The Greatest Player Who Never Lived Read online

  That victory ignited an incredible run through the Roaring Twenties, during which Jones captured 13 major championships. During the same period, he finished second no less than four times in the U.S. Open and twice lost in the finals of the U.S. Amateur.

  One of his second-place finishes in the Open came after Jones called a penalty on himself because his ball moved. No one else saw the ball move. When he was praised for his honesty, Jones seemed put off. “You might as well praise someone for not robbing a bank,” he retorted.

  He was born Robert Tyre Jones, Jr. His father was a lawyer who was nicknamed “The Colonel.” Upon completing his studies, the younger Jones followed his father into practice.

  To the world he was Bobby. To his friends he was Bob.

  Jones seemed to epitomize everything American at the time. He was handsome enough to be a matinee idol. In fact, after his retirement from competition, Jones was persuaded to make a series of instructional golf films for Warner Brothers featuring the likes of W.C. Fields and other Hollywood celebrities in cameo roles. The films were shown as short subjects in movie theaters. They were rereleased on home video some 50 years later and outsold every other golf video released that year.

  He was stylish, too. No one swung a golf club quite like Bobby Jones. He wasn’t just good; he looked good. So damned good in fact, that when Jones was playing it was common for other competitors in adjacent fairways to stop and watch.

  On top of it all, Jones was an extraordinarily bright man, as evidenced by his academic success. Unlike so many other athletes, he actually wrote his own autobiography without a ghostwriter, as well as his own instructional books and articles.

  I was fast becoming an expert on this extraordinary man. And like most converts, I was enthusiastic about my newfound religion. Ken Cheatwood loaned me Jones’s autobiography, Down the Fairway, and I finished it over a weekend. I then located copies of Jones’s other books and magazine articles and read them as well.

  It was evident that there was much to admire about Jones besides his golf exploits. He was clearly a remarkable man apart from his achievements as a player.

  After withdrawing from competitive golf in 1930, the year he won the “Grand Slam,” Jones went on to establish the Augusta National Golf Club, building the course on the grounds of an old fruit orchard. It was a spectacular achievement, coming during the Depression, and fulfilled Jones’s dream of a special place where he and his friends could enjoy golf away from the intense public attention that seemed to follow him even in retirement. (Not long after he quit competitive golf, Jones arrived unannounced to play a friendly round at the Old Course at St. Andrews while “on holiday.” Word spread throughout the town that Jones was on the course. By the time he reached the fifth hole, several thousand spectators had gathered to follow him.)

  Not content just with having a place to play, Jones then decided to establish an invitational tournament so he could have an annual reunion with the great players of professional and amateur golf. He scheduled it to take place just as baseball’s spring training ended in the Deep South, hoping to entice prominent national sportswriters to cover the event as they made their way by train back to the Northeast.

  The inaugural event was held in 1934 and was called the Augusta National Invitational Tournament. Others in the club, most notably cofounder Cliff Roberts, wanted to call the tournament “The Masters.” Although Jones felt that the title was too pretentious, he eventually relented, and the tournament soon was officially known by that name. Within 20 years, it was considered one of the major championships in professional golf along with the U.S. Open, the British Open, and the PGA Championship. Such was the magic of Bobby Jones.

  Unfortunately, fate was as cruel to Jones in later life as it favored him in his youth. As The Masters grew, Jones’s health began to trouble him. In the late 1940s, he was diagnosed with syringomyelia, a chronic progressive disease of the spinal cord with no known cause or cure. In a few years, Jones was forced to view The Masters from a golf cart. Not long thereafter, he was confined to a wheelchair. By all accounts, the disease attacked with astonishing force and humbled a body that at one time performed the most difficult athletic feats with a style and grace far beyond the reach of other men.

  Even in Jones’s final days, he would not let the disease steal his dignity. He never complained of his obvious pain and refused to discuss his condition with anyone other than his doctors. When the end came in 1971 at the age of 69, those who remained close to Jones were more impressed by the courage and grace that he displayed in the last painfilled years of his life than they were by his many golf achievements.

