The Immortal Bobby
Chapter One
East Lake Days
Bobby Jones played his first competitive game of golf when he was
six years old and lost. They gave him the trophy anyway.
Mary Bell Meador, who owned the boardinghouse where Robert
P. Jones had rented rooms for the summer, proposed the match when
she saw how much her young son Frank enjoyed playing with Jones's
son, a frail but game boy they called Little Bob.
The Meador boardinghouse was across from the tenth fairway of
the East Lake Country Club, a golf course that had recently been
built by the Atlanta Athletic Club in the rolling countryside six miles
outside the city limits of Atlanta. During General George Sherman's
march to the sea near the end of the Civil War, one of his generals,
John Schofield, had spent a night in a house on the grounds while his
troops had slept in the open on what would later become East Lake's
fairways.
The recent extension of the municipal streetcar line had helped
East Lake become a popular vacation destination for Atlanta r ... read full excerpt from The Immortal Bobby: Bobby Jones and the Golden Age of Golf ebook
