Memory of a True Great - 15 March 2002

On Sunday 17 March, St Patrick's Day, in the evening there will take place a span of celebration dinners from New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, to several cities in the United States and across the ocean, most notably, to Scotland, to celebrate the 100th birthday of the only American, 200 years after Benjamin Franklin, to be given the freedom of the city, or burgh, of St Andrews.

What we might call the "shrine dinner" was set for Atlanta, Georgia, the birthplace of the man I'm talking about - Robert Tyre Jones - lawyer, scholar, engineer and forever amateur golfer who in the summer of 1930 performed a feat never accomplished before or since - to win in succession all four of the major golf championships in one year, which in those days meant the British Amateur championship, the British Open, the American Open and the American Amateur.

Like Alexander, having conquered all known worlds, he retired.

But this talk is not to be about the greatest golfer of his day, it's a memoir and personal recollection of, I do believe, the most singular human character I have ever known.

The standard reservation to make now is to say of course he was no saint, we always toss in this reminder, forgetting along the way that the early behaviour of some of the saints was not so saintly either.

So then, on St Patrick's Day 1902 in Atlanta, Georgia, was born, to a young middle-aged southern lawyer and his wife, a son.

Almost from babyhood he was enfeebled by a puzzling disease which later he called "a digestive system that did everything but digest".

In those days the automatic remedy for any affliction - from flat feet, to a brain tumour - was to take a vacation in a balmy climate.

But the Joneses were already in a balmy climate and Mr and Mrs Jones took up golf and lugged the four year old along with a sawn-off club. What for? To do him good.

Well his disease vanished as mysteriously as it had arrived and he took to hitting a ball the way other boys take to kicking or throwing a ball.

He watched the new Scottish pro. He was a marvellous mimic and the gift passed over to driving a ball and pitching and chipping a ball, and by the time of his teens he had invented shots nobody else had thought of.

His early prowess was such that he was, at 14, Georgia amateur champion, at 15, with America in the First War, touring the country with the reigning professional golfer giving exhibitions for the Red Cross.

At 15 too he had done with school. He went to Georgia's famous Institute of Technology to take the four-year engineering degree. He took it in two and a half years.

So on to Harvard for an honours degree in English literature. While there, picking up the United States Open Championship during his summer vacation.

At 24 he decided to become a lawyer and he went back to Atlanta to Emory University to take the four-year course.

But towards the end of his second year he thought he'd like to see how tough was the bar examination. He took it, passed it easily, so he left colleges forever, became a lawyer and so remained for life.

Quite simply and incredibly his summer holidays were spent entering 20 major championships, winning 13, coming second in five and at the veteran's age of 28 he retired forever from competitive golf.

He had, of course, not earned a nickel from the game so he started to earn some money to keep his wife and three children.

He made for Hollywood, with a string of stars, 16 15-minute movies about playing the game, which amazingly were a hit in the movie theatres of three continents.

He did a radio talk show, he wrote a weekly column - the most exact, finest, instructional writing that we have.

Incidentally, during the Second War he was exempted from military service with bad varicose veins but he wangled a commission and served in France under Eisenhower.

Now when he retired you'd expect he'd spend the days happily with his family playing golf several times a week but his fame was enormous and during the Depression he had a myriad calls for help.

He devoted all his spare time to innumerable charities, playing only occasional golf.

After one round in his mid 40s he told his partners: "I don't think I'll be playing with you boys for some time."

He'd been struck with an agonising back pain and he had an operation. It didn't help.

He began to feel tingling in his fingertips, a leg grew numb, he had a second operation and bony, vertebral spurs were removed to relieve the compression on his spinal nerves.

But the numbness and the muscle atrophy spread to both legs.

Finally he was diagnosed with a very rare, progressive degenerative disease of the spinal cord for which there was no cure and still isn't.

Although soon totally paralysed from the waist down he determined to appear as a cheerful invalid, kind and genial, without affectation to friends and strangers and always looking out for the shy one.

