Robert T. Jones IV, M.Div & Psy.D

Dr. Robert T. Jones IV, grandson of the legendary Bobby Jones, was kind enough to give me an hour of his time at his Southern Crescent Psychology practice outside of Atlanta.  I had read the foreword he had written for Sidney Matthew’s “Life & Times of Bobby Jones,” in which he described how Mr. Jones — “Bub” as he called him — gave him his Beethoven/Arturo Toscanini record collection.  Prior to meeting Dr. Jones, I asked him if he wouldn’t mind bringing the record collection to his office so that I might photograph it.  He graciously agreed and those photos appear in this interview.

Dr. Jones sheds some new light on the 1968 Masters when Roberto De Vicenzo signed an incorrect score card and was disqualified. You’ll be surprised to learn how Bobby Jones REALLY reacted when the Committee came to his cabin for guidance on how to handle De Vicenzo’s gaffe.

There are also some stories about Cliff Roberts, Bobby Jones’s special “hotline” telephone, and Dr. Jones’s traumatic experience as a priest.

NOTE: Dr. Jones is on the Board of Trustees of The Bobby Jones Society, which helps support the philanthropic efforts of the Chiari & Syringomyelia Foundation.  As you may know, Bobby Jones was afflicted with Syringomyelia and suffered with this crippling spinal cord disease for 27 years until his death in 1971.  There is still no cure for Syringomyelia.  So if you’re like most golf fans who hold Bobby Jones in the highest regard, please consider lending your support this Masters Week to the Chiari & Syringomyelia Foundation.

Golf Conversations: Bob, here’s my card.  On the back is my celebrity spokesperson, my dog Wolfie.

Robert T. Jones IV: Ahhh!

GC: When you said in your email that “Arthur” was going to be here, I thought you were referring to one of your greyhounds, not your grandfather’s Arturo Toscanini/Beethoven collection.

RTJ: I used to have a greyhound that would come to the office with me.  His name was Bravo.  Bravo was an 85-pound, red brindle-and-white retired racer.  That’s monstrously big for a greyhound.  He had the most natural instincts for a therapy dog.

I used to work with a lot of severely disturbed children.  They wouldn’t tell me a word.  But boy, they would just spill their guts out to Dr. Bravo.

GC: That was his purpose here … to be a therapy dog?

RTJ: Originally, it was just to keep me company.  Then I found out he had a natural kind of instinct … If someone started to cry or get upset, he would stand up, walk over to them, and he wouldn’t impose himself.  He would just stand there near them.  And he also knew when people didn’t like dogs.  He would go away.

GC: We used to take Wolfie to see my aunt in the nursing home.  People who were lost in their own world would brighten up and smile when they saw Wolfie coming down the hallway.

RTJ: The things that therapy dogs do, and the people they can reach, it’s really unbelievable.  I’ve often said to my wife, “When our two dogs go to doggie heaven, the next dog I pick – assuming you allow me to have one…

(laughter)

“…it will be with the intention in mind of having him as a therapy dog.”  For two reasons: One is, because I do think it can add an awful lot to my practice.  Two is, ‘cause I’m here alone a lot.  Many people don’t know that greyhounds are docile and sweet creatures.  And having a dog that has a big mouth with a lot of teeth in it might not be the worst thing in the world.  And three is … if he’s my therapy dog, he’s totally deductible!

(laughter)

Which I did not find out until after Bravo had died.

GC: Speaking of therapy, could I ask you a professional question?

RTJ: Sure.

GC: What would you say if I told you that sometimes I think I’m Walter Hagen?

(Bob looks at me with deadly silence)

I’m joking!

(laughter)

RTJ: I’ve never treated a case like that … what would that be called? Hagenaphobia?  No, no…

GC: How about Professional Golfer, uh…

RTJ: Fixation?

GC: Syndrome!!!  Gotta have that syndrome at the end.

(laughter)

RTJ: We could start a little study on that.

GC: You could also get thrown out of your profession.

(laughter)

RTJ: I could!

