In 1916, Birmingham’s famous statue of Vulcan — the Roman god of the fire — had stood over the city for more than a decade. By the end of that summer, young Bobby Jones was ascending to godhood himself — and that ascent began in Birmingham.
Young Bobby Jones, pictured in September 1916 in the Atlanta Constitution ahead of his U.S. Amateur quarterfinals match, less than three weeks after his win at the Birmingham Invitational.
Eleven weeks before the 14-year-old Jones served notice to the world at the 1916 U.S. Amateur, Jones jumpstarted his summer with a thrilling win in the annual Birmingham Invitational, at what is now Highland Park Golf Course. Some 300 fans walked along, and The Montgomery Advertiser called Jones’ 2-up win “one of the greatest matches ever played in Birmingham.”
The course — still Birmingham Country Club in those days, before the club moved outside the city limits in 1926 — was not unfamiliar to Jones, despite his youth. The year prior, Jones had won the event during a year in which he established himself regionally as a golfing sensation with wins in Birmingham, at Druid Hills, and at East Lake. But national renown came a year later — and before that, a return trip to Birmingham for the phenom known in newspapers as “Little Bob” (his father, Robert T. Jones, Sr., was also an elite regional golfer and enjoyed the label “Big Bob”).
Highland Park sits on a plot of land that still plays rollicking, but would have been perfect for golf in the era when the course was built: hilly and naturally rolling, with steep drop-offs here and there, all of which required little earthmoving — which was convenient, since large equipment still was unavailable when the course opened with nine holes in 1903. Three years later, nine more holes were added. By the time Jones arrived in 1915 and 1916, Birmingham Country Club was an epicenter of southern golf. To have seen Jones — just coming into his power — roll his ball along that hilly terrain with the low flights that the era’s hickory-shafted clubs produced (Highland Park still hosts a yearly hickory event) must have been astonishing.
More astonishing, though, was Jones’ level of play. In an era when scores in the 80s were still nothing to sneeze at (at East Lake in 1915, Jones medaled with an 82), the 14-year-old Jones shot 70 in his championship match at Birmingham. And it still almost was not good enough.
The Montgomery Advertiser (June 25, 1916).
Jones’ opponent that late June afternoon was more than twice his age: local sensation Jack Allison, 30 years old and destined to die three autumns later on a battlefield in France. The match teed off at 2:45 p.m. and, from the very outset, violently swung back and forth. A pair of opening threes put Jones 2-up after two; but Allison answered, and after a two on the fourth hole, Allison had squared the match. They halved the fifth, then traded the next four holes: Allison, then Jones; Allison again, then Jones again.
Allison carried a 1-up lead to the 13th tee, but Jones’ three won the hole to square the match again. After halving two more holes, Jones birdied the 16th to go back 1-up — his first lead since making the turn. The two matched threes at the 17th, and Jones stood on the 18th tee 1-up — needing only a half to win the match.
And Allison knew it, of course. He must have reached back for something extra off the tee, because what followed was a rarity for either player that day: a mistake. “The match was in doubt,” The Montgomery Advertiser reported the next morning, “until Allison hooked his drive from the eighteenth tee into the trees while Bob Jones had a fairly easy lie on the side of a bunker just above the green.” Jones needed only a five on the last to hold off Allison; he made four, to shoot 70 (Allison finished with a 72). Neither player won a hole with more than par.
For the rest of the summer, Jones did not cool off until the weather did. Jones followed his win in Birmingham with club championship victories at Atlanta Athletic Club and Cherokee Country Club in Knoxville, Tenn. He set a new course record of 68 at East Lake, and he won the Georgia State Golf Association’s first state championship. “In sum,” Stephen R. Lowe wrote in Sir Walter and Mr. Jones, “Little Bob had all but mastered the southern competition.”
In time, the rest of the competition followed. By then, no one was calling him Little Bob anymore.
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