Jones, "Bobby" (Robert T. Jr.)
Golf
b. March 17, 1902, Atlanta, GA
d. Dec. 18, 1971
Considered by many the greatest golfer ever, Jones was certainly the greatest amateur of all time. He began playing when he was five years old, beat a sixteen-year-old to win a junior tournament when he was nine, broke 80 before he was twelve, and won the Georgia amateur championship in 1916, when he was fourteen, to win his first trip to the National Amateur.
Wearing second-hand Army shoes that he'd screwed spikes into, Jones won his first two matches and led defending champion Robert Gardner by 1 stroke after 18 holes of the 36 holes in his third match, but lost.
During the next several years, however, Jones was held back by his terrible temper, leading British professional George Duncan to comment, "Jones will never be a champion. . . . Only the perfect shot ever suits him."
Jones eventually learned to control his temper and made a breakthrough by winning the 1923 U. S. Open. That ended what his biographer, O. B. Keeler, called "the seven lean years" and began seven years of plenty. From 1923 through 1930, Jones finished worse than second in the Open only once, winning again in 1926, 1929, and 1930.
He also won the U. S. Amateur in 1924, 1925, 1927, 1928, and 1930; the British Open in 1926, 1927, and 1930; and the British Amateur in 1930 to complete the only grand slam ever accomplished. He won the 1930 Sullivan Award as the nation's outstanding amateur athlete.
Jones graduated from Georgia Tech and Harvard Law School, but never practiced. He retired from serious competition after his sensational year in 1930, saying, "Fourteen years of intensive tournament play in this country and abroad have given me about all I want in the way of hard work in the game."
He then did a series of pioneering instructional movie shorts, worked as a consultant and representative for Spalding Sporting Goods, and helped design the Augusta, GA, National Course. He and Clifford Roberts established the Masters Tournament there in 1934, and Jones played in the tournament every year until 1947, when he was forced to withdraw after two rounds because of a sore shoulder.
Originally diagnosed as bursitis, the shoulder problem turned out to be the first symptom of a spinal ailment that confined him to a wheelchair in his later years. Herbert Warren Wind once wrote of Jones, "As a young man he was able to stand up to just about the best that life can offer, which isn't easy, and later he stood up with equal grace to just about the worst."