(laughter)

GC: Needless to say, I’m a great admirer of your grandfather…

RTJ: Thank you.

GC: I mean, how can you not be?  The man was just amazing in every respect.  Obviously, everyone knows about your grandfather, but I don’t think people know that much about you.

RTJ: About me?

GC: About you!  There’s that little photo of you with your dad and grandfather in the Sidney Matthew book, Life & Times of Bobby Jones.  But no pictures of you with your rubber ducky or your cap gun or your Flexible Flyer.

RTJ: There probably are but my family has never been much of a photograph family.  That sort of goes back to my grandfather, in a way.  My grandfather had a photographic memory.

GC: Did he?

RTJ: Once he had seen something, it was there.  And he used to have these drawers full of pictures.  What ended up happening was … someone would write him and ask him for a picture.  So he’d just go the drawer, grab one, sign it and send it on.

GC: Wow.

RTJ: It didn’t matter to him; he’d seen it.  And we all in the family are kind of the same way.  So as a result, if you really want to see the Jones family picture album, you have to contact Sid Matthew in Tallahassee, Florida.  Because in all the books he’s done on my grandfather, he’s kind of collected them all.

GC: Those were all provided to him by your family?

RTJ: No.  He actually found them all at auction.

GC: Oh, my goodness!

RTJ: As people die and their relatives go through their artifacts, they find a picture of Bobby Jones, and say, “Oh, this has to be worth a million dollars.”  Which it’s not.   It’s kind of like an original signed Picasso.  Remember they used to think there were so few of them and now they know that he paid his hotel and restaurant tabs with them!

(laughter)

But regarding me, there’s not that much to say.  I’m the third child of three in my family.  I was born and raised in Pittsfield, Massachusetts.  I never took up golf seriously until I was about 12 years old.   And a number of people would say that I still haven’t.

(laughter)

But I attempted.

GC: But your dad was a good golfer.

RTJ: My dad was.  He always considered himself a very second-rate golfer.  And I suppose when you’re comparing yourself to Bobby Jones, of course, you’re going to come out that way.  But my dad was a very fine regional-level player and also competed in three national Amateurs and was a first-alternate to the Open a couple of times.

He was a very, very active man in a lot of ways.  When we lived in western Massachusetts, for example, golf was just a part of his life.  And that makes sense when you think about the fact that we were under waist-deep snow for 6-7 months out of the year.

And my Dad dealt with that by learning how to ski, how to figure skate, he loved to fly fish.  He continued what was important to my grandfather and that was that golf was a part of his life, but was never his entire life.

I suppose I’ve followed along in the same way. There’s really not that much to say about me.  I hold my doctorate in clinical psychology.  I’ve been in practice for 10 years doing work in both in clinical and sports psychology.

GC: Let’s talk a little bit about sports psychology as it relates to golf.  As I’m sure you know, in the last 30 years or so, sports psychologists have come to the fore in golf.  No pun intended.  The pre-shot routine, stay in the moment, one shot at a time, yadda yadda.  What do you think of all of this?

RTJ: I think a lot of what passes for sports psychology these days – and I’m not speaking against any one in particular …  there are some really outstanding people that are out there.  But a lot of what passes for sports psychology is not always, shall we say, strongly grounded in research.

I do believe that sports psychology has its place, especially in top-level athletics.  I think there are two major issues that people face when they deal with athletic performance issues.  One is, everybody has to learn – whether you’re a club-level player or a top-level player – every person has to learn how to manage stimulation.

By that I mean this: when something goes really well or really bad, your body is going to react to it by sending a bunch of adrenaline through your system.  And you have to learn how to react to that and how to handle that.

I learned about this very practically one year when I was playing at the Atlanta Athletic Club, which is my home club.  I had this series of holes that was just unbelievable.  I had come to the 6^th hole, which was a medium-length par 4 and I was even for the day.  Now I’m a 7-handicapper.  I hit a fairly poor tee shot on that hole and had about a 5-iron into the green.

