The Female Golfing Greats Who Changed Bobby Jones' Life: Golf Channel Feature Debuting Today
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I’m very excited to share the story this week of Bobby Jones and the great female amateurs who intersected with is life at key times, influencing his temperament, humility and ultimately, his vision for Augusta National.
The new women’s amateur event underway and concluding Saturday on NBC allowed us the opportunity to showcase three of the all time great female amateur golfers, but also explain how, as with so much of his life, Jones was an outlier when it came to admiring, respecting and benefitting from his friendships with Alexa Stirling, Joyce Wethered and Marion Hollins.
A Golf Channel feature produced by Dominic Dastoli and written and voiced by yours truly appears today on Live From The Augusta National Women’s Amateur (around 10:30-11 ET on Golf Channel.) . I’ll be on to discuss the story and why went about this. There will be other airings but please tune in and share your thoughts!
In the meantime, David Owen, who contributed to our feature, continues the great work of David Outerbridge and Bob Beck in telling the story of Marion Hollins, 1921 US Amateur champion, giant figure in the 1920s golf world and an underrated figure in shaping the development of Augusta National.
From Owen’s New Yorker piece this week:
Hollins, in addition to providing the original model for Augusta National, made one small direct contribution to its golf course—as I myself discovered in the late nineties, while I was researching my book “The Making of the Masters.” In 1931, Roberts complained to MacKenzie, in a letter, that MacKenzie wasn’t spending enough time in Augusta during the construction of the course. The main reason was that MacKenzie had money troubles of his own, including the fact that Augusta National had stopped paying him. But in his place he sent Hollins, who at that point was more than flush. “She has been associated with me in three golf courses, and not only are her own ideas valuable, but she is thoroughly conversant in regard to the character of the work I like,” he wrote to Roberts. “I want her views and also her personal impressions in regard to the way the work is being carried out.” Roberts was unhappy not to have MacKenzie himself, and he said that Jones would be unhappy, too. But MacKenzie defended Hollins in another letter, to the engineer who was supervising construction of the course. “I do not know any man, who has sounder ideas,” he wrote, and added, “She was most favourably impressed with it.”
And the magic of the Internet, it’s now posted:
