thought about it a bit. I mean the funny part is in
what department would you situate it? Would you would you situated in a history
department, would you situate it in an athletics department, would you situated in
a psychology department? You could probably cross reference at any one of those ways,
and possibly more. I think if I was to do a course on
my grandfather, I think the first thing I would want to do is situate
my grandfather within his historical context. The first peace to that I would say
is this, you have to remember where it was that he was born and
how he came to be here. He was born, of course, on
Saint Patrick's Day of nineteen oh two, here in Atlanta, in a section
of Atlanta called Grant Park. But you know, we say that now nineteen
oh two, and we think of Atlanta as it is now, this big,
huge, bustling city. It's what now the sixth fifth or sixth largest
metropolitan area in the United States, and with the traffic to prove it.
But back then Atlanta was a terribly sleepy town. I mean, the city
was, as my dear friend Sid Matthew talked about in his great book Life
and Times of Bobby Jones, which was also a great documentary, It wasn't
even fifty years after the Civil War. And if you'll remember, the Civil
War was not exactly kind to Atlanta. Atlanta was absolutely destroyed during the Civil
War and it had been rebuilt. So he comes into that kind of that
post Civil war culture and the South back then at least certainly less so now,
But back then the South had a very strong inferiority complex about it.
It was generally considered to be grossly inferior to the much more sophisticated North.
Certainly in the golf world it was considered to be that way because you know,
most of the great golf courses in the Northeast were still very new.
We don't realize it, but courses like Marion in w where the first US
Opened, was where he won his first US Open in nineteen twenty three.
These were all courses that were founded in eighteen ninety five, nineteen, in
the case of Inwood nineteen oh one, and they were all basically bent grass
greens and highly manicured. The South was played on very very rough Bermuda grass,
which was really slow, which is how they kind of which is how
the North viewed Southerners really slow, the Southern people in the South spoke differently.
And then there was the fact that the South had lost a war and
it was and it had lost a war that had, whether we like to
admit it or not, had been fought over the whole question of whether one
set of people can actually own another set of people. And so all of
that came together to kind of create this hothouse into which my grandfather was born.
Now, he came from a family that he came from a family where
his father was a lawyer, and a rather successful lawyer. He would represent
Georgia Power, which later became Southern Company. My grandfather would follow up with
that, and when he was a lawyer, would actually serve on the Southern
Company board. My great grandfather and grandfather did some legal work for the Coca
Cola Company and they so they were very prominent in Atlanta business. But one
of the things that was really interesting is I think there were several events that
occurred that really affected some affected my grandfather and were very important and this is
part of the historical context. And I owe a debt of thanks to another
friend of mine who's a great golf writer, Steve Eubanks, who actually brought
this to my attention, and that was I believe in nineteen twelve, there
was a young girl who worked in a pencil factory here in Atlanta whose name
was Mary Fagan, and Mary Fagan was murdered and a Jewish man named Leo
Frank was later arrested for that murder and tried, I think, tried and
convicted, but ultimately pardoned by the then governor of the state of Georgia.
And in Marietta or in Cobb County, which is where the Frank was jailed,
Frank was busted out of the jail and lynched and it was a terrified
The whole thing was just this nightmare experience. And shortly thereafter the Ku Klux
Klan went went and burned across on top of Stone Mountain, which is the
big, massive, thousands of feet high piece of granite that sits to the
northeast of the city of Atlanta. And interestingly enough, what that did was
it basically drove essentially the Jewish population of Atlanta, which at the time as
is now, but not to the degree it was back then. Drove that
just scattered the Jewish population of Atlanta all over the place to just get out
of to basically get out of dodge. But I think that really affected my
grandfather growing up as he did, because he always ended up having a real
sense of fairness and what was right, and that became very very important to
him. Interestingly enough, I think also one of the things that really went
to influence him in that regard was the relationship that he developed with a sportswriter
for the Atlanta Journal. For the Atlanta Journal named Oscar Baine Keeler, who
was otherwise known as Obi Keeler. Ob. Even though he was a sportswriter
when he was with the Kansas City Star, he wrote a very compelling piece
on the sinking of the Titanic, and later when the whole Leo Frank and
Mary Fagan's situation came up, it was Ob Keeler was that wrote very very
supportive articles on behalf of Frank and really spoke out very very vocally about Frank's
lynching, which could have placed Obe at some personal risk for doing that.
