He was born in Atlanta, Georgia on the 17th of March 1902. As a young child, he was frail and sickly, and he struggled to eat solid food until he was five. His childhood home sat just across the street from East Lake Country Club, the very golf course his parents would send him out to play on after doctors told them that exercise would improve their young boy's health.
Little did they know that by following that advice, their son would go on to become the greatest amateur golfer the game has ever known. A player who was never tempted to cash in on his prodigious talent by turning professional because golf was his pastime, and he would always play it purely for his love of the game.
This episode is about the life and times of Mr. Bobby Jones.
Bobby Jones is arguably the greatest golfer in history. Not because of his records, though they are astonishing, and not because of his skill, though it was sublime, but because for everything he won in the game, he did so as an amateur. One of the most remarkable facts about Bobby Jones' career is that at just 28 years old, at the absolute peak of his powers, he made the decision that it was the right time for him to walk away from full-time competitive golf. How crazy is that?
He'd just won golf's version of the Grand Slam by winning all four of the major championships played for in that era in a calendar year, and then decided that he wanted to hang up his spikes and instead devote his time to practicing law. It seems inconceivable, but it's exactly what Bobby Jones did.
Fortunately, though, he didn't turn his back on the game completely. He proceeded to build a golf course, and he co-founded a tournament that we all watch religiously every April. So I decided to have a proper look at who this man was, and I'm going to share what I learned about him: the child prodigy, [00:02:00] the thirteen major championships, that 1930 Grand Slam, the founding of Augusta National Golf Club and the Masters Tournament, and the devastating disease that stole his body but never broke his spirit.
To understand Bobby Jones, you have to appreciate that he came from a completely different background to the other legends of the game. As a young boy, Byron Nelson had to work in the cotton fields to earn money to help his family pay their bills. Gene Sarazen and Walter Hagen had to quit school when they were only twelve years old to work full-time so their families could put food on the table.
Bobby Jones? He was the son of a wealthy Atlanta lawyer. His father had connections, influence, and money. Apart from his health, young Bobby had everything he ever wanted while he was growing up. But his poor health as a child inadvertently turned out to be a blessing. You see, he didn't pick a golf club up because he wanted to.
He first picked one up at only five years of age because doctors recommended to his parents that he play golf as a way to strengthen his body. By the age of six, he'd won his first tournament. The term child prodigy doesn't even begin to cover it. At 14 years old, he played in the US Amateur Championship. Just 14. At the time, he was the youngest player ever to compete in that tournament. He didn't win, but just qualifying to play in it was remarkable. When Bobby was 17, he won the Canadian Amateur, a title he would successfully defend a year later. At 18, he qualified for the US Open and was paired with the legendary Harry Vardon, the man who essentially invented the modern golf grip. But here's the thing about young Bobby Jones. For all his talent, he couldn't win the big one. From ages 14 through 20, he played in 10 major championships and didn't manage to win one. He was the nearly man, the bridesmaid, [00:04:00] the young talent that couldn't quite close out a big tournament.
Maybe that was because Bobby had a temper. A famous, fiery, club-throwing temper. Sportswriter Grantland Rice famously described young Jones as having the face of an angel and the temper of a timber wolf. He was known for frequent tantrums, club throwing, and he could cuss like a sailor.
The galleries loved it, but Jones hated himself for it. Over time, he learned to master his emotions. He learned the self-control that would define his later career. Between 1923 and 1930, Bobby Jones won 13 major championships. Let me say that again. He won 13 majors in eight years. At that time, the four tournaments each year recognized as the major championships were the US Open, The Open Championship, the US Amateur Championship, and the British Amateur Championship.
Here's the breakdown [00:05:00] of Bobby Jones' wins. He won the US Open in 1923, 1926, 1929, and 1930. He won the Open Championship in 1926, 1927, and 1930. He won the US Amateur Championship in 1924, 1925, 1927, 1928, and 1930. And to round this off, he won the British Amateur Championship in his Grand Slam year of 1930. That's four US Opens, three Open Championships, five US Amateurs, and one British Amateur, 13 in total. And here's the thing about those US Amateur wins, five of them.
That's the most in history. Tiger Woods won three consecutive US Amateurs from 1994 to 1996, but Jones' five total victories remain the record. He was virtually unbeatable in match play golf. His record in the Walker Cup, the amateur equivalent of [00:06:00] the Ryder Cup, was just as dominant. He played in five Walker Cup matches for the USA against Great Britain, and he won nine out of his 10 matches. Nine out of 10. He was a stone-cold killer in team competition Away from the golf course, he was an intellectual with a thirst for knowledge. He earned a degree in mechanical engineering from Georgia Tech and then he went to Harvard and earned a bachelor's degree in English literature. He wasn't done there though because after that he went to Emory University to study law and passed the bar exam.
