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OUT of the rough |
Down the Fairway
If you’ve never read “Down the Fairway” by Bobby Jones and O.B. Keeler, you have one of golf’s greatest pleasures still ahead of you. It will exceed your wildest expectations in evoking a distant time and place, and will make you fall in love with golf all over again just as decidedly as when you first effortlessly launched a beautiful shot and painted it against the sky.
Imagine stopping in the middle of a brilliant career to begin writing your autobiography at the age of 24. Imagine at 24 having enough to say about your life to firmly grasp and hold the reader’s imagination.
Jones stopped in the very center of his great and successful run at history to start writing his masterpiece in 1926, the year he became the first man to win the U.S. and British Opens in the same season. Minton, Balch and Co. published the private first printing of 300 copies of “Down the Fairway” in 1927, and it has become the most valuable book on golf published in the 20th century in both price and content. It’s also the best golf book ever written. If you could only read one golf book, this is the one. It’s unheard of for a great player to write of his successes in midstream and quite rare for a player to actually do all of the writing.
Jones was a genius. He was the original child prodigy — he had the same swing at 6 as he did at 26. He had a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Georgia Tech, a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Harvard and later passed the Georgia bar exam before finishing law school. Incidentally, while at Harvard as the reigning U.S. Open Champion in 1923, he was ineligible for the golf team because he had already matriculated from Georgia Tech. He asked and agreed to become its assistant manager (the team already had a manager) to earn the crimson H for his sweater.
He was not much of an assistant manager — he drank the team’s supply of corn whiskey on an overnight ride to a tournament when both the golf clubs and whiskey were placed in his care.
“Down the Fairway” tells the compelling story of the most golden of Golden Age heroes. He won club championships at 13 and invitationals and the Georgia Amateur at 14 before competing at Merion in the U.S. Amateur, where he was the sensation of the championship.
Jones was 21 before he won his first of the 13 major championships with which he retired. “Down the Fairway” is about so many things. It’s about falling in love with golf, it’s about the thrill of great shots, it’s about the winning and losing of championships. You meet the great players of the time: Sarazen, Vardon, Ouimet and Hagen. You’re surprised to learn Jones had issues with his temper and nearly lost the privilege of playing in USGA competitions because of it. Later, the USGA’s highest honor to bestow on a golfer would be the Bob Jones Award for sportsmanship and character.
Jones thought he would never have a season to compare with 1926. Maybe that’s why he wrote it all down then. Of course, he had more than twice as great a season when he won all four majors in 1930. Read all about that in “Bobby Jones on Golf,” another must-have for your library.
Jones could write as well as he played. Every sentence is worth savoring, and he wrote with self-deprecation and with the insight and restraint of an older, more experienced man. In referring to “Down the Fairway” and Jones, the great historian Herbert Warren Wind opined, “You are not the least surprised that such an engaging, substantial young man grew up into a person of almost Churchillian dimensions — larger than life and at the same time immensely human.”
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