As the U.S. Open returns to Winged Foot this year, no doubt there will be talk of Phil Mickelson’s epic collapse on the final hole in 2006. Yet many forget how 1929 might have marked the end of Bob Jones’s career had he not made a tricky 12-foot putt on that same 18th hole. He’d been six strokes ahead of Al Espinosa with six holes to go. The legendary Grantland Rice wrote that nobody in the enormous gallery would have believed that “any human or inhuman instrument could keep Jones from winning by five or six strokes. But golf is still golf, whether it be for the duffer or the greatest golfer of them all.”
Jones started to falter. A bogie on the 13th wasn’t good, but a triple-bogie 7 on the 15th was disastrous. Espinosa had suffered a triple bogie of his own on the 12th, and seemed to be out of it, but rallied to birdie two of the last three holes and finish at 294. Jones was on the verge of throwing the title away. After pars on the 16th and 17th, he needed one more on the 419-yard finishing hole. Jones “smashed a long drive through the dense masses of humanity fringing the eighteenth fairway,” wrote Alan J. Gould, sports editor for the Associated Press. Jones tugged his second shot left of the green, hole high, but as Rice recounted, it “dribbled half-way down the grassy slope of a steep bank” on the edge of the bunker. “The lie was none too easy and the crowd fairly moaned,” noted Walter Trumbull when the ball came out weakly and stopped 12-feet short of the hole. Alan Gould said “his chances looked slim.”
Jones faced a slick putt with about a foot and a half of break from left to right. His lead squandered, it had to go down to tie Espinosa and force a playoff. “There were thousands struggling and pushing and crowding in to see the final putt,” wrote Grantland Rice. “He knew what it meant to have a championship won by six strokes and then have it thrown away.” Jones got down on one knee to study the line, gnawing nervously on his lip. “Bob was usually a fast putter,” continued Rice. “This time he took a few seconds longer than usual, for in addition to the speed of the fast green he had to decide how big the break was.”
Jimmy Powers reported in the New York Daily News that the sun’s “rays gleamed as they caught the silver of the clubhead’s arc. The glistening white ball, evidently new, rolled over and over.” Rice remembered Jones’s “bronzed face was tense and drawn as the ball rolled on its way.” He watched it with Mike Brady, Winged Foot’s club pro, by his side. “I was on the ground, peering between legs. Mike had a step ladder and was above the mob. ‘He’s short,’ Mike shouted. ‘He missed it, he’s short.’ I lost the ball en route. I picked it up again near the cup. The ball had almost stopped but just an inch from the cup it took another lazy turn, rolled over and disappeared from sight as 10,000 spectators rocked the Winged Foot clubhouse with a roar.”
Moe Dellaporte came to Winged Foot in 1929 as a 14-year-old caddie and was there that day. “Jones’s putt was really something! I was standing on a box so I could see it. The way the crowd roared, golly! I looked up at the men’s upper locker room just before Bobby putted, and saw Al Espinosa looking down. When the ball dropped, Al collapsed in a chair.” Grantland Rice would later say he had “never heard before, or since, the vocal cataclysm that rocked the oaks of Westchester.” He claimed the gallery that final day “was the largest in American golf. There must have been 15,000 or 18,000 stampeding humans who rushed and ran from hole to hole, swarming along the long fairways and completely surrounding the greens.”
Jones had to battle his way through the milling crowd to the clubhouse, a tired look on his face, as USGA president Herbert Ramsey and the marshals carved out a path for him. “The spectators wished to tell Bobby what they thought of him, to pat him on the back, to kiss him,” reported Walter Trumbull, whose grandfather had been a Senator from Illinois and a close friend of Abraham Lincoln. The 36-hole playoff the next day was anti-climactic, as Jones trounced Espinosa by 23 shots. O.B. Keeler believed that if Jones “hadn’t sunk that putt, there wouldn’t have been any Grand Slam in 1930…I think it might have broken him up.” Jones confided to friends that Keeler was probably right. “If I’d missed that putt and lost a tournament already won,” he later told Grantland Rice, “I hate to think of what might have happened to my confidence. And without confidence a golfer is little more than a hacker.”
Jones remembered it “was nice to sink that one. I sure needed it. It was awfully rough going. But, you know, after every year of play, whether I won or lost, I would always look back and think, ‘Why should I punish myself like this over a golf tournament?’” For Jones, it may have also been the beginning of his decision to retire after 1930.
O.B. Keeler claimed that Jones remembered very little about the putt, “except that he knew he had it to tie.” Keeler relied on the account of Al Watrous, who played with Jones that day, to describe the putt. Watrous said it was closer to 14 feet than 12. “A tough, puzzling putt…one of those curling putts, hard enough to make at any time. He stroked the ball beautifully, and the range was gauged so exactly that had the hole been merely a ring on the green the ball must have stopped right in the center. It was just far enough – the true test of steadiness, for anybody in the pinch can bang the hall hard enough to go past the hole. The ball just reached the hole and went in cleanly. It was by far the greatest putt I ever saw, in a pinch.”
Twenty-five years later, at the conclusion of an exhibition match commemorating the anniversary of the event, Jones was on hand to show where the hole had been that final round. A new cup was cut, and the same caddie who tended the flagstick in 1929 was there to hold it again. The four men who played the exhibition, all former U.S. Open champions, took a turn. Tommy Armour went first, missing on the high side. Craig Wood’s putt lacked speed and finished below the hole, as did Gene Sarazen’s. Johnny Farrell came the closest, missing the lip to the left.
USGA executive director Joe Dey then brought out a relic and old friend of Mr. Jones – his “Calamity Jane” putter. It was short (33½ inches) and light (15½ ounces) and the shaft had been cracked by Jones in a fit of temper and repaired. Golf writer Charles Price called it “the worst putter I have ever held in my hands” saying it would have gone begging sitting in a barrel of one-dollar clubs at some pro shop. Claude Harmon, Winged Foot’s club pro, tried the putt twice with the old weapon and missed, as did the others – Sarazen even tried twice. Dey and Homer Johnson, the president of Winged Foot tried and missed. So did 79-year-old Findley Douglas, the 1898 U.S. Amateur champion and the man who, while president of the USGA, handed the U.S. Open and U.S. Amateur trophies to Jones during his Grand Slam year of 1930.
After all these men had failed to hole the putt, Joe Dey asked Jones if he’d like to give it a try. “No thanks,” he replied, a wry smile on his face. “I already made it.” Then, in a self-effacing way, he added gently, “Maybe the hole wasn’t in the right spot today.” Jones knew he made it when it counted, and the moment remains one of the greatest in U.S. Open history.
