Bobby Jones

Bobby Jones was a golfer, born on March 17, 1902 at Atlanta in Georgia, and the founder and co-designer of Augusta National Golf Club. His full name was Robert Tyre Jones Jr. He never turned professional and played on as an amateur throughout. He won the U.S. Open in 1923, 1926, 1929 and 1930 and the Open Championship in 1926, 1927 and 1930, took the U.S. Amateur five times and the Amateur Championship once, thirteen wins in all in the events then counted as majors. In 1930 he won all four of them in a single year, the grand slam, and in the same year, at the age of 28, he withdrew from competition.

Alongside his golf he kept up his studies, taking a degree in mechanical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and another in English literature at Harvard University. He later read law at Emory University, passed the Georgia bar and practised as a lawyer in Atlanta. In the Second World War he served as an officer in the United States Army Air Forces. In 1958 he was made a freeman of the burgh of St Andrews in Scotland, and in 1974 he was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame. He died at Atlanta on December 18, 1971.

His great work as a designer is Augusta National Golf Club at Augusta in Georgia. After his retirement Jones founded the club together with Clifford Roberts and, on land that had been a plant nursery, laid out the course with Alister MacKenzie. Construction began in 1932 and the course opened in January 1933, and from 1934 it has staged the tournament that came to be known as the Masters. After the Second World War he worked on Peachtree Golf Club, in his own Atlanta, together with the golf course architect Robert Trent Jones Sr. It was this Robert Trent Jones Sr. who, at Jones’s request, also remodelled the 11th and 16th holes at Augusta National. The two men shared a surname, but they were not related.

See the other golf course architects here.