The Grand Slam: Bobby Jones, America and the story of golf

(Paperback)

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In the wake of the 1929 stock-market crash, an amateur golfer began a decade of unparalleled achievement, seeming a ray of light in an otherwise depressed America. Bobby Jones won the British Amateur Championship, the British Open, the US Open and the US Amateur Championship. A new phrase was born: The Grand Slam. A modest, sensitive man, a lawyer from a middle-class Atlanta family, Jones had barely survived a sickly childhood, and took up golf at the age of five for health reasons. He made his debut at the US Amateur Championship in 1916 and his genius was recognised by his inspiration, Francis Ouimet. However, he had an ungovernable temper and it wasn't until 1923 that Jones harnessed his talent and eclipsed Ouimet. His health was never good and the strain of completing the Slam exacted a ferocious toll; the US Open, played in July in blazing heat, nearly killed him. Jones fought to keep his fragile condition a secret from a country suffering from the Depression, but at the age of 28, after winning the US Amateur, he retired. His abrupt disappearance at the height of his renown inspired an impenetrable myth, to this day still fiercely protected by family and friends.

Reviews

*'[This book] will be read with pleasure in the afterglow of refreshment at the 19th hole' SPECTATOR *'Mark Frost has come up trumps with this intriguing tale about the life and career of golf's most lauded amateur, Bobby Jones. Frost's tribute to the gre '[Mark Frost's] first book on golf was, darn it, as close to perfection as any author can hope to attain ... [THE GRAND SLAM] is unquestionably the golf book of the year' IRISH TIMES 'The second book, like the second album, is supposed to be the hard one and after the massive success of THE GREATEST GAME EVER PLAYED critics doubted Frost's ability to pull it off again. He has in this wonderful bio of Bobby Jones, the first man to lay successful siege to the Impregnable Quadrilateral (more prosaically, the Grand Slam). Weaving social and personal history and writing in that picture-evoking, limpid style and cinematographic manner that becomes the former writer/producer of Hill Street Blues and Twin Peaks, Frost evokes the man and the magic moment. Top Drawer!' IRISH INDEPENDENT, Top 20 Sports Books of 2004 'Fascinating ... superb' GOLF WEEKLY

Author Bio

Mark Frost is the author of THE GREATEST GAME EVER PLAYED, THE LIST OF SEVEN, THE SIX MESSIAHS and BEFORE I WAKE. He has written and produced several television series, including Hill Street Blues and Twin Peaks.