But I can't imagine that something that happened at that time would not have at
some point been a point of discussion between ob and my grandfather as they traveled
the Entry playing golf. So that's sort of the darker side I think of
the context in which my grandfather grew up. But it was also a time
two of strong families of Atlanta as a growing and booming kind of economy,
the Atlanta the seeds of what would later become the Atlanta Black business community was
being sewn back then, which became a very very powerful thing. So I
mean it was kind of it is, like anything else, a mixed bag.
But I think where I would start then in the curriculum of Bobby Jones
is getting him situated properly in his historical context, because I think unless you
do that, then the things that he does later in his life, I
don't think they quite have the weight that they should have. So that's where
it started interesting. During our tour, and again we had twenty six people
in our group, and this was a tour given by a gentleman who has
a company now for twenty years, and it's always been through the Jewish lens
of going through the South so as we were leaving Atlanta on our bus,
He's pointed out, make sure you check there. I see that it says
pencil factory. So it's still up. And we heard all about Leo Frank
and the large Jewish community that was there and is still there, the temple
which is over two thousand families, which is a huge congregation. Absolutely,
and we heard many stories as we traveled through Birmingham, Selma, and Montgomery
of Jewish business owners in the South and how they had to deal with what
was going on in the nineteen sixties. And you know, well again much
later when we're talking about the civil rights movement versus Man's Patient and the Voting
Right Act in the eighteen sixties, right, fascinating. But yeah, I
know you mentioned emancipation. Think about it this way. My grandfather was born
fifty years after, fifty years after the Emancipation Proclamation, right, So that's
how close you were. Yeah, yeah, which is our lifetime right now,
less than that. So we we have a perspective on fifty years,
which is like wow, because when I remember growing up thinking I was born
in nineteen fifty five and thinking, oh, World War Two was so long
ago. It was ten years, and now with this perspective of being someone
in my late sixties, it's like ten years is nothing. No, no,
it was just yesterday. Wow. All right, we're gonna take another
break. We'll be right back and go to section two of our curriculum on
Bobby Jones with doctor Bob Jones. The fourth our curriculum starts with history.
You said it could it can dovetail between history, athletic and psychology departments.
But I think that the history, it kind of all falls under the umbrella
of history and criss crosses through it, no question, no question, you
know. And one of the things that anyone who studies history will tell you
is history is history is something that is like one see one coincidence that occurs
after another, or a meaningful coincidence that occurs after another. However, I
always like to remind people and Fred, I'm going to see if you know
this, do you happen to know what the ancient Hebrew word for coincidence is
not be shared? No, no, there wasn't one. In the Old
Testament, or what we call the Old Testament. There is no word for
coincidence because it was believed that God's hand, God's providential hand was on every
event of history, and I think in that sense you almost sort of see
that same kind of thing happen in Atlanta at the Atlanta Athletic Club in about
nineteen oh seven nineteen oh eight, when Jimmy Maiden went to be the pro
at I believe, Nassau Country Club on Long Island, and his brother Stuart
came to be the pro at the Atlanta Athletic Club's East Lake Country Club.
Stuart Maiden was an irascible man who also was possessed of probably one of the
most lyrical golf swings around. And when my grandfather, who at this time
was a five or six year old boy, started becoming interested in the game,
Stuart was the one he followed around the golf course. And the way
my grandfather learned to play was simply by imitating the golf swing of Stuart Maiden.
