Four!

Francis Albertanti, assistant sports editor of the New York Evening Mail, considered baseball,
boxing, and horse racing the meat and potatoes of the sports section. College football received
respectful attention during its season, and Albertanti kept a headline standing in type to take
care of tennis. It read: TILDEN DEFEATS RICHARDS AGAIN.
One day Theophilus England Niles, the managing editor, called Albertanti into his office and
asked why golf got no space in the Mail.
“It’s an important game,” Niles said, “very popular with the Wall Street crowd.”
“Then put it on the financial page,” Francis said.
This was in 1912, a year before a former caddie named Francis Ouimet would beat Harry
Vardon and Ted Ray for the United States Open championship. Walter Hagen had not yet made
up his mind between baseball and golf as a career. Bobby Jones was a spindly ten-year-old
living alongside the East Lake Country Club in suburban Atlanta. A year earlier he had won the
junior championship of East Lake, making his name a household word in the Jones household.
Within a few years these three—Ouimet, Hagen, and Jones—would put golf in headlines even
on the sports pages of the Evening Mail.
This piece is mostly about Jones because 1980 is the golden anniversary year of his Grand Slam,
the sweep of the British Amateur, the British Open, the United States Open, and the United
States Amateur in 1930. The “Impregnable Quadrilateral” George Trevor called it in the New
York Sun. Nobody had ever brought it off before and almost surely no one will do it ever again,
for professionals aren’t allowed in amateur tournaments, and the day when an amateur could
win the Open is long gone.
Since this is mostly about Jones, perhaps we should dispose of the threadbare stories at the
outset.
In 1916 Bobby qualified for the United States Amateur championship at the Merion Cricket Club
outside Philadelphia. He was fourteen years old, a chunky towhead of five-feet-four with long
pants and a short temper. In the first round he was matched with Eben Byers, who had won the
championship ten years earlier. When Byers missed a shot, he could throw his club as far and as
angrily as the fiery kid from Georgia. Both missed more than their share. At the twelfth hole,
Byers flung a club over a hedge and out of bounds and forbade his caddie to retrieve it. Bobby
won the match, 3 up and 1 to play.
“I won,” he said, “because Mr. Byers ran out of clubs first.”
In the qualifying round for the National Open of 1920 at the Inverness Club in Toledo, Bobby
was paired with England’s immortal Harry Vardon, revered as master of the gutta-percha ball
before Bobby was born. The oldest player in the tournament and the youngest scored a pair of
75s in the morning round, starting and finishing in total silence.