Memories of The Great and The Good (22 page)

In the Second World War, although deferred as a forty-year-old father of three and suffering a medical disability, he was commissioned in Army Air Force intelligence and served in Europe under Eisenhower's command. In 1948, a painful back compelled him to give up golf. After two operations, he was diagnosed with a rare degenerative disease, which progressively paralyzed him. In 1958, he was given the freedom of the city (burgh) of St. Andrews, Scotland. He died in Atlanta, in December 1971.

O
n the centennial of the birth of Mr. Justice Holmes, I was asked to write a commemorative piece for a liberal weekly. By that time, his reputation as a liberal hero was as secure as Jane Austen's new reputation as a pioneer feminist, an elevation that, if she were within earshot, would—as she might say—”vastly astound” her. Holmes had been so exhaustively written about, so firmly established as the Great Dissenter, that there seemed very little to say about him. I accordingly said very little and summed it all up in the title of the piece: “What Have We Left for Mr. Justice Holmes?” It took many years, and the leisure to look him over freed from his obituary pigeonhole, to make the alarming discovery that the cases in which he voted with the conservative majority as against it were in the ratio of eight or ten to one; and that two notable scholars succeeded each other in spending years preparing his biography only to abandon it to a third man who saw what they had seen in Holmes, but one who also had the courage to say it out loud: that Holmes's political philosophy was (his concern for free speech apart) as fine an intellectual approximation to Fascism as you would care to find among the savants of the Western world.

I have come to a similar hurdle with Robert Tyre Jones Jr. though one nothing like so formidable or alarming. I don't suppose any other athletic hero, certainly no one in golf, has been written about so often and with so much reverence. The same admirable anecdotes are repeated whenever his name is mentioned: his debunking of the teaching clichés (“never up, never in”); his famous putdown by Harry Vardon (“did you ever see a worse shot than that?”); his identifying the enemy as “Old Man Par”; his calling a two-stroke penalty on himself to lose a championship (“you might as well praise a man for not robbing a bank”). And on and on. I have heard these stories a hundred times and concluded long ago that fresh anecdotes about Jones are as few and far between as new funny golf stories. This must be, then, a small memoir of a short friendship in the last years of his life and what I gleaned about him and his character.

In the summer of 1965, when I had been for nearly twenty years the chief American correspondent of the (then
Manchester) Guardian
, our golf correspondent, Pat Ward-Thomas, for some reason or other was unable to cover the U.S. Open championship, which was being held, I believe for the first time, at Creve Coeur in St. Louis. I filled in for him and my last day's dispatch eventually appeared in the
Guardian
‘s annual anthology of the paper's writing. Somehow, a copy of it got to Jones. He wrote me a letter saying, as I recall, he was unaware that “golf was another string to your bow.” Why he should have known anything about my “bow” was news to me. But he mentioned that he had been a regular viewer of
Omnibus
, a ninety-minute network television potpourri of drama, science, politics, history, ballet, and God knows what, which I hosted in the 1950s. Jones's letter was, of course, highly flattering to me, especially since this was the first piece I had ever written about golf. I had taken up the game only one year before, at an advanced age (in my mid-fifties—hopeless, I know); but, being a journalist, I started to write about it, just as when you run into a man who is an expert on the manufacture of heels for ladies' shoes—as was a man I met in Rainelle, West Virginia—you write about
him
.

There was another short exchange or two, in one of which Jones characteristically started a letter: “Dear Alistair (don't you think we ought to put an end to this minuet of Mr. Jones and Mr. Cooke?)” and went on to ask me to be sure to call on him whenever I was down in Augusta or Atlanta. Which I did, most often in the company of Ward-Thomas.

My first impression was the shock of seeing the extent of his disability, the fine strong hands, twisted like the branches of a cypress, gamely clutching a tumbler or one of his perpetual cigarettes in a holder. His face was more ravaged than I had expected, from the long-endured pain I imagine, but the embarrassment a stranger might feel about this was tempered by the quizzical eyes and the warmth his presence gave off. (He kept on going to Augusta for the Masters until two years before the end. Mercifully, for everyone but his family, we would not see him when he could no longer bear to be seen.)

