Sport: Return of Jones

Back from Britain with his second British open golf championship in succession. Robert Tyre Jones Jr. roseate law student of Atlanta, Ga., was obliged to submit to much photographing, interviewing, autograph-hunting* and you-know-me-Bobby-ing as he passed through Manhattan last week to inspect the fatted calves of the South. The newsgatherers gathered much familiar material about the careful Jones wardrobe, the smiling Jones modesty, the memories of tournament strain. And there were some new anecdotes—how cinemactress Mae Murray insulted him,† how he liked his two new dogs (Irish setter, Cairn terrier), how he had learned that it is a jail offense to drive off the first tee at St. Andrews with an iron club.

But one reporter, William D. Richardson of the New York Times, discovered that Champion Jones had brought home with him a consignment of "gutty" (guttapercha) balls such as were used before the introduction of the present, livelier, wrapped rubber ball with a hard rubber core. He had talked about slower balls with Robert Harris and Dr. Harry Gillies, two leading amateurs of Britain, both of them long hitters and fond of experimenting with golf.**

*He signed 300 copies of a limited edition of his golfing autobiography, Down The Fairway, just published, for further notice of which see p. 37).

†They were both being besieged by photographers, reporters. A question about her latest (fourth) husband, Prince David Divani, nettled her. "I'd love him if he were not a prince," she snorted. "I'd love him if he were a street car conductor, even if he were Mr. Jones I"

**One of Dr. Gillies' successful experiments is teeing his ball six to ten inches off the ground, sometimes on an arect beer bottle, and hitting it prodigiously with a deep-faced club.