Memories of The Great and The Good

by Alistair Cooke

  There was another short exchange or two, in one of which Jones characteristically started a letter: “Dear Alistair (don’t you think we ought to put an end to this minuet of Mr. Jones and Mr. Cooke?)” and went on to ask me to be sure to call on him whenever I was down in Augusta or Atlanta. Which I did, most often in the company of Ward-Thomas.

  My first impression was the shock of seeing the extent of his disability, the fine strong hands, twisted like the branches of a cypress, gamely clutching a tumbler or one of his perpetual cigarettes in a holder. His face was more ravaged than I had expected, from the long-endured pain I imagine, but the embarrassment a stranger might feel about this was tempered by the quizzical eyes and the warmth his presence gave off. (He kept on going to Augusta for the Masters until two years before the end. Mercifully, for everyone but his family, we would not see him when he could no longer bear to be seen.)

  After that first meeting I never again felt uncomfortable about his ailment, and only once did he mention it, which was when he spoke a sentence that has passed into the apocrypha. Pat well knew that Jones never talked about his disease, but on that day he really wanted to penetrate the mask of courage and know just how good or bad things really were. Pat’s expression was so candid that—I sensed—Jones felt he would, for once, say a word of two. He said that he’d been told that his disease occurred in two forms—”descending and ascending,”* that luckily his paralysis had been from the waist and his extremities down, so that, he added, “I have my heart and lungs and my so-called brain.” He spoke about it easily with a rueful smile, and no more was said. The familiar punch line, ‘You know, we play the ball where it lies,” was not said in my presence and, I must say, it sounds to me false to Jones’s character, as of a passing thought by a screenwriter that Hollywood would never resist. Let us thank God that Hollywood has never made a movie about Jones; it would almost surely be as inept and more molassic than the dreadful Follow the Sun, the alleged “epic” about Ben Hogan.

  About the disease. At a tournament Jones was playing in, in England, Henry Longhurst, the late, great rogue of English golf writing, was standing beside a doctor who, marveling at Jones’s huge pivot, the long arc of his swing and the consequent muscular strain that sustained it, predicted that one day it would cause him grievous back trouble. Longhurst wrote and retailed this comment to Jones, who responded with a good-tempered note saying, with typical tact, that Henry was good to be concerned but the trouble was due to a rare disease. This sad turn in Jones’s life has also received several versions. So far as I can discover, from tapping the memory of his oldest surviving friend, the inimitable Charlie Yates, and checking with the expertise of several medicos, the true account is simple and drastic.

  In the summer of 1948, Jones remarked to Yates, in the middle of what was to be his last round ever, that he would not soon be playing again because his back had become unbearable and he was going to have an operation. It was, in fact, the first of two operations and it revealed damage to the spinal tissue that could not then be tagged with a definite diagnosis. A year or two later, Jones went up to Boston and after being examined at the Lahey Clinic had the second operation, during which a positive diagnosis was made: syringomyelia, a chronic progressive degenerative disease of the spinal cord, which, as we all know, Jones bore for twenty-two years with chilling stoicism. The scant consolation for the rest of us is that anyone falling victim to the same disease today could expect no better outcome. The etiology is still unknown and there is no cure.

  When I first went into the sitting room of Jones’s cottage at Augusta, I noticed at once a large picture over the mantelpiece, a framed series of cartoon strips by the best, and throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the most famously popular English sports cartoonist, Tom Webster. No American I knew (and no Englishman under seventy) had ever heard his name, but the drawings—of Jones and of Hagen, I believe—served as a taproot into Jones’s memories of Britain and British golf in the 1920s. He enlightened me about the character and skill of various old heroes I brought up: Braid and Duncan and Tolley and Roger Wethered and, of course, Hagen. (Though I played no golf I followed it—from the papers, the newsreels, and the Webster cartoons—as zealously as I followed county cricket). This talk brought up, one time, the never-ending controversy about the essential characteristic of the good golf swing. Jones distrusted “keep your eye on the ball” almost as much as Tommy Armour did. His preference was for Abe Mitchell’s “the player should move freely beneath himself.”

  Jones never recalled to me, as all famous athletes are apt to do, the acclaim of his great days, though once when I had just come back from St. Andrews, he remarked again what a “wonderful experience” it had been on his later visits “to go about a town where people wave at you from doorways and windows.” Otherwise, he never said anything that made me doubt his friends’ assurance that he was uncomfortable with the spotlight and was grateful to have room service in the hotels of towns where he would be recognized on the streets. He did not flaunt his trophies at home, and he kept his medals locked up in a chest.