After that first meeting I never again felt uncomfortable about his ailment, and only once did he mention it, which was when he spoke a sentence that has passed into the apocrypha. Pat well knew that Jones never talked about his disease, but on that day he really wanted to penetrate the mask of courage and know just how good or bad things really were. Pat's expression was so candid that—I sensed—Jones felt he would, for once, say a word of two. He said that he'd been told that his disease occurred in two forms—”descending and ascending,”
^*
that luckily his paralysis had been from the waist and his extremities down, so that, he added, “I have my heart and lungs and my so-called brain.” He spoke about it easily with a rueful smile, and no more was said. The familiar punch line, ‘You know, we play the ball where it lies,” was not said in my presence and, I must say, it sounds to me false to Jones's character, as of a passing thought by a screenwriter that Hollywood would never resist. Let us thank God that Hollywood has never made a movie about Jones; it would almost surely be as inept and more molassic than the dreadful
Follow the Sun
, the alleged “epic” about Ben Hogan.

About the disease. At a tournament Jones was playing in, in England, Henry Longhurst, the late, great rogue of English golf writing, was standing beside a doctor who, marveling at Jones's huge pivot, the long arc of his swing and the consequent muscular strain that sustained it, predicted that one day it would cause him grievous back trouble. Longhurst wrote and retailed this comment to Jones, who responded with a good-tempered note saying, with typical tact, that Henry was good to be concerned but the trouble was due to a rare disease. This sad turn in Jones's life has also received several versions. So far as I can discover, from tapping the memory of his oldest surviving friend, the inimitable Charlie Yates, and checking with the expertise of several medicos, the true account is simple and drastic.

In the summer of 1948, Jones remarked to Yates, in the middle of what was to be his last round ever, that he would not soon be playing again because his back had become unbearable and he was going to have an operation. It was, in fact, the first of two operations and it revealed damage to the spinal tissue that could not then be tagged with a definite diagnosis. A year or two later, Jones went up to Boston and after being examined at the Lahey Clinic had the second operation, during which a positive diagnosis was made: syringomyelia, a chronic progressive degenerative disease of the spinal cord, which, as we all know, Jones bore for twenty-two years with chilling stoicism. The scant consolation for the rest of us is that anyone falling victim to the same disease today could expect no better outcome. The etiology is still unknown and there is no cure.

When I first went into the sitting room of Jones's cottage at Augusta, I noticed at once a large picture over the mantelpiece, a framed series of cartoon strips by the best, and throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the most famously popular English sports cartoonist, Tom Webster. No American I knew (and no Englishman under seventy) had ever heard his name, but the drawings—of Jones and of Hagen, I believe—served as a taproot into Jones's memories of Britain and British golf in the 1920s. He enlightened me about the character and skill of various old heroes I brought up: Braid and Duncan and Tolley and Roger Wethered and, of course, Hagen. (Though I played no golf I followed it—from the papers, the newsreels, and the Webster cartoons—as zealously as I followed county cricket). This talk brought up, one time, the never-ending controversy about the essential characteristic of the good golf swing. Jones distrusted “keep your eye on the ball” almost as much as Tommy Armour did. His preference was for Abe Mitchell's “the player should move freely beneath himself.”

Jones never recalled to me, as all famous athletes are apt to do, the acclaim of his great days, though once when I had just come back from St. Andrews, he remarked again what a “wonderful experience” it had been on his later visits “to go about a town where people wave at you from doorways and windows.” Otherwise, he never said anything that made me doubt his friends' assurance that he was uncomfortable with the spotlight and was grateful to have room service in the hotels of towns where he would be recognized on the streets. He did not flaunt his trophies at home, and he kept his medals locked up in a chest.