I hit this 5-iron about 2 feet from the hole and made the putt for birdie.  Then I hit a 7-iron on the next hole.  There’s a little ridge on the green so you couldn’t see the hole, you could only see where the pin was.

I hit the shot and the guys who are about ready to head to the 8^th tee start screaming.  I had hit it in the hole for an ace.  So now I’m 3 under.  By the time I got to the 8^th hole, I was physically shaking.  The adrenaline level was so high.

I got on number 8, hit a nice drive out there.  Didn’t hit a good 9-iron into the green, and had about a 35-foot putt which I then drained.

GC: Holy Calamity Jane!

RTJ: So now I’m four under and when I got to the 9^th tee I realized something: I was physiologically out of gas.

GC: Out of gas?

RTJ: It’s like the feeling you get after you’ve been working out in the yard for 8 hours straight.  My arms were limp like noodles.  And the lesson I took from that … how do you manage that level of sensation?  And there are some technical ways in which you can do that which I won’t bore you with now.

The second thing I learned is this: we are meaning-making creatures … I hope this is interesting to you.

GC: I’m listening, I like it!

(laughter)

RTJ: Stop me when I hit the saturation point, because I love this stuff!

We are meaning-making creatures.  That’s why God gave us these massive frontal lobes on the front of our brain.  It allows us to make meaning and interpret.  So when we get those adrenaline surges, we interpret them.  And sometimes we don’t interpret them accurately.

For example, if you take a person who is under physical attack versus somebody who is experiencing sexual arousal, very often it’s hard to tell the difference – physiologically between the two – because arousal is arousal is arousal.  It’s the meaning that we attach to it that becomes the issue.

Well what happens if one person interprets that level of arousal as something exciting, something great is about to happen…

GC: I had that level of arousal often in high school: I’d be on a date and I thought something great was going to happen … but it never did.

(laughter)

RTJ: … and another person interprets arousal as being, “Oh my gosh, this is an attack.  I’m in danger!”

It’s going to affect their performance dramatically.  How many times do you hear about people who are on the verge of doing something really exciting in golf and they’re scared.  They’re interpreting that as fear and there’s a reason for that.  And that’s because what this massive part of the brain has told them to do.

Now here’s what’s really cool about that: I try to go to the Atlanta Sports Hall of Fame every year.  My grandfather was in the first class.  One year, Phil Niekro was one of the honorees.  I always like to talk to athletes and find out what goes on in their head.

GC: The knuckleballer?

RTJ: Yeah.  I asked Phil, “How did you handle fear?”  He said, “I was never afraid a day in my life on the baseball diamond.”

“Really?”  I asked.

“Oh, yeah.  I’d get excited but never afraid.”

Right then and there he told me something very important.  He didn’t interpret that level of stimulation as something of which he should be afraid.  He interpreted it as, “Wow, this is exciting!  Something cool’s about to happen.”

Sometimes – and I think this is why it’s important that a person who deals with athletes has to have some clinical understanding – athletes do have clinical issues that affect their athletic performance.  By clinical issues, I mean depression, anxiety, relationship issues.  You’ve got to have somebody who’s able to tease those things out, too.

GC: You were talking about your home club, the Atlanta Athletic Club… are you still playing golf – are you a frequent golfer?

(sigh)

RTJ: No, I’m a frequent practicer.  I’ve been sidelined since November.  I was in a car accident and it’s been a hard time recovering.  But even then, it’s very hard for me to find the time to play golf.  My favorite way to play is … there’s a little public course near where I live.  I normally don’t start work most days until around noon.  Especially on Mondays.  I love to go out on Monday morning at eight o’clock, because nobody’s there.  And I can get in a cart and play 18 holes in about an hour and a half.  That’s about the speed at which I like to play.

GC: You would not like playing with J.B. Holmes.

RTJ: I would have no problem with him personally…

(laughter)

When I die, if I end up in golfing hell, it would be having to play golf for all eternity with J.B. Holmes, Bernhard Langer, and the young Jack Nicklaus.

(laughter)

GC: And you can throw Ben Crane in there if you really want to be tortured.

