Bobby Jones on Golf

by Robert Tyre Jones

  Of course, the first thing one must have in order to be successful in tournaments is a sound, reliable game. Yet this is a thing to be built up over a period of years, by patient study and practice on top of at least a moderate amount of natural aptitude. Like cramming for a final examination, a week or two of perspiring practice in preparation for a tournament is more likely to do harm than good; if the game is not already there, it is not likely to be acquired at the last moment.

  On the other hand, to do too much experimenting on the eve of a tournament is always a bad thing. Many players beat themselves because they will not leave their swings alone long enough to play through the competition. Most of us have all the year to practice and experiment, to tinker with our swings and to improve our method. When a tournament comes along, it is time to forget all that, time to leave off experimenting, and, placing complete trust in the muscular habits we have acquired, to concentrate on “getting the figures.”

  The most important part of preparing for a tournament is to condition oneself mentally and physically so that it will be possible to get the most out of what game one possesses. Rigorous physical training is neither necessary nor beneficial. A physical condition that is too fine usually puts the nerves on edge. What one needs most is to play golf, to harden the golfing muscles, and to get the feel of the little shots around the green.

  How much to play is something everyone must learn for himself. The happy state is one of complete familiarity with all the shots and clubs, and a keenness for the game that thrills in anticipation of the coming contest. Too little golf is bad, but too much is worse. To be jaded and stale before the tournament even begins is an entirely hopeless condition. Yet no one can say how much golf another can tolerate.

  2 COMPETITIVE ATTITUDE

  In every sport, and, I suppose, in almost every other line of endeavor, it is hard to separate and recognize the qualities that distinguish the great from the near-great—the men who succeed from those who just can’t quite make it. In golf, this little difference, as telling as it may be, is yet so small that it is difficult to see that it can have a positive and consistent value.

  I remember reading in an English newspaper after I had won the British Open at St. Andrews, an editorial that made a point of the slight margin of superiority shown by the winner of a tournament over the rest of the field. In this particular championship, I had won by the greatest margin I had ever had, yet as the editorial pointed out, my advantage of six strokes, however big it may have looked, when reduced to percentage, read only 2.105 per cent, or 1 ½ strokes in each round in which an average of a little less than seventy-two strokes were used.

  I suppose it is consideration of a slender margin such as this that led J. H. Taylor to say that the difference between the winner and the near-winner is the ability on the part of the successful contestant to be ever on the lookout against himself. Never too certain of what the result may be, he plays not one shot carelessly or with overconfidence.

  In competition, I have not regarded seriously the tendency of some people to endow golfers with superhuman powers. Because on occasions a few players have staged spectacular finishes to retrieve victory by last-minute rallies, I have heard it said of them that they are able to pull off whatever is necessary to win. Such an idea is absurd, for if these men were capable of playing golf as they willed, they would never place themselves so that they had to beat par to win; and when I hear someone criticized for cracking at the finish, I always think of the query Grantland Rice propounded at Scioto—whether it is better to blow up in the third round or the fourth. Every player has his bad patches in any seventy-two-hole journey. It is mainly a question of who averages up best over the entire route, and that, I think, is the feature the winner remembers and the field forgets.

  When we begin to think in terms of the English editorial I have referred to, we must see the importance of each stroke, whether it be drive, approach, or putt; and we ought to see also that in a medal round to hole a long putt for a six is just as helpful as if it were for a three. It is every shot that counts.

  In defining the difference between the great and the near-great, J. H. Taylor pointed out a lesson for every golfer. He was not merely explaining why some fine golfers win championships and others equally fine do not. He was telling you why you missed that easy pitch to the fourth green yesterday and why, after you had missed your second shot to the eighth, you took a seven instead of the five you should have had if you had played sensibly. All of us, from duffers to champions, would do better if we would play each stroke as a thing to itself.

  It is difficult for a person who has not been mixed up in these things to understand what it means to play a competitive round against opponents who cannot be seen. In an Open Championship, one’s imagination runs riot. A burst of applause or a cheer from a distant part of the course is always interpreted as a blow from some close pursuer, when it may mean no more than that some obscure competitor has holed a chip shot while another player’s waiting gallery happened to be watching. It may not mean a thing, and even if it does, it can’t be helped. But it is difficult to view it that way; one always feels that he is running from something without knowing exactly what nor where it is.

  I used to feel that although I might make mistakes, others would not. I remember looking at the scoreboard before the last round of the 1920 Open, my first, and deciding that I must do a 69 at the most to have a chance. Actually, a 73 would have tied. I had some such lesson each year until I finally decided that the best of them made mistakes just as I did.

  The advice Harry Vardon is supposed to have given, to keep on hitting the ball no matter what happens, is the best in the long run. It is useless to attempt to guess what someone else may do, and worse than useless to set a score for yourself to play for. A brilliant round or a string of birdies will not always win a championship. The man who can put together four good rounds is the man to watch.