And the diabolical disease "progressed" - in the harsh professional language - all feeling going from most of his body, his fine hands reduced to stiff little claws with which he clutched a cigarette, a tumbler, and always signed his letters with a sprawling three letter word - Bob - done with a pen taped to a tennis ball.

He never complained. For 22 years retained his matchless courtesy, his ironical, amused gaze at life.

His last public visit to Scotland was in his middle 50s when the Provost of St Andrews gave him the freedom of a city Jones said "has a sensitivity and ability to extend cordiality in ingenious ways."

He hobbled off to his electric cart and began to propel himself slowly down the aisle as the audience stirred to a single voice and rose to sing Will Ye No Come Back Again.

The start of the hobble and the fact of the cart were enough to remind us that he never would.

The last two years we were rightly not allowed to see him, that tortured wraith of 65 lbs. I pray he was well sedated at the end.

On the last day he turned to his wife - to whom he had, as an old friend put it in his old-fashioned way, kept the faith - and said: "Is this all there is to it?" and died in his sleep just before his 70th birthday.

As a boy, on his first round of St Andrews, he played badly and he withdrew from the championship and threw a little temper tantrum. It was his first and his last.

He made what he called a general apology and later he wrote: "In golf and maybe in life too it is not enough to play by the rules, if you don't play by the etiquette it's not worth a damn."

I suppose what we saw, what we had in him, was something rarer than a great athlete, writer, artist, actor, composer, statesman - a masterpiece of a human life.

So at a time when across the globe many nations and two civilisations are busy deploring each other's national character I thought it might be useful for a change to talk about one human being who everybody, of every nation who met him, agreed was a credit to his race - the human race that is.

I've written and spoken a good deal about Bob Jones down many years of watching him, covering, being with him, from his last appearance at Augusta, way back to his first appearance at Lytham St Anne's in 1926.

I was 17 and within hearing distance of the roar that went up for that magical shot to the 17th green that sealed the match and his first British championship.

The best I can do to sum up my long view of him is to say over what I wrote in my history of America 28 years ago.

"The 1920s were a prosperous, garish, pleasure-bent, often vulgar decade, during which New York city started the colourful custom of paying tribute to national gods with what were called "ticker tape parades" up Broadway - mainly for generals, admirals, aviators.

"There was one peculiar choice, but in him the 1920s were saluting not so much an athlete but unknowingly an old ideal in the moment of its passing - he was Robert Tyre Jones, a weekend golfer but the best of his time.

"He had a grace and charm, on and off the course, that made him the idol of two continents - and that to people who did not know a putter from a shovel and had only the weekly newsreels in the movie houses to go on.

"His universal appeal was obviously not as a golfer. What then? The word that comes to mind is one that is fast becoming an extinct word, with no meaning to present generations except as an obsolete class distinction - the word is a gentleman.

"Meaning in Bob Jones's case a combination of goodness, modesty and social ease, unwavering courtesy, self-deprecation, but first and at all times an alert consideration for other people.

"As for the last dreadful 20-odd years of his life even that long decline was heroic. The American golf historian Herbert Warren Wind has said it better than anybody in the fewest words: 'As a young man he was able to stand up to just about the best that life can offer and throughout the later years he stood with equal grace to just about the worst'."

Enough, this is the time of day when I recall Bob Jones best, what EB White called "the time of the most beautiful sound in America, the tingle of ice at twilight."

I think it's appropriate on this surely American-Scottish occasion to tell you that of the whole pharmacopoeia of medications I take every day, far and away the most effective is what I call "the twilight wine of Scotland".

I had the honour from time to time of sharing a teaspoon or two of it with Bob Jones and he agreed with me about its power to heal.

So raise a glass this evening to toast the now immortal memory of Robert Tyre Jones, a man of unnatural courage and lovely humanity.

THIS TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING, THE BBC CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY.

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