Bub was six years old. He by the time he was ten years
old, he was breaking eighty on Eastlake, which at the time was one
of the longest golf courses in the United States, and he was doing it
with balls that were like forty compression and hickory shafted clubs, and I mean
just with equipment that would fred you and I wouldn't even. We wouldn't even,
we wouldn't even want to hit a ball with those things. And in
nineteen when he was fourteen years old, in nineteen sixteen, pardoned my dog
in the background, No, that's okay. In nineteen sixteen, when he
was fourteen years old, he went and played in the Georgia the first Georgia
State Amateur, which was held at Capital City Club in Brookhaven, and he
won it. And at that point he was invited by Georgia Dare to go
to Philadelphia to play in the United States Amateur with George's son, Perry,
who later became a good friend of my grandfather's. And that's how he started
playing in national championships. And he said the hardest transition, and this is
where the psychology kind of plays in in a way. He said the hardest
transition was from playing When he started playing in championships, they were just a
lark. He thought they were just so much fun and he would love just
getting out there and teeing it up and eating ice cream and hamburgers. But
he said, the better he got. All of a sudden, he said
there was a weight that started to come on to him, and there was
a pressure and an expectation that started to come on to him about when are
you going to win a championship? And it took him a long time to
do it. In fact, was that self imposed or that came from the
press or both? Where did that both? I mean, ultimately all of
that is self imposed. It is self imposed, but yes there were external
sources to it as well, and also you know you figure. In nineteen
twenty one he went overseas to the UK for the first time and playing in
the British Open at Saint Andrew's, he withdrew in the third round. He
ended up played pretty well in the first two rounds, shot forty six on
the opening nine of the third round double bogie the tenth hole, which many
years later would be named in his honor, and then took four shots in
hill bunker on the eleventh hole and picked up his ball and moved on to
the twelfth t withdrawing from the tournament. Matt Bernard Darwin would write later Darwin
was the great English sportswriter for the London Times. Darwin would write later,
master Bobby Jones is just a boy and a rather ordinary boy at that and
that really stung him. You know, it's very funny. Five years later
he would come back. By this time, of course, he'd been a
US Open champion and a US Amateur champion, and he would win the British
the British Open at Royallythem and Saint Anne's and then defend successfully at Saint Andrew's
the next year. And so he learned in that interval how to get his
emotions under control, how to handle his expectations, how to handle the expectations
of others. I mean, learning how to play golf at a championship level
is not an easy task, not an easy task. And here he was
doing this when he was twenty twenty one years old, attending Georgia Tech,
attending Harvard and going to law school at Emory and getting married and starting a
family. So he was he always worked up, going to keep things in
balance, which wasn't always easy, you say, here he is nineteen twenty
nineteen, twenty twenty one years old. Then he learned how to put his
emotions under control. Now there weren't teams of people working with a golfer like
they are today. Now, how did he learn this? Where was his
source of education, Well, I think he had two. One is one
is from Obi Keeler, the sports for the journal. Ob used to accompany
my grandfather and virtually all of his tournaments. Ob Ob was a pretty interesting
character in and of himself. I'll tell you one time ob Obi had spent
an evening in the company of a woman who shall we say was not his
wife, and the next day she said to him, Ob, you said
you would write a poem about me, And he said, oh, that's
right, I did say this. And he sat down at the typewriter and
he batted out my typewriter's most ambitious to endure, insure your lasting fame.
But the liquor we had was vicious. And I cannot recall your name.
But in nineteen twenty love that. In nineteen twenty three, he had just
gotten into a playoff at inwood Well, just right across the bay from Kennedy
Airport now, and Bub was getting ready to go play a playoff against Bobby
Crookshank and Keeler came up to him and he said, Rubber Tire, because
that's what he called him. My grandfather's name, like mine, was Robert
Tyre. Jones, so Ob would call him rubber tire, and he said,
rubber tire. He said, you are the best damn golfer in the
world. And when you get that through your head, you're not going to
win one championship, You're going to win a bunch of them. And Bub
kind of I think that really startled Bub and he took that to heart and
he went out and won the playoff for his first US Open. But the
other lesson, I think that taught him about controlling emotion. He was a
notorious club thrower because he always believed he was only hurting no one but himself.
