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we’ll miss ’em sure!”
    With my mother pushing, we bolted straight outside, smack into the Messner twins’ dad’s hired man Albert whose ancient Ford stakebed was creaking by with a load of green melons. Garland shouted to him if he’d give us a scoot to the station. Albert laughed and told us they already was about sixteen million folksjammed in there, packing the streets and spilt over onto every porch, stoop and rooftop. “Y’all boys won’t see jack squat a-racin’ there. Climb on the truck with me, for the motorcade.”
    “What motorcade?”
    “Don’t y’all know nothing? The motorcade out to Krewe Island!”

Eight
    T O UNDERSTAND BOBBY JONES’ STATURE in the South at that time, you have to remember that the War of Northern Aggression (as we called it in our family), or Civil War as the Yankees preferred, had by no means then receded into the benign past. Its memory was fresh as a still-open wound. Not so much the war itself, for the South had achieved abundant glory on the battlefield, nor even the fact of defeat, for in surrender the nation yet maintained a certain grim dignity. It was that obscene and lingering hell euphemistically labeled Reconstruction that rent the Southland’s soul and ground her honor into the dirt.
    As recently as the 1870s, private property was still being confiscated under the Domestic Reparations Act. My own grandfather had all his weapons, including two antique shotguns and a Tennessee long rifle forcibly taken from his house by Federal officers in ’79. I still recall the cold rage of that proud gentlemanwhen he spoke of the helplessness and despair he endured in that moment. Families were still being put off the land in the 1880s, and the poor agrarian Negro, who of all was most blameless, was still being exploited by that element of shameless Northern locust known as the carpetbagger.
    Then must come the admission that in each Southerner’s private heart, even the most ignorant cracker and peckerwood’s, lay hidden the dishonorable truth that our side, however valiant its champions, however noble its defense of sacred home soil, was the side that stood in line with human slavery and fought for its preservation.
    This secret knowledge of our collective guilt, which none but the most courageous would give thought, let alone voice to, lent an added agony to our nation’s vanquishment and prostration. My father said many times that the wonder wasn’t that the South expressed so much rage, as that she expressed so little. Compare her to Weimar Germany, after its mortification at Compiègne.
    It was that same pain, the loss of national manhood, that the South felt so keenly. Not just the men, whose culture had been built on a beau ideal of manly pride and virtue, but the women, children and servants whose psychological security depended upon the stability and power of their fathers, brothers and sons.
    The Great War helped. The heroics of Southern warriors like Alvin York of Tennessee and General Black Jack Pershing. But even their spectacular exploits were performed beneath the stars and stripes of the hated Yankee flag. As late as the 1920s, the South had not produced a champion with the combined virtues of spectacular achievement and Southern purity.
    Not until Robert Tyre Jones, Jr., of Atlanta.
    Permit me, Michael, passing over his scores of lesser triumphs, to recall only the major championships Jones collected over a brief seven years.
    1923   U.S. Open
    1924   U.S. Amateur
    1925   U.S. Amateur
    1926   British Open, U.S. Open
    1927   British Open, U.S. Amateur
    1928   U.S. Amateur
    1929   U.S. Open
    1930   British Amateur, British Open, U.S. Open, U.S. Amateur
    In that brilliant span, Jones won 13 of the 21 national championships he entered. He won all three of the British Opens he played in and one of the two British Amateurs. In nine U.S. Opens from ’22 to ’30 he finished first four times and second four times. So dominant was he in his prime