BOBBY JONES: STROKE OF GENIUS

BOBBY JONES: STROKE OF GENIUS

Bobby Jones (1902-1971) is likely the greatest golfer ever. Only in 1930 did Tiger Woods equal jones’ triumph when he won the U.S. Open, British open, U.S. Amateur and British Amateur that year alone then retired from competition at age 28. Chances are no golfer will match that record if only because no great enough to do it will be an amateur.

Jones also won seven U.S. titles in a row, a feat that seems unattainable.

Jones was not just an amateur; he was an amateur who had to make a living, so he couldn’t play every day and mostly played only in championship level tournaments. This makes him sound like a man who played for love of the game alone, but “Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius” shows us a man who can’t help but seem driven to play, obsessed; there’s less joy than compulsion in his career, and the movie juxtaposes him with the era’s top professional, Walter Hagen (Jeremy Northam), who appears to have a lot more fun.

Jim Caviezel (“The Passion of the Christ”) plays Jones as an adult after childhood scenes show us a young boy who becomes infatuated with the game and watches great players while hiding in the rough. He comes from a family ruled by a strict puritanical grandfather, but Jones’ father, “Big Bob” (Brett Rice), is supportive. Not Mary (Claire Forlani), Jones’ wife, who plays a role that has become standard in biographies of great men she’s the woman who wishes her man would give up his dream and spend more time at home with her and the kids.

Of course Mary sees sides of Bobby invisible to the world; this is always how it works with people such as Bobby. The man is tortured. He feels he must enter tournaments and win them, to prove something he can never quite articulate, to show “them” without being sure who they are. And he is often in physical pain.

After a sickly childhood, Bobby grows into a thin man with a tense face, and doctors have only to look at him to prescribe rest. His stomach starts aching about the same time he takes up drinking and smoking, and though the movie does not present him as an alcoholic, we hold that as a hypothesis until we learn the pain comes from syringomyelia a spinal disease that would cripple him later in life.

Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius is a conventional, bland account of a man’s life but an extraordinary lackluster drama. It’s true, Bobby Jones’ story has not been turned into a soap opera with artificially hyped crises and climaxes; it’s about a golfer and there is lots of golf in it. Much of the golf is photographed on the treacherous Old Course at St. Andrews, Scotland, where the game began, and we learn why there are 18 holes: “A bottle of Scotch has 18 shots,” an old-timer explains, “and they reckoned that when it was empty, the game was over.”

O.B. Keeler (Malcolm McDowell) is his friend and “official biographer”; if Bobby Jones was an amateur golfer, Keeler seems to be an amateur biographer with all day free every day to follow him around carrying his stomach medicine (and his whiskey) and chronicling his exploits, sometimes typing while leaning against a stone wall on a course. No wonder that although Jones retired in 1930, Keeler did not publish his “authorized biography” until 1953.

The director, Rowdy Herrington, has made more exciting movies than this one ”Road House” (1989), for example, legendary for its over the top performances by Patrick Swayze as a bouncer/ninja/throat-ripper/guru/dancer/philosopher/enforcer/vigilante and Kelly Lynch as the woman who loves him slash visits him on alternate Wednesdays from 8 o’clock to closing time. “Bobby Jones” is more solemn; it’s the kind of movie you’re not surprised was financed by The Bobby Jones Film Company and authorized by the trustees of The Bobby Jones Trusts (who also oversee lines of clothing and so forth).

And I suppose it’s not astonishing that although the film mentions that Jones founded the Augusta National Golf Club and started the Masters Tournament there, and although a photo over the end credits shows Jones with the course’s favorite golfer, Dwight D. Eisenhower, there is no mention of the club’s exclusion of blacks or women.

To be fair, it’s not really about his entire life but more about his youth and his championship golf. I am not a golfer; I took golf in P.E. class in college and played a few rounds; there are too many movies to see and books to read and cities to explore and conversations to have for me to spend great parts of the day following that little ball around and around and around. But I do realize that everyone I know who plays golf loves the game, and most of them seem to derive more cheer from it than Bobby Jones does in this movie.

That he should get more pleasure out of it than he does is certain if only because we mostly see him making impossible shots chipping the ball into the hole at one point from close to the wall of a sand trap higher than his head. Walter Hagen spends much of this movie raising an eyebrow in reaction shots or grimacing after another miracle by Jones has sunk in.

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