Of course, we could deal with that one for a while, but
we won't. But in nineteen twenty two at the US Open at Skokie and
Skokie in Chicago, he had lost his temper and he had thrown a club
that bounced off the ground and struck and struck a woman spectator in the leg
and busted her leg open. And when he returned to Atlanta, he received
a letter from George Herbert Walker, who was the president of the USGA,
and I believe the maternal grandfather of George Herbert Walker. Bush and George Walker's
letter to my grandfather said a lesson. Until you can learn to control your
temper, your applications for USGA championships will not be accepted. And at that
point my grandfather decided that he would never let anybody be able to tell how
he was playing, either good or bad, by his facial expression or his
behavior. And that was the thing that really brought about the change. No
one has ever found that letter, to the point to where I'm almost wondering
if it is not an apocryphal story. But you know, it's like one
of the Italians have a phrase. I don't remember it in Italian, but
it translates to if it isn't true, it should be so you'll leave it
at that. So actually I just said it, so it must be true.
It must be true. You just said it. Oh Man, more
much more history post nineteen twenty one. We're going to pick that up right
after this. All right, Well, this is not going to be one
of those shorter podcasts where there's sometimes I get to a point where a person
I'm like, yeah, I think I got everything I need at here,
so we're going we're done. I got my commercials in I need to do
that. But there's just so much information about Bobby Jones that we love getting.
Even though it's secondhand, it's first hand. You know, there's only
one degree of separation here. And the amount of research that you've done,
the amount of knowledge that you've acquired over the years about your grandfather is just
a breathtaking I'm just I admire it so much. So thank you, thank
you for agreeing to do this. My plagurest mostly, but I want to
pick up. So now we've got his temper under control, We've got his
realization that he could be that good. Yes, and we do know that
he has the only Grand Slam, but let's get there. Yes, yes,
I think in order to get to the Grand Slam, there are two
There are two golf shots that are absolutely pivotal in getting him there, because
without these two golf shots, there is no Grand Slam. And we are
talking about Bobby Jones as maybe just this arcane figure from the past. The
first one was a shot that he hit on the second seventy second hole or
excuse me, on the final hole of the playoff against Bobby Crookshank at Inwood
Country Club outside of New York City, and he was in the right rough
about two hundred yards out with a shot overwater to a tight pin to win
the United States Open, and he took out a two iron and out of
this light rough he struck this shot that ended up about four feet from the
hole. It was considered at the time to be the shot of the century.
What most people don't realize is had he not won that United States Open,
he likely would have given up competitive golf at that point. Six years
later, he came back about thirty five miles maybe forty miles from Enwood in
Mamerineck, New York, at a new club called Wingfoot, where he had
a twelve foot putt. He had blown a five shot or three or five
shot. I think he blow a three shot lead or a five shot lead,
and he ended up with a twelve foot putt to force a playoff with
a guy named al Espinosa, and it was the most diabolical putt that probably
any his ever faced, and he rammed it into the back of the cup
to force the playoff. The next day he would go out and defeat Espinosa
by twenty three shots. It was the most lopsided victory in a playoff in
USGA Championship history. Had that shot not happened, it is likely that he
would not have gone overseas in nineteen thirty to play in the British Championships and
there would have been no Grand Slam. So had it not been for the
shot at Inwood, he would not have even continued his playing career had it
not been the shot at had it not been for the putt at Wingfoot,
he would not have had a Grand Slam. The Grand Slam started, of
course, at Saint Andrew's with the Amateur Championship, and then went to Hoylake
to Royal Liverpool where he won the Open, and then he came back and
then won the third leg at Interlachen outside of Minneapol, where it was so
hot that somebody came up to him after one of the practice rounds and said,
Bob, did you hear it's going to be one hundred and six degrees
in the shade today? And bub looked at him and said, thank God,
we don't have to play in the shade, and so he went out.
He went out to play in one of his practice rounds and at the
end of it he came back in and he went to take his tie off
and he had sweated so profusely during the round they actually had to cut his
tie off with a pen knife. And if you see photos of him playing
in that us open at Interlock, and you'll notice he's wearing an open collared
shirt because he didn't want to take the chance of having having to ruin another
tie. And finally he wrapped up the Grand Slam at Marion, which is
where it began just fourteen years prior in nineteen sixteen. Bob always loved symmetry.