  No man can expect to win at every start. Golf is not a game where such a thing is possible. So the plan should be to play one’s own game as well as possible and let the rumors and cheers fly as thick as they will.

  The best competitive golfers are, I think, the distrustful and timorous kind, who are always expecting something terrible to happen—pessimistic fellows who are quite certain when they come upon the green that the ball farthest from the hole is theirs. This kind of player never takes anything for granted and cannot be lulled into complacency by a successful run over a few holes. The most dangerous spot, where the cords of concentration are most likely to snap, comes while everything is going smoothly; when the hold upon concentration is a bit weak anyway, there is nothing like prosperity to sever the connection.

  Over the Hill Course of Augusta Country Club in the second round of a tournament once, I got off to a shaky start. After collecting two 5’s on the first two holes, the ball started rolling for me. The two strokes lost to par on the first two came back at the seventh and eighth; an additional one was gained at the eleventh, and another at the thirteenth, so that on the sixteenth tee I had par left for a 70. I had not made a costly mistake since the second hole and had left the difficult part of the course behind. Each of the last three holes was of drive-and-pitch length, probably the easiest stretch on the entire course.

  Yet, although I did not realize it at the time, I allowed my attitude toward the rest of the round to become just what it should never have been. Seventy was good enough, I thought, and there was absolutely no danger of slipping a stroke on these last three holes. For me, the round was over; I had merely to go through the simple formality of holing out on 16, 17, and 18.

  If I had been intent on picking up further strokes against par, as I should have been, I should have been far better off. If the finishing holes were such easy fours, why did I not attack them on the basis of threes? But I did not. I teed my ball on the sixteenth tee, addressed it carelessly, without even one look at the fairway, and hit a perfectly straight shot over the roadway out of bounds,
and this too when confronted by one of the widest fairways of the course. The penalty being stroke and distance, I had thrown away two precious shots. That shocked me into consciousness again, and I called myself every kind of a fool I could think of, but that helped little toward getting the strokes back.

  One shot carelessly played can lead to a lot of grief. I think a careless shot invariably costs more than a bad shot painstakingly played, for it leaves the morale in a state of disorder. It is easy to accept mistakes when we know that they could not have been avoided; we realize that many shots must be less than perfect, no matter how hard we try. But when we actually throw away strokes without rhyme or reason, it is pretty hard to accept the penalty philosophically, and to attack the next shot in the proper frame of mind.

  I once heard of a man who, playing in the final of a club championship, had won his match on the last green after being two down and three to play. To accomplish this, he had played the last three holes in 5-4-5 against a par of 4-3-4. After the match, he had been congratulated most heartily upon his magnificent victory—snatching victory from defeat by a courageous finish, and all that.

  Some weeks later during the same season this same man, over the same course, had reached the final of an invitation tournament. This time, instead of two down and three to play, he had found himself one up with three to play. He played the last three holes in par, 4-3-4, a stroke a hole better than on the previous occasion, yet this time he lost on the last green. Where his 5-4-5 had made him a hero, his 4-3-4 left him in shame, a creature of no backbone who faltered under the fire of competition.

  And so it goes in golf. I have for this very reason an unspeakable aversion for the word “guts” as it is so often used in describing an attribute of a golfer. Not only has the ability to finish well, or to play golf at all for that matter, nothing in the world to do with physical courage, but it will be found that sensational recoveries and tragic failures are almost always accomplished by the cooperation of both sides.

  3 CONSISTENCY

  Everyone who has played golf, however well or badly, has found how impossible it is to hold his best form, or anything like it, for any length of time. A chart of a player’s golfing fortunes over an extended period would exhibit a series of peaks and depressions, with the peaks very sharp, the downward curves precipitate, and the up slopes long and arduous. There is always a long struggle, painfully won, from the bottom of each valley to the top of the hill, and then, after a brief travel along the crest, the touch or feel that was so hard to find vanishes in an instant and back we go to the bottom.

  There are two real reasons why absolute consistency is so rare in golf, and an appreciation of them will show something of what the golfer’s problem is and will give him a chance to tackle it with his eyes open. The only two things that will ever enable him to smooth out the curve of his game chart are, first, a thorough understanding of the fundamentals of the swing, and, second, an intimate and unprejudiced acquaintance with his own faults and tendencies to fault.

  A golfer must play by feel, and I know that I am not the only person who has found that no feel or conception, or idea, will work perfectly for very long. In other words, there is no one movement, or sequence of movements amenable to control, that being controlled, will continue indefinitely to produce satisfactory results. It is not possible to think through the entire swing when playing each shot. Sometimes by remembering to start the downstroke by shifting and turning the hips, highly satisfactory results may be obtained. While this continues, we are enjoying one of the peaks of our chart. But soon, either because we begin to exaggerate this one thing, or forget entirely about something else, the whole thing goes wrong and we have to begin over again. Again, we set out to find another thought that will set things right. This is the time when we need our understanding of the swing, for without this we shall be groping in absolute darkness.