(laughter)

RTJ: Even though I have tremendous respect for all of them…

GC: Of course!

RTJ: But you’d have to pair me with someone like Chi Chi Rodriguez.

GC: Or like Trevino used to say, “If you’re gonna miss, miss fast.”

RTJ: Exactly.  Although I think Sarazen was the one who came up with “miss it quick.”

GC: Speaking of golf clubs, there’s a club down Interstate 20 here.  If you take it all the way, it ends up in the city of Augusta.  I think the club is called Augusta National Golf Club.

RTJ: Yes, I’ve heard of it.

GC: Is that something that you’re allowed to talk about or will you turn into a pumpkin?  ‘Cause, as you know, they don’t like you saying anything – about anything – about their club.

RTJ: Well, it’s never really stopped me before.  I’m not a member so there’s nothing they can…

GC: YOU’RE not a member???  That’s not right!  Your grandfather designed the course, founded the club, created the Masters … you should be … grandfathered in!

(laughter)

RTJ: Here’s how I see it: I’m not a real sentimental guy.  I believe private clubs have the right to have whoever they want or don’t want as members.  Take a look at this [Bob gestures around his office]: this is not exactly the surroundings where you would find a typical member of Augusta National Golf Club.  I don’t have my own jet.

GC: What???  I’m leaving!

(laughter)

RTJ: And most psychologists don’t get jets, so I’m not in a real hurry to get one.

GC: But if you do get a jet, it’s going to be tax deductible.  Especially if you bring the dog on.

RTJ: That’s right.  My therapy dog.  But honestly, almost everybody that’s in Augusta National right now … I can’t think of more than one or two that even knew my grandfather.  There’s nobody there that knew what he really thought about the club.  What his thoughts were when he started the club … the relationship between he and Clifford Roberts.  The relationship with my father, who was a vice president of the club.

In a lot of ways, the relationship that exists between our family and the club is cordial.  Every year, they give me two tickets – for my wife and I – it’s basically good for going anywhere you want whenever you want.  And then we get two trophy room badges.  That’s an agreement we have with the club.  And we buy four series badges and most of the time I use those for business associates or…

GC: Or people who come to interview you.

RTJ: You never know.

GC: You never know.

RTJ: It depends on how the interview gets edited.  You never know!

(laughter)

But seriously,  I think the relationship that exists at this point in history between Jones and Augusta National is really quite superficial.  And I’m not 100% sure how relevant Bob Jones even is to the contemporary experience at Augusta National.

That may be a sad thing, that may be a good thing, I don’t know.  I tend to think it’s not really a good thing.  I think that’s the only tie they really have to tradition.

GC: Yes, and that’s what they’re always talking about: “We’re all about tradition, we’re all about history.”

RTJ: But they’re not.  The USGA is.  And I don’t mean that in a bad way about Augusta National…

GC: I know you don’t.

RTJ: I have some friends that are members.  I think it just is what it is.

GC: Well, tempus fugit.  It’s a shame.  Of course, I didn’t know your grandfather but I’ve read all the books about him and he wanted to have a club for his friends and people that he liked to socialize with.  I don’t know if he meant for it to evolve into something that’s the home of the Fortune 500.

RTJ: Well, yes and no.  When you look at the founding members of Augusta National, this was not the gathering of Toulouse-Lautrec and the Bohemians on the banks of the Seine.

GC: Yes, that’s true.  You had to have some deep pockets …

RTJ: You go back and look at the guys who started this thing.  Clifford Roberts got a lot of these New York titans to come in there and really finance this venture.  There’s always been a certain cachet to it.

Of course, part of the reason they were able to do that was because Cliff was able to say, “Oh, by the way, did I get a chance to introduce you to the guy that’s really doing this?  His name’s Bobby Jones.”  That didn’t hurt.

GC: Star power.

RTJ: It was.  There’s always been that pull between Augusta National the club and the Masters tournament as an event.  That tension has always been there.

GC: I don’t have any problem with them functioning as a private club to make whatever rules they want.  However, I do think that the point that woman made a few years ago…

RTJ: Burk.

