Alexa Stirling

A L E X A S T I R L I NG | I I I

his students, softened around Alexa, her wavy red hair tied in a ponytail and her smiling face littered with freckles. In a brogue he never lost and often enjoyed accentuating, Maiden often said, “If she’d only leave that damned fiddle bide awhile, she’d make a braw player.”

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In the summer of 1908, Alexa, along with a sickly six-year-old Jones and two more children, Perry Adair, who would go on to win two Southern Amateur titles and be a teammate of Jones’ at Georgia Tech, and a local named Frank Meador, played a thrown-together tournament on a few of the high holes on East Lake’s north course. The prize was a small silver cup that Frank’s mother had bought. She owned the boarding house where Jones Father, R.P., a prominent attorney, had rented a couple of rooms (the home still stands just across Alston Drive from the second green at East Lake Golf Club). Mrs. Meador wanted to give the children some activity that didn’t involve firearms, catching snakes or have the potential for drowning.

At the end of play, however, scandal erupted. Everyone knew that Alexa had shot the lowest score. But Frank, who was the oldest child and thus put in charge of scorekeeping, couldn’t let a girl win. So, he jiggered the scorecard to give Little Bob a one-shot victory. “I’ll always believe that Alexa won that cup,” Jones wrote many years later. “I took it to bed with me that night. I’ve got 120 cups and vases and 30 medals, but there is one little cup that never fails of being well polished. And I never slept with another one.” Alexa, on the other hand, learned a hard lesson, one she never forgot: life isn’t fair, especially when a girl beats the boys.

She also learned over time what a frightful fit some men can pitch when threatened by a confident woman. During one of their many rounds together, Jones hit a bad shot and let fly a torrent of vulgarities at the exact moment Dr. Stirling wandered out of his house and onto the course. The good doctor, who was the British consul general to Atlanta at that time, stuck an imposing figure with a bushy handlebar mustache,

stiff white collar and homburg hat that made him look seven feet tall, especially to a kid. “Young man,” Dr. Stirling said, the Edinburgh accent thicker than normal, “haven’t you learned better than to use that kind of language around a lady?” Then, putting his arm around his daughter and escorting her off the course, he said to Jones, “She’ll not play with you again until you learn some proper manners.” “Good,” Jones shot back. “A lot of good it does me to play with girls anyway. If I’m going to be a golfer, I’ve got to play with the men.” Alexa would later say of Jones, “He was a handsome boy with a gentle, wry way of smiling, and, except for his bursts of temper on the course, his manners were impeccable.”

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