In late June, 1930, a few days after he had captured the British Open Championship after previously winning the British Amateur, Bobby Jones sailed for home. A sizable delegation of his friends from Atlanta met his boat as it made its way into New York harbor. The metropolis joined them in a roaring welcome to the double champion as Mayor Walker led the auto-cade through the ticker tape and down the gulches of lower Manhattan. Bob had himself a brief "rest" and then it was time to head for Minneapolis and the Interlachen Country Club, venue that year of the United States Open.
Everyone now was talking excitedly about the prospect of a Grand Slam. If only Bob could get by the Open, so went the consensus, the U.S. Amateur (scheduled for Merion in late September) would be comparative duck soup. As for Jones, the awareness that he had a fairly good chance of winning all four titles in one year had, of course, now entered his mind, along with many ancient considerations. Try to fulfill your own legitimate ambitions and, if you are an athletic hero, before you know it you are public property and everything becomes painfully complicated. What you like and what you don't like, what you want to do and what you have no desire to do, become inextricably entangledâ??and you can't have one without the other. If you were Jones, you certainly wanted to win the U.S. Open, and if you won, as you knew, you would get both closer to and farther from the things that really mattered to you. And at what a price! Late one afternoon during that Open, O. B. Keeler of the Atlanta Journal, Bob's devoted Boswell, followed him into the lockerroom at the conclusion of his round. It had been steaming out on the course, the temperature over 100, the humidity wickedly enervating. Bobâ??he once lost 18 pounds during the course of a tournamentâ??sat down in a lump on a lockerroom bench and started to unknot his tie. He could make no headway with it. Sweat had made it an unmanageable soaking mass. O. B. finally got hold of a knife and cut the tie off. "When are you going to quit this?" he said to the spent young man of 28. "Pretty soon, I thinkâ??and hope," Jones replied limply. "There's no game worth this darned foolishness."
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