GC: Martha Burk.

RTJ: Who’s also a psychologist.

GC: They are profiting enormously from the public’s embracing of the Masters.  They get a lot of money because of it…

RTJ: The question is, do they make themselves a place of public accommodation? I have friends that are really outstanding lawyers.  Two of them who study those kinds of issues.  One of them is absolutely adamant: Yes, Augusta National makes itself a place of public accommodation and is therefore under different requirements than say, the Athletic Club would be.  Because the Athletic Club does hold public tournaments.

Then I have another friend who is well versed on those issues who says with equal vehemence: No!  It is a private club; the Masters tournament is a separate entity legally and therefore blah-blah-blah-blah.

Here’s the way I’m left with it: to quote our beloved President, “That one’s above my pay grade.”  If two top-notch lawyers have such variant views on the subject, then I’m not going to interject myself into that debate.

GC: What I find so odd about Augusta National is the silly requirements that they put on CBS as to what sort of language they can use.  You can’t call that group of people in the gallery “fans.”  They’re not “fans,” they’re the “patrons.”  You can’t say “the front nine and the back nine,” it’s “the first nine and the second nine.”

RTJ: Correct.

GC: Perhaps in your grandfather’s time,  patron was a more genteel way of describing this group of people.  And I understand that and appreciate that.  But here in 2011, to say that group of people around the 16^th hole is not a bunch of golf fans, is just silly.

RTJ: I don’t quite see it that way.

GC: Ooops – there go my Masters’ badges!  Ok, let’s hear why.

RTJ: Very simple.  I totally agree with the way they do the telecasts.  One of the things we have done in our culture is to dumb it down to the lowest common denominator.  And we do that even in golf.  It’s not fair to say this about specific commentators because I grew up listening to my grandfather talking about golf while he was watching it on TV.

What I think the Masters telecast does is something unique in sports.  It tries to capture an image that is timeless by referring to fans as patrons.  By referring to crowds as galleries.  By not having Jim Nantz, who is not just a fine broadcaster but a really fine man …  how many times have you watched a golf tournament, they pan over the seashore and you hear, “Don’t forget tonight on ’60 Minutes’ we’ll have an interview with Lindsey Lohan.”

GC: Oh, I think it’s great that they’ve eliminated the commercial aspect…

RTJ: I think what it does is it tries to take you back to a time … it tries to show continuity with history that otherwise we would lose.  In some ways, in 2011, the scoreboard system that Augusta National has, doesn’t make much sense, does it?

It makes about as much sense as Wrigley Field’s scoreboard, right?

GC: The human involvement in posting the scores?

RTJ: Yes.   Now having said that, here’s what it does do: it involves a whole host of volunteers in the tournament who otherwise would never have been involved in it.  And it gives them access and a sense of participation in this wonderful sporting event.  It gives people a chance to experience the same thing coming to the Masters that their grandparents may have experienced when they came to the Masters.  It gives you a sense, both while you’re there and while you’re watching it on TV, that time has frozen.

And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with a vocabulary from announcers that is a little bit more refined, that is a little bit more thoughtful.

GC: I agree.  I’m all for refined and thoughtful.  I think it’s just that particular word “fan.”  It’s not vulgar, it’s not obscene, and it’s not coarse.  I don’t think by using the word “fan” to describe the folks in the gallery, a broadcaster is dumbing down the tournament.  As for “the first nine/second nine” silliness, that’s a distinction that I’m sure is lost on 99.9% of the people who are listening to the broadcast.

I guess what I really find objectionable about Augusta’s “language police” is that in the past if a broadcaster made a boo-boo and used a forbidden word, there was hell to pay.  Maybe in the post-Cliff Roberts era it’s not that way anymore.  Hmmm, maybe this is why Augusta National has ignored my email requests for media credentials!

(laughter)

RTJ: The word “fan” wasn’t the real problem.  The one that was the real problem was I think, in ’66, when Jack Whitaker…

GC: Called them a “mob.”

(laughter)

RTJ: … made the mistake of referring to the gallery as a mob.

