Below is an excerpt from a book I am writing called Never Despair: Trials and Triumphs of Golf’s Great Champions.
In 1927 the British Open was played over the Old Course at St. Andrews, never one of Harry Vardon’s favorite venues. Bobby Jones won that year, with a record score of 285. “What a dramatic little episode that must have been on the third green at St. Andrews,” recorded the Literary Digest,
when Bobby Jones, with his retinue of 5,000 hero worshippers, met old Harry Vardon, who was playing the homeward nine. The correspondent draws a graphic picture of Vardon, conspicuous for his loneliness, swallowed up the milling mob which swarmed in Jones’s wake. What thoughts must have burned through Vardon’s brain as he stood…above his ball, arms outstretched to fend off the rabble which threatened to trample him.
Perhaps Harry recalled the day at Prestwick in 1914, when the thundering herd cheered him to his 6th Open championship. Vardon knew his time had passed, and when he looked at Jones, he realized here “was one so young and yet who had the game at his finger tips,” innately knowing that “he would be one of the very best golfers ever seen.” This precocious Jones boy was the vanguard of change, noted the article:
The old order changeth, yielding place to new. Sport can be mercilessly cruel. There is pathos in the picture of Vardon struggling to save his ball as the man-pack surges around the latest Caesar. Few in that thrill-drugged crowd noticed Harry Vardon. Fewer still recognized him if they saw him. Some day even Bobby Jones will know that stilly quiet, the silence that roars with the echoes of vanished ghosts.