Our talks were mostly about books, people, politics, only rarely about golf, whenever Ward-Thomas was eager for another Jones quote for his bulging file of golfing wisdom. In the winter after my first meeting, a book came out entitled
Bobby Jones on Golf
, and I reviewed it under the heading, “The Missing Aristotle Papers on Golf,” remarking along the way that Jones's gift for distilling a complex emotion into the barest language would not have shamed John Donne; that his meticulous insistence on the right word to impress the right visual image was worthy of fussy old Flaubert; and that his unique personal gift was “to take apart many of the club clichés with a touch of grim Lippmannesque humor.” Shortly after the piece appeared, Jones dropped me a letter beginning: “Off hand, I can't think of another contemporary author who has been compared in one piece to Aristotle, Flaubert, John Donne and Walter Lippmann!”

Much was made—rightly—when the book came out about the extraordinary fact that Jones had written it himself. This is only to remark, in a more interesting way, how phenomenally rare it is for a scholar to become a world-class athlete. The same dependence on a ghost is true of actors and actresses, as also of ninety percent of the world's—at least the Western world's— best politicians. The exceptions are rare indeed. Churchill, after a Washington wartime meeting with Roosevelt, flew home in a bomber, alternating between the controls and the composition of a speech on a pad. He was no sooner in London than he appeared at the BBC and broadcast across the Atlantic a majestic strategical survey of the world at war. To his horror, Roosevelt heard it in the White House while he was working on his own promised broadcast with the aid of three ghost writers. One of them, Robert Sherwood, consoled the president with the sorrowful thought: ‘I'm afraid, Mr. President, he rolls his own.”

When I think back to those Augusta talks, I recall most vividly the quality of irony that was always there in his eyes and often in his comments on people and things. I asked him once about “the master eye” without knowing that he had written about it. I'm sure he said what he had said before: he didn't believe in it or in the ritual of plumb bobbing. The main thing was to “locate the ball's position … I'm told a man can do this better with two eyes than with one.” The last time I saw him, I told him about a rather morose Scottish caddie I'd recently had who took a dim view of most things American, but especially the golf courses, which—he'd been told—had lots of trees. We were sitting out on the porch of his Augusta cottage and Jones looked down at the towering Georgia pines, the great cathedral nave, of the plunging tenth fairway. “I don't see,” he said deadpan, “any need for a tree on a golf course.”

Toward the end of one Masters tournament, Henry Longhurst took suddenly very ill. He lay grumpily in his hospital bed and, lifting his ripe W. C. Fields's nose over the bedsheet, predicted that it was “closing time.” Happily, it turned out not to be, but Pat and I stayed over through the Monday to watch out for him. In the early afternoon, when the place was empty, we called on Jones and he suggested we collect some clubs from the pro shop and play the splendid par three course. We were about to set off when Cliff Roberts, cofounder of the club, came in. He was shocked at the generosity of Jones's suggestion: “Bob, you surely know the rule—no one can play without a member going along.” “Don't you think,” Jones asked wistfully, “you and I could exercise a little Papal indulgence?” Roberts did not think so. And although he'd recently had a major operation, he went off, got into his golfing togs and limped around with us through six holes, by which time he was ready for intensive care and staggered away accepting the horrid fact of the broken rule.

Because of the firm convention of writing nothing about Jones that is less than idolatrous, I have done a little digging among friends and old golfing acquaintances who knew him and among old and new writers who, in other fields, have a sharp nose for the disreputable. 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 had been able to observe, he nothing common did or mean.

However, a recent author, in a book depicting the Augusta National club as a CEO's Shangri-la, does not spare the patron saint of golf from his lamentations. He attacks Jones on two counts. First, for his being “weak and irresolute” in bowing to Cliff Roberts's expulsion of a player for violating the etiquette of the game. (On the contrary, Jones was disturbed by the man's behavior for six years. Only when, after three requests, the man properly apologized, did Jones welcome him back.) This criticism reflects a serious misconception about Jones's function. In the running of the Masters, Cliff Roberts's power was absolute. What Jones brought to the tournament was the prestige of his immense popularity, not to mention a saving contribution of seed money when the club was on the verge of foundering. Otherwise, it was understood from the start that Roberts was the prime mover and shaker, the organizer of the staff and the commissary, the recruiter and commander of the course patrols, the boss of the course officials and of crowd control, the inventor of new conventions of scoring, and even (over Jones's protesting pleas) the final judge of the architecture of a hole.