The Great War, Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen

The Great War's impact on the twentieth century stretched beyond political and military realms. We see this, for example, in the way the war changed the game of Golf in Europe and America. One sees this change through the careers of two legends, Robert Tyre Jones and Walter Charles Hagen. When the Great War broke out in the fall of 1914, Bobby Jones was only 12 years old, but he would make his debut in a major only two years later in the 1916 U.S. Amateur at Merion, that famous landamark in American golf where Jones would complete his "Grand Slam" in 1930 and Hogan would win the U.S. Open Championship in 1950. In spite of Jones' superior ability, he would not win a major for another 7 years, when finally in 1923 he won the Open at Inwood on Long Island. There are numerous explanations for the drought, not least of which being Jones' internal battles down the stretch. A perhaps less intriguing explanation is that he had fewer chances to win a major because, at various points during the war, majors were cancelled. Most golf courses in Europe lay fallow during the war, as did some in the United States. The reason is that the war required an enormous output of human labor and material production. There was none left for operating courses. Moreover, the war temporarily exhausted societies' inclination toward leisure and recreation.

But Bobby Jones played on in the optimistic spirit that Pop Keeler, his confidante and personal journalist, helped instill in him and which would propel him to greatness. With a lighter tournament schedule, Jones, along with others including his boyhood friend at East Lake Alexa Sterling, volunteered to play in Red Cross exhibition matches in the U.S. and Europe to raise money for humanitarian relief and provide recreational entertainment. These tournaments were a huge success financially as well as measured by the turnout they generated. These Red Cross matches led to a realization that not all golfing elites were clositered well-to-dos preoccupied with self-aggrandizement, but that some devoted themselves to good causes and recreation for its own sake. There is a relationship between Bobby Jones, the Red Cross Matches, and the recognition of Golf as an egalitarian sport. Jones himself was fortunate to have enjoyed the advantages of a country club lifestyle in his yout and he possessed superior innate intelligence and physical talent. But throughout his life Jones lived by the precepts of modesty, self-restraint and purpose. At the peak of his career in 1930, after he had won the Grand Slam, Jones retreated from the national and international stage to practice law and raise his family. The roles in which Bobby Jones felt most comfortable were those of the father, the devoted husband and the lawyer.

If some golfers answered the call for sacrfiice during the war, there were others who in its aftermath lived to great excess. One such golfer was Walter Charles Hagen, referred to affectionately by his fans as "The Haig." Hagen was a drinker, a showman and a womanizer, and he went to no great lengths to conceal that he was all those things. Hagen was Golf's embodiment of the Jazz Age, the golfer we would most expect to have regular attended Jay Gatsby's parties in West Egg. Hagen's excess, like that of F. Scott Fitzgerald himself, hints at how the war changed economies and societies. In Europe the Great War caused the breaking of armies, the collpase of empires, and the failure of economies. But America's comparatively limited physical involvement in the conflict, the economic gain it reaped from supplying the Allies, and its own domestic entrepreneurship made the United States, by war's end, the world's sole creditor. But America largely chose to live absorbed in its own prosperity, of which Hagen was an unmistakable symbol. By the mid 1920s Hagen was earning, from tournaments and arranged exhibitions, annual sums of six figures, which were unheard of to the likes of Harry Vardon.

Hagen was a phenomenal talent and a showman, but he also commanded the admiration and affection of golfing patrons in America and Europe. This was in part because Hagen was always a source for a quick laugh. When one fan noticed Hagen walking to the tee in the morning with a cocktail, he is said to have remarked, "you don't expect me to walk out there alone, do you?" Fans also came to appreciate Hagen's efforts to do away with the elitist and exclusive traditions of the game, such as the age-old prohibition against admitting professional golfers into clubhouses. Prior to the mid 1920s, tournament officials at Europe's elite clubs took pleasure in denying Hagen access to their clubhouses and scoffed at his showmanship. So Hagen drove up to clubhouses in gaudy limousines, had his entourages serve him chilled drinks on the eighteenth green after a round, and regularly held court in local pubs. Hagen seemed to be saying that professional golfers were entertainers for the people who took interest in them. Hagen, like Jones, did much to elevate the status and respect of professional golfers in the public's eye. This was evident, for example, at the 1920 U.S. Open at Inverness Club in Toledo, where Ted Ray, Harry Vardon's sidekick, became the first professional admitted to a clubhouse. Shortly thereafter, admission of touring professionals to clubhouses became common practice in both Europe and America.