Memories of The Great and The Good (23 page)

So the view of Jones as the impotent puppet king of a cabal of CEOs is both melodramatic and quite wrong. In the beginning, Jones and Roberts wrote to hundreds of friends, acquaintances and strangers “to buy a share of the club” but recruited only a minuscule membership: a hundred dollars a head was hard to come by in the pit of the Depression. Incidentally, the slur also blandly ignores the deepening agony of Jones's illness throughout the last twenty years of his attendance at “his” tournament. (His private view of the tycoon's preserve that Augusta was to become was never, I believe, vouchsafed to his friends, but it was after a hearty get-together of board chairmen, celebrated in a photo opportunity more theirs than his, that he confided ruefully: “They say I love people. I don't. I love a few people in small doses.”)

The second charge is more familiar and these days has become inevitable when a young author reacts to warm praise of an old southerner. It is the charge of “racism.” This is so pretentiously silly that I have to swallow hard to choose to meet it. It is the old fallacy, which every generation is subject to, of judging a man outside his time and place. Franklin Roosevelt now, I imagine, is thought in retrospect to have had a very callous streak since he never protested the separation of the races. Many shocked readers of this piece would have felt the same indifference if they had been born a half century earlier. I know. I was there. During my first two years in America, I was curious about, but not outraged by, the social status of the Negroes. In my most enlightened moments I should have thought of them as an aberration in an otherwise admirable system. The Negro was not yet a crusade, even among bloodshot liberals.

I look back on the southerners I knew and admired. I was lucky to have traveled far and wide in the South in the 1930s and 1940s, and I had many friends in many southern places. Jones belonged to those fine ones who were incapable of condescending to a black or being ever less than conscious of their lowly status. When things went wrong for their servants—sickness, debt, delinquency—the family took anxious care of them, of its own. By contrast, we in the North hired daily help in good conscience and hoped they stayed well. Their private afflictions were their own. The northern Negro might be permitted more public chutzpah than his southern brother, but the North took it out in tuberculosis.

For myself, I can now say simply that in my life I can count four human beings who radiated simple goodness: my father; a Franciscan priest; a university professor; and Robert Tyre Jones Jr. Maybe “radiated” is too strong a word, for one striking thing about good human beings is their gift for not being striking. Jones had an instinct for noticing, and attending to, the shy one in any bubbling company. His capacity for shifting the spotlight away from himself was remarkable even in the one performance where you would expect him to be authoritative: in the act of teaching golf. In those precious film shorts he made for the Warner brothers, in which a lesson in the use of the brassie or mashie is tagged on to a ludicrous plot about a golf widow or other domestic strain, he never says “you must do this …” or “it is essential to do that.” He is careful always to say: “I've found that if I move the ball an inch or so …” and “perhaps if you tried … it works well with some people.”

The last indelible memory of him, for those who had the luck to be in St. Andrews in the late autumn of 1958, was his acceptance of the freedom of the city. The Provost was careful to say that he was being saluted not only as “the first golfer of this age … but as a man of courage and character.” In response, Jones put aside the notes he had painfully written out and spoke freely, first of the Old Course, which had enraged the nineteen-year-old and come to enchant the man; then he talked with the slightest tremor of the curious lasting friendship he had acquired for a city and a people “who have a sensitivity and an ability to extend cordiality in ingenious ways.”

He hobbled off to his electric golf cart and began to propel it down the center aisle, as the audience stirred, picked up the cue of a tentative voice, and rose to sing “Will Ye No' Come Back Again?” The start of the hobble and the fact of the cart were enough to remind them that he never would. It was a moment of suddenly shared emotion that upset the most cynical. Herbert Warren Wind remarked: “It was ten minutes before many who attended were able to speak with a tranquil voice.” During those minutes, he seemed to one onlooker to qualify for Frederick Buechner's definition of goodness as “valor and unnatural virtue.”

What we are left with in the end is a forever young, good-looking southerner, an impeccably courteous and decent man with a private ironical view of life who, to the great good fortune of people who saw him, happened to play the great game with more magic and more grace than anyone before or since.