PhD Defense by Eric W. Steagall
THE LAST AMATEUR: BOBBY JONES AND GOLF IN THE 1920s
Tuesday, July 8, 2025, 1:00 pm EST, Zoom Meeting

Abstract

Robert Tyre Jones, Jr., was the premier golfer and one of the most celebrated Americans of the 1920s, a decade remembered as the “golden age” of sports in the United States. Exceptional athletes dotted the national landscape during this era, but few of “Bobby” Jones’s contemporaries dominated their sports without turning professional. He remained an amateur for his entire career, which culminated with the “grand slam” and his subsequent retirement from tournament golf in 1930. Several journalists and independent researchers have written about Jones and golf, yet none have properly situated him and his sport within the larger societal shifts, conflicts, and developments that took place in 1920s America. And while Jones was the most admired southern figure of the era, no historian or scholar has sufficiently considered what he meant to his native region during the first full decade after the Great War.
“The Last Amateur” is a narrative history of the making and meaning of Bobby Jones, on and off the golf course, during the first three decades of the twentieth century. This biographical dissertation goes beyond simply chronicling his life and impact on the game of golf over the course of his competitive career. In exploring how he shaped his times as well as how his times shaped him, it reinterprets Jones’s cultural significance in the South, in America, and in Great Britain. Using newspapers, magazines, periodicals, contemporary autobiographies and memoirs, oral histories, and archival collections, this project makes historiographical contributions to the fields of sports, popular culture, southern, and mass media history.
Amateurism, a Victorian tradition first invented to preserve England’s rigid class hierarchy, is one of the main threads weaving each chapter of this dissertation together. This dynamic social construct was the basis for governing many sports in general and golf in particular during the 1920s. Bobby Jones personified the core tenets of the “spirit,” or “code,” of amateurism; his image as a “gentleman amateur” remains one of the defining aspects of his legacy. Nonetheless, he also contested and reshaped this stringent ideal throughout his career. Examining how he grappled with the constraints of amateurism, with his status as a national and international celebrity, and with his own personal struggles reveals new insights on the tensions and contradictions that wrought U.S. society in the period between the Armistice and the first full year of the Great Depression.
The Committee Members:
Dr. Johnny Smith (Chair), School of History and Sociology, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Daniel Amsterdam, School of History and Sociology, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Douglas Flamming, School of History and Sociology, Georgia Institute of Technology
Dr. Clif Stratton, Department of History, Washington State University
Dr. Glenn Eskew, Department of History, Georgia State University