{"id":460,"date":"2011-04-01T14:16:26","date_gmt":"2011-04-01T21:16:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tgpnolan.com\/?p=460"},"modified":"2013-05-10T02:45:19","modified_gmt":"2013-05-10T09:45:19","slug":"no-such-person-as-bobby-jones","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/about-the-gameessays\/460\/no-such-person-as-bobby-jones","title":{"rendered":"No Such Person as Bobby Jones"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Robert Tyre Jones<\/p><\/div>\n

Come Masters weekend, golf\u2019s rank and file fans will be joined by millions of drop-bys.\u00a0 They will look for a spare chair in the living room and ask who\u2019s winning, what an eagle is, why anyone would wear that ridiculous get-up.\u00a0 But most simply absorb the beauty of the golf course, and as they do, they fall silent and grow attentive.\u00a0 A very few of them have little stories they can tell.<\/p>\n

Among the kibbitzers is my ex-father-in-law.\u00a0 Never a golfer, he is however, a Georgia native, Atlanta born and bred.\u00a0 In the \u201860s, as the South agonized its way through still more of the seemingly endless toils of its past, Atlanta billed itself as \u201cthe city too busy to hate.\u201d\u00a0 It was plausible.\u00a0 Coca Cola and IBM were as much institutions as blue ribbon businesses, and segregation had no place in their business models.\u00a0 Their names alone gave Atlanta a worldly aura, and in time, a skyline matched by no city in the South.<\/p>\n

A booster mentality obtained.\u00a0 Business was good.\u00a0 Upward mobility was real.\u00a0 Everything was about moving forward.\u00a0 There was at that time no more important or powerful institution in the city of Atlanta than the Chamber of Commerce.\u00a0 C of C luncheons brought the city\u2019s business elite to table with its up-and-comers, and they were not to be missed.<\/p>\n

Yet for all of its sky-is-the-limit enthusiasm, Atlanta was in some respects as much a part of the Old South as any nook of the Confederacy.\u00a0 Courtesy bordering on courtliness was still the way people treated one another.\u00a0 Even as it looked forward, Atlanta was a city that felt the tug of its past.<\/p>\n

My father-in-law worked for Atlanta <\/em>magazine, which did more than support the city\u2019s positive outlook: it helped articulate, focus and energize it.\u00a0 The Chamber\u2019s events were a natural for him to attend. \u00a0And that was how he came to be riding in an elevator one noon when the doors opened and admitted, in the glittering cage of a wheelchair, a slight man, plainly withered by whatever wasting disease he suffered from.<\/p>\n

What struck my father-in-law was the man\u2019s self-possession.\u00a0 While he was obviously pained by how much space his wheelchair used, he didn\u2019t apologize for it.\u00a0 No need.\u00a0 The atmosphere in the elevator had turned electric.\u00a0 Everyone knew who he was.\u00a0 When he was rolled into the dining room, there was a slight murmur. Atlanta\u2019s elite paid respects not by stopping over to gladhand, but by not stopping over to gladhand.\u00a0 The volume of conversation in the room dropped for the balance of the event.<\/p>\n

That was all.\u00a0 But in a room full of wealth and ambition, the kind of place most likely to pay no heed to its past, he was the center of attention. \u00a0If one thought about it, he was hard to get a handle on. \u00a0The magnificent golfer, of course. \u00a0But what about the engineering degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology, the English degree from Harvard, the JD from Emory? \u00a0What kind of mind enquired into such varied disciplines with such obvious command? \u00a0And there was his fate: the athlete denied the use of his body, for the spinal disease he contracted did just that, and would kill him before his time. \u00a0He was hard to get at. \u00a0In a roomful of his native Atlanta’s most elite strivers, gravitas attached to the man\u00a0who had no great fortune, ran no great company, whose great deeds were a generation old.<\/p>\n

Hearing this years later, I wondered what my father-in-law had said upon that chance encounter with Bobby Jones. \u00a0A simple hello?\u00a0 A handshake and a word or two?<\/p>\n

He was silent for a bit, and then he said: \u201cNo. \u00a0There was no such person as Bobby Jones. \u00a0All anybody in Georgia knew was Mr. Jones. \u00a0I heard him called Bob Jones sometimes, and that was borderline acceptable coming from people who new him well. \u00a0That implied a familiarity. \u00a0But to me, and most folks, he was Mr. Jones.\u00a0 Pure and simple.\u201d<\/p>\n

I imagine it is difficult to lose your personhood and become an icon, and that is exactly what happened to Mr. Jones.\u00a0 Who ever managed it better?\u00a0 He was, in one sense, lucky, because he put his gifts to work in yet another field, designing Augusta National, which all at once deflected attention from the man, and came to represent him.\u00a0 He left behind not only his legacy as a player, but one of golf\u2019s most sublime golf courses, and a tournament that squeezes the breath out of the best players in world.<\/p>\n

People from around the globe will tune in for the theater that the old peach orchard in Augusta produces every April.\u00a0 And Georgia will pay its respects to Mr. Jones in the way it always has: not by presuming a false familiarity with the man, but by glorying in his most enduring achievement.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Come Masters weekend, golf\u2019s rank and file fans will be joined by millions of drop-bys.\u00a0 They will look for a… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1245],"tags":[1001,159],"class_list":["post-460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-about-the-gameessays","tag-bobby-jones","tag-augusta-national"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/29"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=460"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":529,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/460\/revisions\/529"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=460"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=460"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theaposition.com\/tgpnolan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=460"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}