Bobby Jones was born in Atlanta in 1902 and first took up golf as a doctor's prescription to strengthen a sickly body. A prodigy who won the Georgia Amateur at fourteen, he balanced the game with degrees in engineering and English and a law career, a diversified identity that kept the sport from ever fully consuming him. As an amateur he routinely beat the era's hardened professionals.

Famous for calling penalties on himself that cost him championships, he completed the impossible Grand Slam in 1930, winning all four major tournaments in a single year, then retired at twenty-eight. He went on to popularize steel-shafted matched club sets, co-found Augusta National, and create the Masters, introducing gallery ropes and real-time scoreboards. A degenerative spinal disease later confined him to a wheelchair until his death in 1971.

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