  Our talks were mostly about books, people, politics, only rarely about golf, whenever Ward-Thomas was eager for another Jones quote for his bulging file of golfing wisdom. In the winter after my first meeting, a book came out entitled Bobby Jones on Golf, and I reviewed it under the heading, “The Missing Aristotle Papers on Golf,” remarking along the way that Jones’s gift for distilling a complex emotion into the barest language would not have shamed John Donne; that his meticulous insistence on the right word to impress the right visual image was worthy of fussy old Flaubert; and that his unique personal gift was “to take apart many of the club clichés with a touch of grim Lippmannesque humor.” Shortly after the piece appeared, Jones dropped me a letter beginning: “Off hand, I can’t think of another contemporary author who has been compared in one piece to Aristotle, Flaubert, John Donne and Walter Lippmann!”

  Much was made—rightly—when the book came out about the extraordinary fact that Jones had written it himself. This is only to remark, in a more interesting way, how phenomenally rare it is for a scholar to become a world-class athlete. The same dependence on a ghost is true of actors and actresses, as also of ninety percent of the world’s—at least the Western world’s— best politicians. The exceptions are rare indeed. Churchill, after a Washington wartime meeting with Roosevelt, flew home in a bomber, alternating between the controls and the composition of a speech on a pad. He was no sooner in London than he appeared at the BBC and broadcast across the Atlantic a majestic strategical survey of the world at war. To his horror, Roosevelt heard it in the White House while he was working on his own promised broadcast with the aid of three ghost writers. One of them, Robert Sherwood, consoled the president with the sorrowful thought: ‘I’m afraid, Mr. President, he rolls his own.”

  When I think back to those Augusta talks, I recall most vividly the quality of irony that was always there in his eyes and often in his comments on people and things. I asked him once about “the master eye” without knowing that he had written about it. I’m sure he said what he had said before: he didn’t believe in it or in the ritual of plumb bobbing. The main thing was to “locate the ball’s position … I’m told a man can do this better with two eyes than with one.” The last time I saw him, I told him about a rather morose Scottish caddie I’d recently had who took a dim view of most things American, but especially the golf courses, which—he’d been told—had lots of trees. We were sitting out on the porch of his Augusta cottage and Jones looked down at the towering Georgia pines, the great cathedral nave, of the plunging tenth fairway. “I don’t see,” he said deadpan, “any need for a tree on a golf course.”

  Toward the end of one Masters tournament, Henry Longhurst took suddenly very ill. He lay grumpily in his hospital bed and, lifting his ripe W. C. Fields’s nose over the bedsheet, predicted that it was “closing time.” Happily, it turned out not to be, but Pat and I stayed over through the Monday to watch out f
or him. In the early afternoon, when the place was empty, we called on Jones and he suggested we collect some clubs from the pro shop and play the splendid par three course. We were about to set off when Cliff Roberts, cofounder of the club, came in. He was shocked at the generosity of Jones’s suggestion: “Bob, you surely know the rule—no one can play without a member going along.” “Don’t you think,” Jones asked wistfully, “you and I could exercise a little Papal indulgence?” Roberts did not think so. And although he’d recently had a major operation, he went off, got into his golfing togs and limped around with us through six holes, by which time he was ready for intensive care and staggered away accepting the horrid fact of the broken rule.

  Because of the firm convention of writing nothing about Jones that is less than idolatrous, I have done a little digging among friends and old golfing acquaintances who knew him and among old and new writers who, in other fields, have a sharp nose for the disreputable. But I do believe that a whole team of investigative reporters, working in shifts like coal miners, would find that in all of Jones’s life anyone had been able to observe, he nothing common did or mean.

  However, a recent author, in a book depicting the Augusta National club as a CEO’s Shangri-la, does not spare the patron saint of golf from his lamentations. He attacks Jones on two counts. First, for his being “weak and irresolute” in bowing to Cliff Roberts’s expulsion of a player for violating the etiquette of the game. (On the contrary, Jones was disturbed by the man’s behavior for six years. Only when, after three requests, the man properly apologized, did Jones welcome him back.) This criticism reflects a serious misconception about Jones’s function. In the running of the Masters, Cliff Roberts’s power was absolute. What Jones brought to the tournament was the prestige of his immense popularity, not to mention a saving contribution of seed money when the club was on the verge of foundering. Otherwise, it was understood from the start that Roberts was the prime mover and shaker, the organizer of the staff and the commissary, the recruiter and commander of the course patrols, the boss of the course officials and of crowd control, the inventor of new conventions of scoring, and even (over Jones’s protesting pleas) the final judge of the architecture of a hole.