  Unlike most sports figures, Jones continued to grow in stature after retiring from the arena of competition. And that truly set him apart.

  Although he was “to the manor born,” having advantages that few professionals of his era enjoyed, Jones was always well-liked by the professionals against whom he competed. While he didn’t pretend to be one of them, he was never condescending toward them, either. He respected the professionals, and so he gained their respect as well. Far from resenting the intrusion of this privileged amateur into their midst, the touring pros relished the challenge he posed as one artist might admire the work of another.

  So it was that Jones became fast friends with Gene Sarazen, Walter Hagen, Horton Smith, “Wild Bill” Mehlhorn, and other contemporaries, as well as Sam Snead, Ben Hogan, and Byron Nelson, who came along a decade later. And their affection for Jones made The Masters an important tournament almost instantly.

  As I read the accounts of Jones’s tournament play, I recognized virtually all of the names of the prominent golfers of his day. In addition to the professionals, there was Francis Ouimet, Johnny Goodman, Jess Sweetser, and Charles Evans, Jr., on the amateur side. They were all Jones’s rivals and, for the most part, his friends as well. Many of them were his teammates on the Walker Cup, a competition between teams of amateurs from the United States and Great Britain/Ireland held every other year. Jones played on five straight teams and was the playing captain for the last two competitions in which he participated, in 1928 and 1930.

  In the middle of all this, I came across an account of Jones’s play in the 1928 Southern Amateur, held at the famed Seminole Golf Club in Florida. The story described how, at each stage of match play, Jones defeated the leading amateurs. The one name I didn’t recognize was his semifinal opponent: Beauregard Stedman. Stedman must have been some player; he eliminated Jones from the competition in a match that lasted 20 holes before Stedman won by making a 40-footer for birdie.

  I had never heard of this Stedman fellow. There was a small picture of him, but the paper was so faded his features were blurred. He appeared to be fairly short, no more than 5′ 6″ or so. But he was thick in the chest and his uprolled sleeves (they still played in long-sleeved shirts and ties) showed the kind of forearms that appeared strong enough to strangle an opponent if he had a mind to. His build made me think of Ian Woosnam. The big difference was that Stedman appeared to have a wild head of hair, sandy in color and tightly curled. From the looks of the picture, it hadn’t seen a comb in a while, either.

  His game must have been as spectacular as his appearance. The account of the match insisted that Stedman routinely outdrove Jones—who was considered very long off the tee—by as much as 30 yards. Only Jones’s magic with Calamity Jane, his putter, extended the match 20 holes before he was eliminated.

  The article described Stedman as a young phenom, only 15 years old. For someone that young to beat Jones was remarkable. At the time, Jones already had eight major championship trophies on his mantle and was the best known golfer in the world. Yet Stedman had matched Jones par for par and birdie for birdie until he was able to win at the 20th hole. As an indication of the quality of their play, both players shot 68 for the first 18 holes of their match.

  For young Stedman, it must have been the thrill of a lifetime to beat the greatest player in the world. Not surprisingly, the final was re
ported to be something of an anticlimax after Jones was eliminated from the field. Perhaps exhausted by his monumental victory over Jones, Stedman lost 2 and 1 to Jess Sweetser.

  I had never seen Beau Stedman’s name mentioned before in any of my reading. Jones was quite generous in his autobiography with his fellow players, calling many of them by name and always complimenting their games. His book recounted numerous war stories of the great matches he had played. Yet I didn’t recall any mention of his match with Stedman in the Southern Amateur.

  Of course, Jones competed against a lot of people, and it simply wasn’t possible for him to name all of them. Still, I found myself wondering what became of Beau Stedman. In fact, I became more interested in that than in my indexing of Jones’s other papers. Not that anyone cared; no one had asked to see the results of my labors even after three weeks on the job.

  I guess I should have been jealous. Most of the other law clerks were working directly with lawyers in the firm on various research projects. A couple of them had been allowed the privilege of attending depositions to observe how real lawyers work. One lucky clerk even got to watch a senior partner argue a motion in federal court.

  For some reason, I really wasn’t worried about whether the powers that be at the firm even knew whether Charley Hunter was alive. Ken Cheatwood and a couple of the other clerks had gotten interested in what I was doing, and they kept me in the loop of things, making sure I got invited along whenever the lawyers took the clerks out. I even made a Braves game, watching Tom Glavine beat the Mets 4-2.

  I don’t even remember wondering why I wasn’t jealous. I suppose I was having too much fun back in the 1920s.

  3

  WHEN I WAS A CHILD, I came across a couple of old scrapbooks that belonged to my mother. They became my favorite reading material for years. I would spend hours looking over the old photographs of my grandparents, my mother and uncles, and their friends.

  The stuff from the 1940s, when my grandparents were young, was my favorite. The ’40s seemed like such a romantic time to me, what with World War II and all. My grandparents had saved programs and dance cards from formals and other social events. There were even mementos from mixers in college. My grandmother had even saved newspaper clippings about the war, particularly those that mentioned boys with whom she had gone to school.

  My infatuation with that era continued to adulthood. I preferred watching black and white films made in the ’40s, in which the men wore suits and the women wore gowns, than most any current Hollywood production. It was no coincidence to me that more and more of Hollywood’s output now consisted of remakes of the old classics.

  I now had another set of scrapbooks, so to speak, and I was reading them with the same fascination as my mother’s memorabilia. It reminded me of the wonderful journeys I had made back in time as a youngster and was certainly more fun than any other project I could have been given.

  Part of it was the elegance of the time. In the magical decade before the Depression when Jones dominated golf, the great championships of his sport were held at upper crust country clubs far removed from anything the average man or woman would ever see. It was the time of Great Gatsby. Golfers played in ties, and, in the true style of the rich, they did not sweat; they only perspired.

  Golf’s amateurs were usually members of these posh clubs and enjoyed all their amenities. However, although professionals were occasionally allowed to play their courses, they usually dressed in their cars because entry into the clubhouse was forbidden to them.

  With few exceptions, amateur golfers were rich men who had gone to college and then into banking, law, or business. Professional golfers, on the other hand, had little education and came to the game as caddies. They played the game for money because they had no other way to make a decent living.

  Class lines were fairly clear in those days, and sportswriters usually fell on the side of the line with the professionals as opposed to the amateurs. America was not an egalitarian place then, and class differences were keenly felt. This may have accounted for the fact that the professional side of the game received excellent coverage from the sportswriting fraternity, which probably felt it was championing its own. When it came right down to it, the only real difference in their eyes between Babe Ruth and Walter Hagen was that they played different sports.

  The real breakthrough, however, came at the 1931 U.S. Open at Inverness in Toledo, when the club invited the professionals into the clubhouse and allowed them the use of the locker room. For the touring pros, this was a major social advance. They were so grateful that they later presented the club with a grandfather clock inscribed in appreciation, which remains on display there to this day.

  These historical events were coming alive in the aging and frayed files that lay in my hands. I was reading accounts of tournaments Jones played on the great courses of Long Island, New York, such as Garden City, Maidstone, and Shinnecock Hills. If any place epitomized the world of Gatsby, it was the Hamptons.

  Then, in the midst of my reverie over what it must have been like, a name leapt off the page at me: Beauregard Stedman. He had beaten George Von Elm 5 and 4 in the finals of the 1929 Garden City Invitational.

  I hurried down the hall to Cheatwood’s office.

  “Look at this.”

  Cheatwood immediately put down the deposition he was summarizing and read what I handed him.

  “Do you know anything about this guy Von Elm?”