He was an engineer at heart, and so he liked things to kind
of mathematically balanced, and so I think it always sort of appealed to him
that it all ended where it began for him, as it were in national
championships. And then after that he retired, and the question was what was
he going to do? You know? He used to always be asked again
by Obi Keeler. People would ask him what are you going to do when
you retire? And he would have Ob Keeler recite this poem that was written
by Hilaire Belloc, and Ob would always say, if I ever become a
rich man, or if ever I grow to be old, I will build
myself a small thatched house to shelter me from the cold. I will hold
my house in the high wood, within a walk of the sea, and
the men who were boys when I was a boy will sit and drink with
me. Well, it's a very idyllic picture. But when you're Robert tire
Jones Junior and you really are something of a dynamo, it's not something that's
going to happen. By the late nineteen twenties, he was already thinking about
building a golf course, and he had already set his sights on the property
that is now Augusta National Golf Club. And in thirty or thirty one he
met Clifford Roberts. He was introduced by the mayor of Augusta at the time
to cliff Roberts, and together they formed a corporation to buy the property.
That's a long that we could do a podcast just on the formation of Augusta
National Golf Club. That's interesting enough as it is. And then he so
he started the Masters tournament along with Cliff. He did not particularly care for
the title of the Masters. He thought it was extraordinarily pretentious. In fact,
for many many years he would privately refer to it as the so called
Masters. He preferred the title Augusta National Invitational. I think he didn't like
the Masters, yes, because a it was pretentious, and I think there
was While Bub would not be said to be progressive in any way, shape
or form, he certainly remember he had a real strong sense of fairness,
and I think even then he would have had something of a prescient sense of
how tough it would be to name something the Masters in the Deep South.
So he preferred the title Augusta National Invitational. Finally, when Arnold Palmer won
his second Masters in nineteen sixty and did so so convincingly and so dramatically,
Bub finally gave in and said, I guess masters is probably the right term
to use for the tournament now of the game. He gave in. He
gave in, and he was right, because they were at that point the
masters of the game. Yeah, everybody who was anybody had won the tournament.
But so even then, by nineteen thirty, what nineteen thirty four was
the first tournament. By around nineteen forty, it was kind of like what
else was there for him to do well? World War Two came along and
he enlisted in the army. They wanted him to play golf during the Army
like he did in World War One, and he said, I'm not interested
in doing that. I want a position in action. And so he landed
on Normandy on Omaha Beach on d Day plus two when the beach was still
under some fire, and he crossed the European continent. He started as a
captain and ended up as a lieutenant colonel, started in I believe, the
Air Corps, and then went and was in Army intelligence for a long time
for the rest of the war. But then his life would take a terrible,
terrible turn immediately after the war. And for all that he had accomplished,
for all the books that he had written, for all the articles he
had written, the championships he had won, the degrees he had earned,
all of that, I think the true greatness of the man actually emerged after
the Second World War when he ended up going through a health crisis that ended
up in a very catastrophic diagnosis. When he came back from the war,
he noticed that he was having problems where occasionally a foot would start to turn
under just a little bit would or he would scald his fingers on hot water
because he couldn't feel the temperature tingling at the very very tips of the fingers,
and he couldn't quite figure out what it was. He had to go
in for experimental series. Back then, you know, we didn't have any
imaging that was like we have now, So if you wanted to see something,
you had to go in and look at it, and nobody could figure
it out. And then, finally, I believe it was in nineteen fifty
or nineteen fifty two, he went to New York and he was given the
worst news he could possibly have received from doctor Houston Merritt, whose textbook on
neurology is still the textbook on neurology, and doctor Merritt diagnosed him with a
degenerative disorder of the spinal cord called syringo myelia. It's a terrible disease then,
and now we've not really gotten that far along much farther along in understanding
it now. Even it was a disease that would eventually that would eventually wear
him, wear him down and put him with two canes and then later in
