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that the two professional titans of the day, Walter Hagen and Gene Sarazen, never won an Open championship, in Britain or America, in which Jones was also entered.
    Bobby crowned this incomparable stretch, surely the most glorious ever in American sport, with the Grand Slam of 1930. He retired from competitive golf then at the pinnacle, at age twenty-eight.
    I remember the city of Savannah, and no doubt the entireSouth, glued to the radio broadcast of the ticker-tape parade down Broadway, when Bobby returned from Britain with the first two legs of the Grand Slam. You could hear the cheers and the music, the harsh Yankee voices of the broadcasters describing the scene. Then the microphone was placed before Jones. Over the air came that soft Georgia accent. My father had to turn his face away to hide his emotion. My mother wept openly.
    Here at last was our Grail Knight, our Parsifal. Jones’ triumphs, the very fact of his existence, seemed all by themselves to recall the South from decades of ignominy and exile. His graciousness, his gentility, the fact that he was not a coarse Northern striver but a gentle-born chevalier, an amateur. Jones embodied the finest qualities of Southern manhood and he had not just whipped the Yankees but the whole damn world.
    And now here he was. In our city. Crossing the causeways in an open car toward our own Krewe Island. From our perch atop Albert’s watermelon truck, my brother and I could see the glistening wetlands extending ahead for half a dozen miles and, rising out of them by the sea, the towers of Krewe Island’s grand hotel. It was a pilgrimage. The motorcade stretched a hundred cars ahead and hundreds more behind; Model A’s and Plymouths, Reos and Auburns and Packards, crawling, sputtering, backfiring from their sizzling-hot, trembling exhausts. Farmers’ wagons choked the route. Autos would overheat and stall and be pushed out of the way by the onswarming pilgrims, sometimes straight into the wetland muck, like casualties being shouldered aside by an advancing army.
    Hagen was up there beside Bobby, suntanned so dark helooked wood-stained, grinning to the girls and favoring the matrons with a little cavalier gesture of his hat. Flowers were being tossed into the open back of the car. Bystanders pressed apples and pears on the heros. “Bobby! Bobby!” they cried, even the barefoot swampers for whom golf, or the idea of sport period, was as alien as some notion from the moon.
    Bobby was their knight too. He had crossed the ocean to take on the world’s best and come home bearing not just their silver cups, but their admiration and respect as well.
    Jones stood on a par with the other titans of the decade—Lindbergh, Dempsey, Tilden, Ruth—and, in the eyes of many, surpassed them all.
    But where was Junah?
    Had anyone contacted him? Did he even know that Jones and Hagen had arrived? Would he miss the practice round? I strained my eyes in every direction but saw no sign of the Ford or the Chalmers.
    At Krewe Island, the scene broke down into pure merry bedlam. Cars parked anywhere they could, on fairways, levees, raw gooey muck; a mass surge swept Hagen and Jones on toward the hotel and the tented pavilion that had been erected outside. Garland and I wriggled forward, worming our way through the crowd. With a leap and a hand from Judge Anderson, we were home free. Up there! On the podium.
    There must have been fifty reporters, plus every political scalawag for 500 miles, all jostling for position in front of the cameras. Adele Invergordon was up front, looking glamorous and mouthing words of welcome which were utterly lost in the feedback and echo of the microphones sputtering for power. It took almost ten minutes for something resembling order, not to mention electrical current, to arrive, and Garland and I used every second to wriggle our way closer. I was scuffling with one meaty fellow, right up near the mikes. He stepped on my foot, just about breaking my toes; I turned