(laughter)

GC: “A mob.”  I can understand how Augusta would object to that.  But “fan” is not an objectionable, low-class sort of word.

RTJ: The reason that they don’t like the word – or that Cliff never liked the word – because the word “fan” is an abbreviation for…

GC: Fanatic.

RTJ: … And Augusta National does not have fanatics roaming their property. They have patrons on their property.

GC: Yeah.  And they don’t tolerate any of that “Get in the hole!” nonsense, either.  Did you ever have any interactions with Mr. Roberts that you can recall?

RTJ: I have several that I can recall.  Then there are several that I know about simply because I remember interactions my father had with Mr. Roberts.  I want to be very careful in what I say about this.

GC: Ok.

RTJ: There has been much that was made about the deterioration of the relationship that existed between Cliff and my grandfather in my grandfather’s waning years.  Most of the comments that have been made about the deterioration of that relationship were true.

Frank Chirkanian, I think, wrote an article for Golf Digest in which he talked about the severe friction that existed between my father and Clifford Roberts.  That is not only true, but if you go back and read that article in Golf Digest, I can tell you that it is almost an understatement of the tension that existed between my father and Clifford Roberts.

There are a number of things that I am privy to on all of that that probably I will take to my grave.  Suffice it to say, there was no love lost between the Jones family and Clifford Roberts.

And to a certain extent, for many years, that extended to Augusta National.  Because Cliff was very much the face of Augusta National.  Or he became that way.  I did save this one for publication, so I will repeat it to you.  I had somebody call me up one day and they said, “Bob, is it true that your grandmother didn’t want Cliff to come to your grandfather’s funeral?”

Cliff felt real bad about that.  I’d heard that he wasn’t allowed to come.  So I said, “No, that’s not true.  My grandfather’s funeral was for immediate family only.”  And actually, grandchildren weren’t originally supposed to be there.  It was supposed to be just my grandmother, the three children, and the priest.

However, I said, if my grandmother had known that Cliff had gotten his feelings seriously hurt, that would have just been an added fringe benefit.

(laughter)

Cliff is gone now.  My grandfather is gone now.  And I think we can let Cliff rest in peace.

GC: Very diplomatic.

RTJ: Thank you.  But I get my point across.

GC: Yes.  If we were having a party here today, he might not be invited.

RTJ: Well, maybe.  I will tell you something that did happen.  In 1976, Jack Nicklaus held the first Memorial Tournament at Muirfield Village.  My grandfather was the initial honoree.  Cliff was there.  My mother and I flew up that morning for the event and flew back that afternoon.

My dad had just died in 1973.  And my mother was probably not likely to be, shall we say, in the most charitable mood toward Mr. Roberts.  And at one point, Cliff came to my mother and they talked for a little while.  Then Cliff came to me and said, “Bob, I’d like to see the golf course.  I was wondering if you’d drive me around in the golf cart.”

I said, “Well, Mr. Roberts…” and I turned to my mother and she nodded her head.  We went out for about an hour and drove around.  We chatted and talked.  I always felt that that was his way of trying to find some sort of bridge to make peace.  It wasn’t much longer after that that he killed himself.

GC: I’m not familiar with your father’s passing at such an early age.

RTJ: We moved to Nashville in 1970.  My mother immediately began to have serious health problems which was very difficult for my dad.  My grandfather then died on December 18, 1971.  Two years later, my father, at 47, had a massive heart attack on December 20, 1973.

GC: That must have been difficult for you and the family.

RTJ: I was 16 and it was probably the single-most disorganizing event of my life.  And it probably took me a good 10 years to resolve.  There’s always that thing about losing your father which is always difficult when you’re 16 years old.

Also, all of a sudden, I went from figuring I’ve got years ahead of me to be behind my dad and learn how to handle a lot of the Jones stuff … to now be called upon to be a spokesperson.  And I had to learn it on the fly.  I can do it now but I remember when I went to speak at the Memorial Tournament, I figured, “How hard could this be?”