a walker and a wheelchair and find lee in a bed. And yet throughout
it all while he had to deal with the anger of dealing with that and
the grief of losing his mobility, he never lost his dignity as a person,
and he bore the illness with such grace that I think, to a
large extent, the way he bore that disease had him had contributes as much
to his legacy today as all of the championships that he won in the nineteen
twenties and in nineteen thirty. He bore it, at least externally, with
some humor. For example, he used to love to go fishing, and
one of his cousins was a guy named Charlie Elliot, who for years was
the editor of Field and Stream magazine. And Charlie Elliott had a Boston whaler
for my grandfather because Boston whalers could not capsize, and he had a chair
put in the middle of it that would swivel three hundred and sixty degrees and
they would take my grandfather from the dock and the dockhand would pick up my
grandfather, carry him down to the boat, strap him in. There'd be
a space for his tackle box on his right side, along with the space
for his Coca Cola bottle where he could put his coat, and then he
could rest his fishing rod in a special attachment on the left hand side,
and they would go spend hours out on the water fishing well. One time,
the deckhand, who was an African American gentleman, had my grandfather carrying
him like a baby to bring him down to the chair on that boat,
and he turned and he looked at my grandfather and he said, mister Bob,
do you mind if I ask you a question? And my grandfather said,
no, no, no, what is it? And what are you
going to say? Might drop you in the water if you say no?
But what are you gonna say? What are you gonna do? And so
he said no, no, I don't mind. So he said, well,
I just can't help but thinking, mister Bob, how a crippled up
old man like you won all them golf tournaments. And my grandfather just looked
back up at him and said, well, it wasn't easy, and that
was it. And I mean, I don't know about you, Fred,
but if I were in that situation, I don't think I would have made
such a joke and I would have been probably hurt angered. But the funny
part is there are two meanings to that. I mean it wasn't easy,
because I mean, it would not be easy for that someone that physically challenged
to win a golf tournament. But when he said it wasn't easy, he
was telling the truth. It wasn't easy, but he bore that illness with
incredible grace. You know. I'm often asked what was he like at home?
And the best thing I can say about my grandfather is he was essentially
the same in private as he was in public. When you think about how
many public figures there are who we put up on a pedestal, who we
later find out maybe we shouldn't have put them up on that pedestal, Right,
it's very rare to actually encounter somebody whose personal integrity and sense of humor
and natural humility would really equal his. There was a I'm trying to Paul
Gallico wrote a book called Farewell to Sport. Gallico was a great sports writer,
and he said in it it was just a scathing book about the all
the great athletes that Gallico had met throughout his career and all the clay feet
that they had, and his last chapter was reserved for the one person who
he said embodied everything that was truly truly great in sports, and only one
that he had ever known, and that was Robert tire Jones Junior. Not
a bad legacy. Not a bad legacy. That was awesome, class dismissed,
Bob. That was great. I really enjoyed that. Thank you so
much for sharing all that. Well, thank you for asking me, because
to be honest, as always, Fred, your interviews are never they're just
they're never just like cut and dried. They are all. You always ask
me stuff that is so interesting and gets me thinking about things that I really
don't think about that much. And I appreciate. I appreciate what you do.
Thank you, and I appreciate you sharing because it's such a rich history
that in history today is so important, and yet it's so hard to get
because we're so caught up in the moment of everything that's bombarding us on all
different directions. But let's just remember what it's like to be on the golf
course. Just play it one shot at a time and deal with the process,
not the outcome. And when that ball's an less than an inch off
the club face, your job is done. There you go, Bob,
great to talk to you again, you too, and next year maybe I'll
make it back to Atlanta. We're gonna do this interview live at some point.
We're gonna be Hi buddy. Well again, thank you for the kind
words, thank you for your continued support, Thanks for the history lesson.
Thank you Fred. So early in the conversation with Doctor Bob, I mentioned
my wife's college friend, whom we met while in Atlanta last month. As
fate would have it, that's this week's Golf Smarter Ambassador. Thank you.
