Club Times: March/April

2 2 the Lean Years

g o l f

Authored by: Robert Tyre Jones IV, Psy.D.

of others. Because it is my honest conviction that you are the best golfer in the world.” If Hagen and Keeler were convinced of his greatness, Bub didn’t share their enthusiasm. He was feeling the unrelenting pressure that accompanies top-level tournament golf and he feared that the pressure was too much for him. After the 1921 season, he was not only emotionally drained, but he was also in terrible physical pain from varicose veins in his left leg. Repairing these would require four painful surgeries in the winter of 1922. Bub’s appearances in “The Big Show” in 1922 would be in the United States Open and Amateur championships. That July, the Open was played at Skokie Country Club in Glencoe, Illinois, a north shore suburb of Chicago. After shooting 74-72-70 in the first three rounds, Bub confidently believed that a 68 in the final round should do the trick. Gene Sarazen had other ideas. Firing a 68 of his own in the third round, Sarazen had played himself into contention. “It was a stiff jolt,” Bub would write later, “as I wasn’t going well enough to keep faith with the 68 I had wanted for my own fourth round; indeed, I was out in 36 and now had to do another 36 to tie Gene.” A disappointing par at the seventy-first hole sealed his fate and he tied for second. “Here’s where the iron certitude of medal competition bears down on you. You know what you have to do, in that last round. It is not one man whom you can see, and who may make a mistake at any moment, with whom you are battling. It is an iron score, something already in the book.”

On the train out of Chicago, Sarazen held the trophy proudly. He turned to Bub and said, “Well, Bob, you want to play me for this?” “No, Gene,” Bub said, probably through somewhat clenched teeth, “You won it fair and square.” In September, the Amateur championship returned to The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts. Jess Sweetser defeated Bub in the semi-final round, 8&7. It was the worst defeat that he would ever suffer in that championship. “So that was 1922, when I was 20 years old, and I had now played in eleven national championships, amateur and open, and still was outside…[T]here was that increasing insistence – a great golfer, but it’s time he won something; a great golfer, but he can’t win! I was now wondering what was the matter. If I was really a great golfer – what was the matter? Or was I a great golfer? I could hit the shots well: I couldn’t help knowing that. But was I a golfer, or only one of those hapless mechanical excellencies known as a great shot-maker, who cannot connect the great shots in sufficient numbers to win anything?” Although he would have his questions answered within a year, by the end of 1922, Bobby Jones was deeply discouraged and wondering if the effort was worth the cost.