  The other reason why it is so hard to hold to form arises from the insidious nature of some of the faults that can creep into a golf swing without the player himself becoming aware of them. It has never been possible for me to think of more than two or three details of the swing and still hit the ball correctly. If more than that number have to be handled, I simply must play badly until by patient work and practice I can reduce the parts that have to be controlled. The two or three are not always the same; sometimes a man’s swing will be functioning so well that he need worry about nothing; then, of course, on those rare occasions, the game is a simple thing.

  But because we have not the capacity to think of everything while attention is directed elsewhere, a hundred little things can go wrong. Every year I played golf, I discovered more and more ways to miss shots, obscure and yet important mistakes I had never dreamed of making.

  One important reason for the uncertainty of golf is that it is played over ground that in contour remains almost as nature shaped it. Hills and valleys, small mounds and undulations, deflect the ball this way or that. Two balls striking within a foot of the same place may finish yards apart—one in a bunker, the other near the hole.

  One is inclined to overlook the times when a few feet more or less meant a difference of several strokes. When a ball stops a few inches short of a hazard, we seldom stop to think how lucky it was that it failed to roll in. Things of that kind occur on almost every hole of the course. They are regarded as merely parts of the game. It usually requires something almost startling to awake us to a full appreciation of the part actually played by the breaks of the game.

  The first National Open Championship I won was saved for me by my ball taking a bound toward the hole instead of away from it, as it might well have done. Playing the sixteenth hole at Inwood in the last round of the championship of 1923, I was in the lead, but strokes were quite precious. After a good drive, I elected to play a number three iron to the green, which was protected by bunkers and mounds on either side, leaving a narrow opening in front. I must have felt the strain, for I wheeled the shot off to the left of the green, barely missing the bunker on that side, and watched it scamper into the roadway out of bounds. That meant the loss of stroke and distance, so I was playing 4 from the fairway.

  Severely shaken by the mishap, I came very close to duplicating on the next shot the mistake that had cost me dearly on the first try. I remember wondering, as I watched the ball in the air, what I should do if that one, too, should go out of bounds. The ball came down on the side of the mound at the front of the green and, bounding almost at right angles, came to rest not over ten feet from the hole. I made the putt and so escaped with a 5 that ought to have been at least a 7. When I took 6 at the last hole, I was even more grateful for the lucky bound that enabled me to tie Bobby Cruickshank and remain with a chance for the championship.

  When a fine drive goes sailing down the middle of the fairway, it is reasonable to expect that it will find at least a reasonably good lie. But when a wild shot goes off into the woods or rough, it is not likely to find an agreeable resting place.

  When Walter Hagen and Leo Diegel came to the third tee on the number four course at Olympia Fields one afternoon, they were all even after thirty-eight holes of play. They were playing a semifinal match in the P.G.A. Championship. Diegel got away a fine drive down the narrow fairway. The course was fast, and he was left with a fairly easy second. Hagen, on the other hand, hit one of his wildest slices over a clump of trees and into what everyone knew was deep rough. Apparently, that ended the thing so far as Hagen was concerned. The situation of the green was such that a shot from the position of Hagen’s ball would be almost impossible if it were found in long grass.

  Most of the gallery scampered over the hill, anxious to see what Hagen could do in the way of extricating himself from a bad situation. But on arriving there, they found that Hagen was by no means out of the match yet, for instead of long grass, his ball had found a perfect piece of turf in a nursery kept to supply patches for the greens.

  A fine iron shot put him on the green in 2 and the hole was hal
ved in 4. Diegel was shaken by the surprise of that half and topped his drive on the next hole. There was no nursery waiting for him, so Hagen won the match.

  Whatever may be a player’s skill, he must have luck to win a championship of any kind—at least, he must have no bad luck; golf is still a game, rather than a science, and a game it is likely to remain. Possibly the feature of uncertainty is the chief reason for its popularity among players and spectators alike. One can never tell when the thrills will come thick and fast.

  In seeking an explanation of the startling things that happen, one must appreciate that golf is a game requiring perfect coordination between mind and muscle—at least to the extent that a harassed mind will not prevent the muscles from performing according to long-established habit—and that in any field the margin enjoyed by any one of at least ten players can be only the difference in being on form or slightly off.

  If any proof is needed that these sudden collapses are caused by the interference of fear and anxiety, numbers of instances can be cited in which players apparently out of the running, and so, relieved of the strain and the overwhelming responsibility, have gone back to playing free and easy golf and won championships. It is a fact that the winner of an important championship rarely starts out in the lead, holding it straight through to the finish without once being overhauled. Time after time, it has happened that the ultimate winner has begun his last round two, three, or four strokes behind the leader, and often playing early and almost unattended, has posted a low finishing round and a total score the others could shoot at in vain.