I remember standing in front of that microphone.  I followed Joe Dey — you never wanted to follow him speaking.  I uttered something inane and sat down.

GC: You had no prepared remarks?

RTJ: I didn’t think it was that big a deal.  I just figured, if you can’t be bright, be brief, and I sat down.

GC: Your dad must have had some issues with being Bobby Jones’s son.

RTJ: He did.  I think it was a very difficult thing for my dad.  He was very close to his father.  In fact, we had a separate a phone line in the house; the only person who had the number was my grandfather.

GC: This is when you lived in Massachusetts?

RTJ: Both Massachusetts and Nashville.  There was always this other phone that we were told never to answer.  Only dad answered it.  And Bub – we used to call our grandfather Bub – Bub had a phone line in his house.  And the only person who had the number to that was dad.

GC: This is like the Washington-Moscow hot line.

RTJ: Yes, it was!  Very much.  It was like, “Don’t touch the red phone!”  Well, the red phone in our house was white.  Our regular phone was forest green.

My dad really knew what his father thought on a lot of different subjects.  Because they would talk hours every week.  Much of what I know about my grandfather I learned from being with my dad.  My only regret is that I didn’t have more time with him.

Dad was very free about talking to us about what was on Bub’s mind.  He also thought it was very important that we need to know certain things because he said, “The press will find you.”  And they did … and they do.

So they were always very straightforward about talking about different issues within the household.  For example, to give you an idea how things get really crazy.  There’s this big thing about the Roberto De Vincenzo flap.  And it was all about how “Oh, Bobby Jones agonized for hours over this.”

Curt Sampson wrote this absolutely asinine piece in which – and I felt kind of betrayed by that because he interviewed me for it – in which he said that my grandfather’s pain that he was experiencing with Syringomyelia had affected his cognitive ability.

I wrote a letter to Golfworld in which I said, “Now look, as a clinical psychologist I’ll tell you pain can affect cognitive function, but it doesn’t necessarily do so.”  And in my grandfather’s case it didn’t.

They also wrote about how, “Oh, it was this agonizing decision by the Committee.”  My sister was in the room when this happened.  My sister Adele – and I think my sister Mimi was there, too.  They were in the room when this thing happened.  Here is what happened with the De Vincenzo flap:

The Committee struggled and struggled and struggled.  Finally they decided to come over to the cabin and see what Bob Jones would have to say.  They came in, sat down, talked to my grandfather.  Here’s what my grandfather said:

“Jesus Christ, boys, why are you bothering me with this?  The rule’s clear!”

(laughter)

“He signed a card that showed a higher score than he actually shot.  The man’s stuck with the score he shot.  Sorry!”

(laughter)

I mean, he didn’t put it quite that way but it was just, “Why are you bothering me?  The rule’s clear.”

GC: Yes, they did make it seem like he was trying to come up with a way around it.

RTJ: Nope.  No.  Think about it.  This is a man who called a penalty on himself that cost him a United States Open.  You play the ball as it lies, you play by the rules.  The score he puts on his card has to stand because golf is a game about your honor and your signature every bit as much as it is about your ability to strike the ball.

GC: Just to backtrack a little bit, when you had this awful experience with your father passing away, do you think that led you to become interested in psychology?

RTJ: I suppose.  You know, originally, my first track was, I was ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in 1985.  I went to the seminary for 7 years.  My interest in psychology came shortly after when I left the priesthood.  That was the result of an armed robbery that I’d been a victim of.

I didn’t realize it at the time but it left a real post-traumatic stress event with me.

GC: How did that come about?

RTJ: I was in a church where the pastor never locked the door.  And I was held at knifepoint, our collection was stolen, and I was locked in the safe.

GC: Where was this?

RTJ: This was in Knoxville, Tennessee.  Shortly after that, I got to the point where I could no longer distribute Communion because I could not have people come walking up to me with my hands full.  But I didn’t realize that at the time.  And then I couldn’t hear confessions because I couldn’t put my head to the screen because that makes me vulnerable to anybody who’s there.

GC: Oh, my goodness.

