One sportswriter of the time called Jones’s feat the Impregnable Quadrilateral which conveyed the right degree

One sportswriter of the time called Jones’s feat the “Impregnable Quadrilateral”, which conveyed the right degree of difficulty but was not exactly catchy. OB Keeler, a prolific chronicler of Jones’s career, went with “Grand Slam”.Given that Jones is the last amateur to win the Open, the feat is unrepeatable Jones was modesty itself about it at the time. “I did not feel like saying I had planned it all because I felt reluctant to admit that I considered myself capable of such an accomplishment,” Jones wrote later in Golf is my Game. “But at this point, separated from the facts by so many years, this reticence seems a bit silly.

Actually I did make plans for that golfing year with precisely this end in view, and so prepared myself more carefully than I had ever done before.”In The Greatest Year, Grantland Rice wrote: “The results were obtained with an ease and grace that were born in the system. Of the thousands of pictures taken of Bobby Jones, no one can recall an awkward pose, an awkward swing, a sign of effort beyond control.”Jones, of course, went on to found both Augusta National and the Masters tournament. It was because of the high regard in which Jones was held that all the players accepted his invitation to the event and it quickly took on a major importance. With fewer amateurs capable of taking on the professionals, the PGA of America’s own championship grew in importance.Hogan’s Triple Crown season of ‘53 was its own type of Slam because, following a near-fatal car crash, Hogan found the then matchplay format of the USPGA too much Instead, he played in, and won, his only Open at Carnoustie.

At the time it was rare for the leading Americans to travel to the Open but that all changed with Palmer.Palmer had already decided to play in the Open for the first time in 1960 at St Andrews when he won the Masters and the US Open at Cherry Hills, one of his most famous victories over Jack Nicklaus. Flying over the Atlantic with his friend, Bob Drum of the Pittsburgh Press, the pair got talking about how Jones’s Grand Slam was unlikely to be repeated. “I said why didn’t we create a new Grand Slam? I said: ‘Gee, Bob, wouldn’t it be great if I would win the British Open, come back to Akron and win the PGA?’”So Bob wrote about it and it’s gone on from there. That’s how it really got to be what we know now as the modern Grand Slam. Anyway, at St Andrews, I lost by a shot and that was the end of that. But in the ensuing years, when I won the Masters, there was no question about the fact that that was in the back of my head all the time.”Never again did Palmer win the first two majors of the year and Nicklaus, the winner of a record 18 professional majors, did so just once, in 1972.