Not only was he a golfing prodigy, he was also an extraordinary intellect. He once tried to explain why he never turned professional. He said that he saw professional golf as a cage and explained his analogy by saying, "You are expected to get in the cage and stay there, but nobody can do that."
He wanted freedom. He didn't want to be owned by a schedule or by sponsors or by galleries demanding that he perform. And so for those very reasons, he stayed an amateur and he became a lawyer so that he would always play golf for the love of it.
Now we get to it, the greatest single season in golf history. In 1930, Bobby Jones set out to do something no one had ever done before: win all four major championships of his era in a calendar year: the British Amateur, the Open Championship, the US Open, and the US Amateur Championship. His mission started in May at the British Amateur Championship at St. Andrews in Scotland. He defeated Roger Wethered in the 36-hole final by 7 and 6.
Speaker: So on to June and the Open Championship at Hoylake in England. His 72-hole total of 291 was good enough to see him finish two shots clear of Leo Diegel and McDonald Smith, who tied for second place. Then in July at the US Open at Interlaken in Minnesota, guess what? He got the win in that one too. His 72-hole total of 287 secured a two-shot victory over Macdonald Smith, who was the runner-up. He was three from three. One more to go. Immortality beckoned. The US Amateur Championship was held in September at the Merion Cricket Club outside Philadelphia. Like the British Amateur Championship, this was a match play major, 36-hole knockout matches. Just one bad round and the whole thing could fall apart. Jones cruised through the early rounds to reach the last eight. In the quarterfinals, he won his match 6 and 5, and in the semifinal, he demolished his opponent 9 and 8. The final was against a man named Eugene Homans. Jones shot a brilliant back nine of 33 in the morning to take a 7-up lead into the afternoon round. And by the 11th hole of that afternoon, the 29th hole of the day, Bobby Jones closed out the match to win by 8 and 7.
The crowd went berserk. 18,000 people were there to witness history. A contingent of US Marines had to form a human shield to prevent Jones from being swamped by his own fans. He'd done it. He'd won every major championship played for that year.
No one had ever done it before. No one has ever done it since. At least not the way the majors were defined then. The modern definition of the Grand Slam is winning the four professional majors. But back then, the British Amateur Championship and the US Amateur Championship were considered to be majors. Bobby Jones was just 28 years old, which made what he did next so unbelievable. He retired. Can you imagine? You're 28 years old. You've just achieved something that no one in the history of your sport has ever done.
You're at the absolute peak of your powers. The world is at your feet. Endorsements would be worth thousands. You could turn professional and make an absolute fortune. But instead, Bobby Jones decided that he wanted to retire from full-time competitive golf so that he could practice law. He later explained it by saying he'd nothing left to prove.
He'd won everything there was to win. He'd beaten everyone there was to beat, and that the pressure of competitive golf, the constant travel, the eyes of the world, and the expectation had all taken its toll. He wanted his life back. He wanted to be a husband, a father, a lawyer. He wanted to play golf for fun again, not for history.
So at 28 years old, he just stopped, retired. He would never return to play full-time competitive golf again. But stepping away from the limelight didn't mean he could disappear into obscurity. Bobby Jones had become so famous that he couldn't play a casual round without being mobbed.
He longed for a place where he could play in peace with his friends, a private club. He'd been looking for lands near Atlanta for many years when a friend of his, an investments dealer named Clifford Roberts, told him about a property in Augusta, Georgia, an old indigo plantation called Fruitlands. Jones visited it in the spring of 1930 and fell in love with the property.
He saw its potential, and in 1931, Bobby Jones and Clifford Roberts bought it for $70,000. He enlisted the help of a Scottish golf course designer by the name of Alister MacKenzie. MacKenzie had already designed a number of golf courses, including Cypress Point in California. Together, Jones and MacKenzie designed a golf course on that old indigo plantation, and they opened it for play in early 1933. They called it Augusta National Golf Club. But a private club needs a tournament, so Bobby Jones and Clifford Roberts created one. The first tournament was held in March 1934. They called it the Augusta [00:12:00] National Invitational. Jones hated the name Masters. He thought it was immodest. But Roberts insisted, and in 1939, the name was officially changed to the Masters Tournament. Jones came out of retirement to play in the Masters every year from 1934 to 1948. 12 appearances in total. His best finish, 13th place in the first one. His scores were respectable, but he was never truly in contention. He was the host now, not the champion, and that was fine with him. The innovations Jones and Roberts introduced at the Masters changed tournament golf forever. Gallery ropes to control the crowds, scoreboards all around the course, the use of red numbers for under par, an international field, week-long passes for patrons. All of it was new, and all of it was subsequently copied by every other tournament in the world. Without Bobby Jones, there would be no Masters.
