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seven went down on the card and he later told Darwin that it was the
most inexcusable hole he had ever played, adding: “An old man with a
croquet mallet could have got down in two. I will play that hole
over a thousand times in my dreams”. He gritted his teeth and ground
out a 75, then had a long wait to see if anyone would catch him. No
one did and, although he had played by his standards, “sloppy golf”,
he won by two shots. That year he took the four tournaments that
made up the Grand Slam of those days-the British and US Amateur and
Open titles, then retired – at the age of twenty-eight! Perhaps we
can understand why when we consider how the strain spoiled his
enjoyment of the game. He used to say that there were two kinds of
golf – golf and tournament golf - and his feelings were revealed in
his remarks to reporters during that anxious wait in the Hoylake
clubhouse: -
“Golf championships are no fun, even when you win. In that last
round it was simply a matter of getting home as best I could”.
Bernard Darwin said: - “He was utterly exhausted and had to hold his
glass in two hands lest the good liquor be spilt. All he would say
was that he would never, never do it again.” Jones revealed how he
overcame the jitters after the eighth hole debacle: - “I kept in
mind Harry Vardon’s advice that, no matter what happens, you must
keep hitting the ball”. Amen to that.
It was while I was at Bridgnorth that one of the biggest changes in
golf took place – the legalisation of steel shafts and I was faced
with the problem of fitting the new shafts into the old hickory
shafted irons. This was achieved with the use of adapters made of
aluminium, which were shaped like the bottom of a hickory shaft.
This little gadget had to be filed until it fitted the hosel; then
the steel shaft was driven through the hole in the adapter until it
was a tight fit. It was then riveted in the same manor as a
hickory shaft and the adapter filed down and smoothed to the size of
the hosel. Not very pretty, but it sufficed until heads to fit the
steel shafts became available. Both shafts and iron heads were
rather crude, and bore little resemblance to the clubs we know
today. Woods were easier to adapt as they required a smaller bore,
but re-shafting a set of hickories was a lengthy procedure.
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