Bobby Jones’ Legacy Alive And Growing At Reimagined BJGC | By Jim Dodson

Forty-five years ago this month – a week before the Masters, as it happened – I arrived in the city of Atlanta to start work at The Atlanta-Journal Constitution as one of the youngest writers at the oldest Sunday Magazine in the nation, where Margaret Mitchell had worked when she wrote “Gone with the Wind.”

I hadn’t been on the job more than a day or two when legendary Journal sports editor Furman Bisher, who was preparing to shove off to the Masters, summoned me to his office to say hello and point out that since we were the only North Carolinians in the building, he felt obliged to keep a sharp eye on me lest I embarrass myself and our home state.

“I understand you’re a golfer,” he said at one point.

“Yessir. I brought my clubs.”

Eager to impress this sports-writing legend, I mentioned that I’d also read just about every book written by or about Bobby Jones, and even had a couple vintage Spalding Bobby Jones wedges in my bag.

“Good for you,” barked The Legend. “Maybe I’ll take you out to East Lake someday. In the meantime, you should check out the Bobby Jones Golf Course. Good place to start on a rookie reporter’s salary.”

That weekend, I dutifully found my way to BJGC, Atlanta’s first public golf course, built in tribute to Jones in 1932, two years after he achieved the Grand Slam and retired from competition. I recall hoping to find a public version of Augusta National. What I found instead was a weary golf course that looked as if it might be prepared to give up the ghost. Despite this disappointment, I played with a couple older regulars who dearly loved the course and claimed to have actually known Bob Jones, an unexpected bonus. But I never went back. Two weeks later, in fact, I carted my clubs home to Carolina and left them in a corner of my bedroom where they more or less sat gathering dust for the next six years. Sad to say, due to all work and no play, I managed to hit a golf ball only a handful of times in the hometown of Robert Tyre Jones, Jr. With borrowed clubs, no less.

Longtime Jones family lawyer Marty Elgison smiled when I told him this sad little tale of woe on a recent gloriously golden spring morning in my first journalism stomping ground. Ironically, I was in town to do research for a book on Bobby Jones and welcomed Elgison’s invitation to come have a look at the new Bobby Jones Golf Course complex that opened to great acclaim in late 2018. Simply put, what a difference four decades and a lot of visionary thinking makes.

Gone is the poorly maintained public course I remembered from 1977, replaced by a masterfully sculpted reversible nine-hole golf course designed by Atlanta’s late golf renaissance man, Bob Cupp, with a surrounding practice facility that rivals anything I’ve seen in the world of golf.

The complex’s two-story, six-bay, state-of-the-art Bandy Instructional Center, for example, presides over one of the most beautiful – and busiest – practice ranges in the Southeast, home to a thriving junior program that boasts 1,800 kids and counting, including the largest Junior PGA program in Georgia and 13th largest in the nation after just a year or so in operation.

At the heart of the modest 128-acre property, echoing the Age of Jones, stands gorgeous Murray Golf House, a 23,000-square foot, neo-gothic wonder ship inspired by the classic clubhouses of East Lake and Atlanta Athletic Club (with a touch of Hoylake thrown in for seasoning), designed by famed Atlanta club architect Jim Chapman. In addition to a full service restaurant with a top chef and a veranda that arguably boasts the best views in the city, with interiors designed by a cadre of gifted students from the Savannah College of Art & Design, this soulful house of Jones is home to the Georgia Golf Hall of Fame, Georgia State Golf Association and the Georgia Section of the PGA respectively, not to mention a splendidly curated Bob Jones Room sponsored by the USGA.

Even the facility’s charming starter hut and Dan Yates putting course (designed by Jerry Pate and Bob Cupp’s son, Bobby, where kids under age 17 play free) are inspired by their antecedents at St. Andrews’ Old Course, where Jones became an immortal serenaded by the grateful citizens of the “Auld Grey Toon.”

To read the full article, visit GlobalGolfPost.com.

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