  “Yeah. I recognize the name. He was good.” He reached over to a stack of books he kept in his office. Pulling down one I was becoming familiar with, he began to read.

  “According to this, Von Elm was no pushover. He and Jones squared off in the finals of the U.S. Amateur twice, each coming away with the title once.”

  “You mean this guy was a U.S. Amateur champ?”

  “That’s what it says here.” He pointed to the page. “And I’ll tell you something else: Garden City is a great golf course. Back in college, I got invited to play there. It was right after I made All-American my junior year. Great track.”

  He pulled down another book. “Let’s see … yeah, I was right. Garden City’s been the site of several U.S. Amateurs. I know it’s still listed in virtually every ranking of great courses in the United States.”

  The article I had shown Cheatwood described the same kind of powerful play that Stedman had displayed against Jones in the Southern Amateur at Seminole a year earlier. In a 36-hole final, Stedman had apparently taken charge early, jumping out to a 3-up lead after 18 holes, and had closed Von Elm out with 4 holes left in the 36-hole final. There was even a picture showing Stedman, with his distinguished woolly hair all askew, grinning and holding the winner’s cup aloft.

  As he handed it back to me, Cheatwood asked, “How did Jones make out in the tournament?”

  “You know, there’s no mention of him.”

  My friend gave me a puzzled look. “That’s odd. Even playing below his usual standards, I would have expected him to do well enough in the medal rounds to qualify for match play. He was such a great player. If he had failed to advance to the match play bracket, that would have been news in itself. There’s no mention of him at all?”

  I held out the article. “See for yourself.”

  He shook his head. “No, I believe you. It’s just strange. It sounds like Jones didn’t enter the tournament.” Cheatwood paused thoughtfully. “But if that’s the case, what’s this clipping doing in his files?”

  I had no answer, so I went back to my cell. It wasn’t long before another clipping caught my eye. This one recited the results of the 1929 Metropolitan Open, which had been held on the East Course at Winged Foot in Mamaroneck, New York, just three months later. It was a 72-hole stroke play event, and I immediately noticed the name of Beau Stedman, who must have been all of 16 years of age at the time, finishing third at 284 behind Walter Hagen with 281 and Ralph Guldahl with 283.

  In a span of 90 days in early 1929, Beau Stedman had finished first and t
hird in two of the most prestigious golf tournaments in the country. And he was barely old enough to shave. I wanted to share this with Cheatwood, but he had been called into the office of one of the lawyers to discuss the status of a project he was working on. I went back to work.

  The next sheet of paper in the file was a crudely written note of some kind. It read: Thoght you might like to see thez. I played pretty good. Thanks to you. It was unsigned. Although it had no address or salutation, it had apparently been sent to Jones.

  Now what on earth was this, I wondered. Then it hit me. This note had enclosed the clippings about Beau Stedman. Could it have been written by Stedman himself? If so, why was he sending a note of gratitude to Jones? What had Jones done for Stedman? There was obviously some connection, but I had no clue what it was.

  At the time, Stedman was around 16 years of age, and Jones was 27. Judging from Stedman’s poor spelling, he had little education and was certainly not of Jones’s social class. Thus, they would hardly have been friends outside of golf, and they didn’t seem to be related in any way either. The dark side of me momentarily speculated that perhaps Stedman was a half-brother, the result of some indiscretion by the Colonel.

  Or maybe it was something far less titillating. Maybe Jones had simply taken an interest in an outstanding young player who had the potential to be his equal in golf.

  There were any number of explanations for the note, and I had no evidence leading me to believe one was more likely than the others. One thing I did notice was that Stedman was still listed as an amateur in the Metropolitan Open standings. He had accepted no prize money. He remained eligible to pursue the grand prizes of amateur golf, such as the U.S. Amateur and the British Amateur, as well as such notable tournaments as the Western, Northeast, and Southern amateur championships. But traveling the amateur circuit cost money, and there was nothing to indicate that Stedman had the means to do so.