And without the Masters, golf would be missing its cathedral Now we come to the saddest part of the story, and it is genuinely heartbreaking. In 1929, Jones and two friends were caught in a sudden thunderstorm while playing a practice round at East Lake Country Club in Atlanta.
As they ran for the clubhouse, a bolt of lightning struck its chimney. Bricks came loose and fell around them. One of those falling bricks struck Bobby on the neck. It didn't seem too serious at the time, but that accident had damaged his spinal cord, and the damage would take nearly 20 years to show itself.
In 1948, Jones started noticing symptoms. He was losing feeling in his hands and his legs, and he was also losing coordination. Those symptoms were later linked back to that accident. In 1950, he was diagnosed with a rare neurological condition called syringomyelia, a progressive disease that slowly destroys the spinal [00:14:00] cord. Over the next 21 years, Bobby Jones went from leg braces to a cane, from a cane to a walker, from a walker to a wheelchair, and finally from a wheelchair to a bed.
Not only could Bobby no longer hold a golf club, he couldn't walk. The greatest golfer of his generation, the man who had conquered the world with a swing that was poetry, was slowly being paralyzed from the inside out and here's the thing that gets me, the resolve that maybe explains why he was such a formidable champion. Bobby Jones never complained about his condition, not once. He kept his sense of humor. He kept his dignity. He famously said, 'In life as in golf, you play the ball where you find it.' He had every right to be angry, to be bitter, to rail against fate, but he didn't. He just kept living, kept going to Augusta [00:15:00] every spring, kept greeting the players and the patrons, kept being Bobby Jones even when his body had betrayed him. He died on December the 18th, 1971, at his home in Atlanta. He was 69 years old so what does Bobby Jones mean to golf? What's his legacy? His achievements tell the story. Bobby Jones won 13 major championships between 1923 and 1930, seven professional majors and six amateur titles that in that era were considered to be majors. By that historical standard, his 13 majors rank him third all time behind only Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods. But Bobby Jones did it all as an amateur. Modern lists that count only professional major wins place him lower, so his exact standing remains a legitimate historical debate.
Then there's the 1930 Grand Slam. He's the only player in history to win all four majors of his era in a single calendar year.
That achievement has never been equaled. Tiger Woods won four straight professional majors, the Tiger Slam, but those victories spanned two calendar years. Jones did it in one. He also founded Augusta National Golf Club and co-founded the Masters Tournament, arguably the most iconic event in all of golf. Every April, when you hear those piano notes and see the azaleas in bloom, you're watching Bobby Jones' dream that he turned into reality. In 1958, he became the first American since Benjamin Franklin to receive the freedom of the city of St. Andrews, the highest honor the home of golf can bestow. In 1966, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Lyndon B.
Johnson, And in 1974, he was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame. He was also, by all accounts, a genuinely good man.
Honorable, gracious, and humble [00:17:00] despite being one of the most famous athletes on the planet. A sports writer once said that Jones' celebrity in the 1920s rivaled that of Babe Ruth, but Bobby Jones never let that attention go to his head. He saw himself as just a lawyer who played golf. That's all he ever wanted to be. So there you have it. Bobby Jones, the child prodigy who won his first tournament at six years old. The lawyer who won 13 major championships without taking a single dollar for playing the game.
The man who completed the Grand Slam at 28 years old and then immediately retired from full-time competition. The visionary who built Augusta National Golf Club and co-founded the Masters Tournament. And the tragic figure who spent the final two years of his life in a wheelchair, paralyzed by a cruel disease, and never once complained about it. He once said, "Golf is the closest game to the game we call life. You get bad breaks from good [00:18:00] shots. You get good breaks from bad shots, but you have to play the ball where it lies." Bobby Jones played the ball where it lay every single time.
Whether it was a perfect lie in the middle of the fairway at St. Andrews or a body that was slowly shutting down on him, he never made excuses. He never gave up. He just kept playing. He belongs on that mountaintop with all of the other legends, but in one way he stands alone. He's the only one who did it all without ever turning professional. He didn't need the money.
He didn't want the fame. He just loved the game, and the game loved him back,
And that's why he's an absolute legend.