Cheed Hurwitz originally from Brookline, Massachusetts, and now plays at the Atlanta Country
Club. You too can be a Golf Smarter Ambassador, whether you went to
school with my wife or not. And once you do, you have the
choice of three great gifts that include the Tony Manzoni video of the Loss Fundamental,
a glove and glove storage compartment from redroostergolf dot com, the Premium Golf
Club subscription service, and a box of robotically tested premium flight Pathgolf tees from
flightpathcolf dot com. A te above all. Just send me an email and
I'll send you simple instructions on how to call our toll free listener line to
record your show opening, telling us where you're from, where you play and
what number episode you are introducing. I'm happy to report that I played eighteen
holes this weekend pain free. You may or may not be familiar with TENS,
which is the transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation. It's a compact, rechargeable unit
that has small pads connected either wirelessly or wired to specific spots you're having muscle
pain. After discovering it a couple of weeks ago, I've been using it
multiple hours every day, which is okay, and the pain is significantly reduced
in my arm. It's miraculous. Actually. Anyway, last Saturday, I
woke up pain free, played eighteen holes and even after the round, the
pain was minimal. I'm not out of the woods yet, but I'm meeting
with another doctor this week to see what my other options are moving forward.
But my goal is to be one hundred percent ready for our golf Smarter Royal
adventure to Northern Ireland this July. I really want to play golf and hang
out with you for a week. You know, I've never played Northern Ireland
before and this is a total bucket list opportunity for me. Hopefully it is
for you too. But even if you've already played there before. Please join
me because I'll need some local knowledge again. The trip is July two through
nine, twenty twenty four, and we have five rounds that include the number
one course in the world, Royal County Downs, the host of the twenty
twenty five Open Championship, Royal port Rush, one of the most beautiful courses
you'll ever see at Ardglass, and we'll even play a parkland course with the
oldest clubhouse in the world, Royal Belfast. I've partnered up with TMO Golf
and we only have room for two foursomes, but the clock is ticking.
You can get the full itinerary end pricing at TMI golf dot com slash golf
smarter. That's TMI golf dot com slash golf Smarter. And let me just
add that I completely understand if you can't make this trip happen because I sprung
it on you so late. But fear not, I've been having additional conversations
with Ta Fox at TMI Golf and here's what we're talking about for small golf
groups coming up in the future. How about a couple's trip to Portugal.
Now, my wife, who doesn't play golf, will host others who don't
during our three rounds over this nine day tour of beautiful Portugal. The next
spring, I want to go with you to play the Robert Trent Jones Trail
in Alabama. And how about in twenty twenty six we check off another bucket
list item with a golf adventure to New Zealand. Yeah, and if you
live near there or there, join us. I'll leave a link in the
show notes and about the show notes. We're now using AI provided by our
recording platform Riverside FM to generate the summary and takeaways for each new episode,
so this way you can review what we're discussing before, or give yourself a
recap after listening to this episode Now This Friday is part four of our annual
series with the late Tony Manzoni. Since Tony passed away in twenty eighteen,
we've been playing select episodes each year to get back into playing shape for spring.
What's different this year is that we're playing every episode in order that we
did with Tony between twenty ten and his final appearance in June of twenty seventeen.
This week's episode is called Stop Topping the Ball Forever. Now Chances are.
You've probably never heard this episod because it was a member's only show in
April of twenty twelve, and this is the first time it's being shared publicly.
So to make sure you're clear with this, Golf Smarter Mulligins is no
longer a separate podcast that you need to find now. It's included in this
free Golf Smarter subscription and is released every Friday. Over the years, one
thing that's been consistent with this podcast is that listeners golfers around the world enjoy
going back into our archives to hear valuable conversations again and again. That's why
we now publish Golf Smarter twice each week. Tuesdays are a brand new episode,
and on Friday we open the vault to bring you game improvement interviews that
are just as valuable today as they were the first time around. If you
have any questions, comments, or suggestions for upcoming episodes, or need more
information and want to discuss our royal adventure this July, please write to Golf
Smarter podcast at gmail dot com or click on the Hayfred button when you visit
Gulfsmarter dot com.