RTJ: And I didn’t piece that together.  I just thought what that meant was that I didn’t have a vocation.  So I left.  I then went to work in a psychiatric hospital and that’s where I started becoming interested in psychology.  I had a couple of detours along the way but finished my doctorate in 2001.  I’ve been in practice ever since.  Does my father’s death have some impact on how I chose this profession?  Of course it does.  What that impact is, I don’t really know.

GC: I did not know you were a Roman Catholic priest.

RTJ: I still am a priest.  I serve in the Anglican Catholic Church which is not part of Rome at all.  I serve at the moment part-time; I was doing it full-time until last year.

GC: Your grandfather, the last week of his life …

RTJ: He converted to Catholicism.

GC: Had he been a religious man before that?

RTJ: Yes.  It’s not made much of.  He was not denominational but he had always thought about religious matters.  He had been a regular Mass attender every Sunday because my grandmother was devout.

GC: She was a Roman Catholic?

RTJ: Yes, she was.  At one point, he had taken instruction from Bishop Fulton J. Sheen.  Three days before my grandfather died, he was baptized, confirmed, and received his first Communion.  He knew he was dying and I think he figured the time for debate is kind of over.  He was having a bourbon with the priest afterwards and he said, “I’m glad that I’ve done this but if I had known how happy this would make Mary” – my grandmother – “I would have just gone ahead and done this years ago.”

GC: Interesting.  And was your father also a religious man?

RTJ: He actually was.  He was low-key about it.  He had the little profane streak that his grandfather and my grandfather had … and as I have.

GC: Well, that’s %$#^% good to hear!

(laughter)

RTJ: We’re all cut from the same cloth, so to speak.  We’re all shaped the same, too.  We’re all shaped like a Coke bottle.

(laughter)

Thin at the top, wide at the middle, narrow at the bottom.

GC: Is that the new Coke or the old Coke?

RTJ: Either one.

(laughter)

My father wasn’t a daily Mass kind of guy but he would go every single Sunday.  He was very active in our church both in Nashville and Massachusetts.  And he was a silent contributor to a lot of churches.  He’d give a $5000 check to a church back when $5000 was WHOLE heap of money.

GC: How did your entering the priesthood come about?

RTJ: I always thought that I was called to it.  I’ve often thought, had that robbery not occurred, what would have happened to my life.  But those are irrelevant debates.  The fact is, my life has worked out the way it has and it’s worked out reasonably well.  I always like to feel that I’m under God’s care all the time.

GC: How old were you when you entered the seminary?

RTJ: This was 1978; I was 20, finished at 27.  It was very shortly after I was ordained that I was in the robbery.  It was Halloween weekend.  Needless to say, I do not celebrate trick or treat.  It’s getting grimmer and grimmer, every year.

GC: It used to be fun; now, it’s like extortion.

RTJ: Yes, these people come to you dressed like Satan and say, “Give me candy.”

(laughter)

I’ve got a patient in about 5 minutes so I want to make sure that we covered what you wanted to cover.

GC: I think we did.  As I mentioned in my email, what I wanted to do was to have a conversation with you and perhaps learn some things about you that people weren’t aware of.

RTJ: Well, you did something I’m not normally used to.  I’m not used to people asking me about me.

(laughter)

GC: It’s a great treat for me as a golf fan to chat with you.  And I think my readers will also enjoy to know that there’s still a living, breathing link to the great Bobby Jones.

RTJ: Thank you.  I hope that’s the case.  My family and I are very cognizant of who our grandfather was and is.  It’s a legacy that we really cherish.

GC: As well you should.  And you do the licensing of the Bobby Jones sportswear?

RTJ: Yup.

GC: I think everyone appreciates the fact that you haven’t commercialized the Bobby Jones name to an extent that some families might have.  You could have had Bobby Jones bubble gum and Bobby Jones umbrellas and you did none of that.

RTJ: That would be the equivalent of starting to describe the gallery as “fans.”

(laughter)

GC: Touché!

(laughter)

Can I get a photo of you and Arturo?

RTJ: Sure!