AMATEUR SPIRIT

By the time Bobby Jones arrived in St Andrews for the British Amateur Championship in 1930 he was already nicknamed by locals the “Unofficial King of Scotland”. The Scots took him in as one of their own when he successfully defended his title in The [British] Open on the Old Course in 1927 (having first won at Royal Lytham in 1926), posting a course record 68 in the process.

Jones set out in 1930 to achieve his Grand Slam of the British Amateur and Open and the U.S. Amateur and Open titles, and the first of the four championships to play was the British Amateur, the only one of the four trophies he had never raised and the one Jones rated as hardest to win.

It was notoriously difficult to claim the Amateur title as the champion had to win eight match play, knock-out matches. One slip and you’d be cutting a lonesome figure on the station platform by dusk. In the fourth round in 1930 Jones came up against the defending champion, Englishman Cyril Tolley, and on the 18th Tolley missed a 12-foot putt that would have sent Jones packing. His entire bid for what would be called the “Impregnable Quadrilateral” came within an inch of collapsing. So fine are the margins in golf. Jones won at the first extra hole and said afterwards he felt as if the pair had battled “with broadswords”.

Jones eventually came up against another Englishman in the final, Roger Wethered, the Amateur champ of 1923 and runner-up in 1928, but in a 36-hole final at this time, with the form Jones was in, he was virtually invincible. He won by what the Brits still call a “dog licence”, 7 & 6 (the cost of a dog licence, in pre-decimalized Sterling, was seven shillings and six pence), and the Scottish crowd carried him up to the 18th green in celebration. An estimated 15,000 people swarmed around their hero.

Championship organizers the R&A had booked a brass band to play for the trophy presentation, but such was the pandemonium in front of the clubhouse that the band never played a note.

Jones remains the last golfer to have won both The [British] Open and the British Amateur titles.