Evening star., 1924-11-17
FLOW E r S
For the Living
'sBobby" Jones
BY o. n. KELLER.
BY o. II. KELLER.

For golf tournaments he registers
as r. T. Jones. jr. On the Havemycrs
trophy and on the historic cup en-
blematic Of the United States open
golf championship he is inscribed as
| Robert T. Jones, jr. But to the world
at large he is Bobby Jones. And that
is significant title. He came by it
naturally, when he made his modest
bow to the world of golt, a tow
| headed schoolboy of II, at the Merton
Cricket Club in 1915. He never has
outgrown it. And he never will
| Everybody knows his record in
golf-national open champion at q,
national amateur champion at 22-
and his standing as the supreme
stylist of his generation.
| Perhaps everybody also under
stands insensibly why he is known
as Bobby Jones, tribute of millions
! of golfng fans to a personality that
as one metropolitan newspaper said
editorially when he won his latest
| championship, is as winning as his
| game.
| For Bobby Jones, a great golfer,
is a greater boy. AS the English
say, there Is that about him. 1t may
be that so lovable a personality has
| interrupted his winning of cham
| j
popularity. He is so gentle an op
ponent and so generous a foe that
! his competitors invariably have been
| inspired to outdo themselves, and not
| infrequently to defeat him for the
highest honors in the sport in which
he now is recognized as supreme.
A good loser, a good winner
som etimes harder to be-Bobby Jones
has been good all the way; a good
]
man, a good sweetheart and a good
husband. All this is not entirely
usual in an artist-Which is Bobby
Jones position before the world. His
pre- eminent fault as a competitive
golfer is modesty, that most eminent
virtue in a boy and a man. In the
huge galleries that follow his play
the women all say, Hes such nice
looking boy! And when he loses
they weep. The hardest-boiled golf
ing critics have said that he is too
fine a gentleman to be a good match
player-an odd sort of contradiction
in what is truly a gentleman's game.
Yet he has reached the top.
Twenty-Five years old, the bloom
still on his face-the bloom of in
herent and uncomfortable innocence
he stands at the peak of the
worlds golf, and wonders why. HIS
pain through SchOOl ana colltSe anu
university and in business is pleas
ant, because everybody loves him.
An invincible modesty cloaks him
round and looks out through the
gray eyes turned steadfastly but
never avidly on the goal Of cham
pionship: he Is modest inside and out.
So they call him Bobby Jones,
worlds tribute to perennial youth
and modesty and lovableness. And
after his triumph in the blue ribbon
event OF amateur golf, at Merton,
newspaper in his home town, Atlanta,
concluded an editorial thus:
Think Of it-he might have been
poor Alexander, with a high look
and a proud heart. ruling a bubble
empire. He might have been julius
Caesar, writing back home. 1 came,
1 saw, 1 conquered only to crumple
before a lean and hungry Cassius.
He might have been that plaything
Of Destiny, who, after fiaring like
, comet, fell at last like a vagrant
golf ball in the rocky solitude of st.
Helena. But instead, praise to the
gods of things as they ought to be,
he is Bobby Jones himself; conquer
er by mettle of sportmanship, ruler
by grace of spirit; clean as a noun
tain wind, modest as the soul of
youthful chivalry-
braver soldier never couched q lance;
gentler heart did never sway in court
Copyright, 1924.)