I grew up in Atlanta near the Bobby Jones golf course on Northside Drive. That’s where I picked up golf and snow sledding from my dad. My son and all my friends will agree that I never really learned to do either one very well. But I can brag about two rounds under 80. One was well witnessed in a tournament at East Lake and is in the book, but I was a single at the Grove Park Inn. My potential witness had a headache.

I received a BA in History from Davidson College and my MD degree at UVA. After medical internship and residency at Strong Memorial in Rochester, New York, I joined the Army Medical Corps in Washington as an internist in a Walter Reed clinic at Fort Meyer. I learned to be a neurologist at Grady Hospital. After being recruited to join the Emory faculty, I learned muscle pathology at the NIH and electrophysiology (EMG) at the Mayo Clinic. I worked as a specialist in weakness and loss of sensation, two of the problems that affected Bobby Jones.

I joined East Lake in 1989, four years before Tom Cousins purchased it and watched him transform it. I never saw Bobby Jones, but I read his books and wrote down eye-witness stories about him from over forty people who had known him well, especially Tommy Barnes, Charlie Yates, and Charlie Harrison.

Tom Cousins had an enormous influence on me. He chose me to be chairman of the Emory Committee for the Bobby Jones Scholarship. It is the student-exchange program with St Andrews University. It gave my wife, Priscilla, and me five wonderful years of close contact with young people. During the first Gulf War, the mother of one of the St Andrews Scholars told us we were her son’s “American parents.” I also watched closely when Rees Jones and Andrew Green did their complete golf course transformations.

Writing this book has taught me important things about Bobby Jones. My experience with so many patients with spinal cord disease gave me a unique perspective. Although he was two years older than my dad and I never knew him, my time with his friends, especially the former college students who saw him so often, has made me imagine that he was a friend of mine.