  So the view of Jones as the impotent puppet king of a cabal of CEOs is both melodramatic and quite wrong. In the beginning, Jones and Roberts wrote to hundreds of friends, acquaintances and strangers “to buy a share of the club” but recruited only a minuscule membership: a hundred dollars a head was hard to come by in the pit of the Depression. Incidentally, the slur also blandly ignores the deepening agony of Jones’s illness throughout the last twenty years of his attendance at “his” tournament. (His private view of the tycoon’s preserve that Augusta was to become was never, I believe, vouchsafed to his friends, but it was after a hearty get-together of board chairmen, celebrated in a photo opportunity more theirs than his, that he confided ruefully: “They say I love people. I don’t. I love a few people in small doses.”)

  The second charge is more familiar and these days has become inevitable when a young author reacts to warm praise of an old southerner. It is the charge of “racism.” This is so pretentiously silly that I have to swallow hard to choose to meet it. It is the old fallacy, which every generation is subject to, of judging a man outside his time and place. Franklin Roosevelt now, I imagine, is thought in retrospect to have had a very callous streak since he never protested the separation of the races. Many shocked readers of this piece would have felt the same indifference if they had been born a half century earlier. I know. I was there. During my first two years in America, I was curious about, but not outraged by, the social status of the Negroes. In my most enlightened moments I should have thought of them as an aberration in an otherwise admirable system. The Negro was not yet a crusade, even among bloodshot liberals.

  I look back on the southerners I knew and admired. I was lucky to have traveled far and wide in the South in the 1930s and 1940s, and I had many friends in many southern places. Jones belonged to those fine ones who were incapable of condescending to a black or being ever less than conscious of their lowly status. When things went wrong for their servants—sickness, debt, delinquency—the family took anxious care of them, of its own. By contrast, we in the North hired daily help in good conscience and hoped they stayed well. Their private afflictions were their own. The northern Negro might be permitted more public chutzpah than his southern brother, but the North took it out in tuberculosis.

  For myself, I can now say simply that in my life I can count four human beings who radiated simple goodness: my father; a Franciscan priest; a university professor; and Robert Tyre Jones Jr. Maybe “radiated” is too strong a word, for one striking thing about good human beings is their gift for not being striking. Jones had an instinct for noticing, and attending to, the shy one in any bubbling company. His capacity for shifting the spotlight away from himself was remarkable even in the one performance where you would expect him to be authoritative: in the act of teaching golf. In those precious film shorts he made for the Warner brothers, in which a lesson in the use of the brassie or mashie is tagged on to a ludicrous plot about a golf widow or other domestic strain, he never says “you must do this …” or “it is essential to do that.” He is careful always to say: “I’ve found that if I move the ball an inch or so …” and “perhaps if you tried … it works well with some people.”

  The last indelible memory of him, for those who had the luck to be in St. Andrews in the late autumn of 1958, was his acceptance of the freedom of the city. The Provost was careful to say that he was being saluted not only as “the first golfer of this age … but as a man of courage and character.” In response, Jones put aside the notes he had painfully written out and spoke freely, first of the Old Course, which had enraged the nineteen-year-old and come to enchant the man; then he talked with the slightest tremor of the curious lasting friendship he had acquired for a city and a people “who have a sensitivity and an ability to extend cordiality in ingenious ways.”

  He hobbled off to his electric golf cart and began to propel it down the center aisle, as the audience stirred, picked up the cue of a tentative 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 them that he never would. It was a moment of suddenly shared emotion that upset the most cynical. Herbert Warren Wind remarked: “It was ten minutes before many who attended were able to speak with a tranquil voice.” During those minutes, he seemed to one onlooker to qualify for Frederick Buechner’s definition of goodness as “valor and unnatural virtue.”

  What we are left with in the end is a forever young, good-looking southerner, an impeccably courteous and decent man with a private ironical view of life who, to the great good fortune of people who saw him, happened to play the great game with more magic and more grace than anyone before or since.

  * I have consulted several neurologists about this. None is aware of this distinction but all say that it can begin by attacking different parts of the body in different victims.