Sportsman

It is a dozen years since one of the most popular young men in the U. S. began to visit around the country, at first in very grown-up long trousers, later in more grown-up short ones, with a flaming Swiss Guard's cap during the War (when he helped get $150,000 for the Red Cross) and a smile that grew broader and readier as he filled out, steadied down and began to win the biggest tournaments--Robert Tyre Jones Jr. of golf and Atlanta, Ga.

Lately this "greatest golfer the world ever saw," assisted by a news scribe who long ago made the Jones career his own, has found time to write an autobiography.* The book reads as though Rob Jones had dropped in after Sunday supper on his good neighbors, the U. S. public, and fallen to swapping reminiscences, informally, naturally, letting himself be drawn out but not without deprecations such as, "Oh, I don't know about that, now," and confessions like, "I was cocky, all right."

Golf is the theme, of course, but so much personality and family background come into the narrative that the opening chapters, especially, are as clear a picture of the average U. S. sportsman's origins and environment as one might ask.

A new golf course is built. Summer homes grow up around it. Parents take up the game, turning their offspring loose to paddle for themselves--until some of the offspring (Alexa Stirling, Perry Adair, Rob Jones) can beat the parents. Then comes the problem of developing young talent without letting it become infant-prodigious. Rob Jones's paternal grandfather refused, even when discovered in galleries, to admit to any interest in the 13-year-old club champion, the 14-year-old state champion or the 15-year-old Southern chaimpion. Not until 1923 when Jones Jr. was 21 and about to win his first major title, did Grandfather Jones send a telegram. But then he said: "Keep them in the fairway and make all the putts go down."

Now that Rob Jones has given up swearing (audibly) after bad shots, now that he no longer eats pie a la mode during tournaments, now that he has twice won every major title except the British amateur and established medal-play records unapproached in history, it is interesting to learn that he--

Learned to swear from a Negro iceman.

Attended a girls' school and deliberately walked in puddles to get his feet wet and be sent home.

Liked tennis and baseball as well as golf until 1913, when he saw Harry Vardon and Ted Ray play.

Considers "the greatest shot" he ever saw was Ted Ray's 170-yard mashie niblic from behind a 40-foot tree.

Remembers when his own wooden shots were so short he had to "stick a pitch against the pin to take up the slack."

Now changes his ball every six holes for fear he may have knocked it off centre.

Thinks cigarets, during stiff competition, relieve "that stretching and stretching and stretching in side your head."

Thinks Oakmont (Pittsburgh) is the best championship course in the U. S.

Lost 18 pounds during a championship at Oakmont.

Says, "The glare of the championship takes the dew quickly off the turf."

Cannot shake off a Presbyterian feeling about tournament golf-- that the winner is predestined, an instrument of fate.

"A few modest chapters in conclusion" describe and illustrate the Jones technique--the classic body-turn, sharply cocked left eye, straight left arm, opposed wrists in putting, etc.--and reiterate the central Jones doctrine: "Play against par."

Then, taking his departure, Mr. Jones tells his neighbors something they can well believe, that when a sinking feeling tells him he has played in his last championship he will be comforted by the thought of the best round of all, the family foursome on the old home course on Sunday morning.

Without Parsley

"WE"--Charles A. Lindbergh-- Putnam, ($2.50). This book has been the subject of much gossip. At first, it was erroneously reputed to be an expansion of Colonel Lindbergh's signed articles in the New York Times. Its publication date was delayed nearly a month. Skeptics said that the author-aviator was having disagreements with his publishers.

Now that "WE" is put, there is no doubt that it is original material from Colonel Lindbergh's own pen, that he took great pains and a reasonable length of time in writing it. It is an ungarnished autobiography, beginning with the sentence: "I was born in Detroit, Michigan, on February 4, 1902." Many a garrulous autobiographer might well follow Colonel Lindbergh's example of omitting the personal parsley.

The best chapters tell of the author's early barnstorming adventures. Over Billings, Mont., with a pilot named Lynch, he attempted to draw a crowd by doing some wing-walking, throwing overboard a dummy, go that spectators would think Wing-Walker Lindbergh had fallen to his death. "We returned to our field and waited expectantly for the curious ones to come 'rushing out for information, but two hours later, when a few Montanans did arrive, they told us about one of the other attractions--a fellow who dived from an airplane into the Yellowstone River which was about three feet deep at that point. That was the last time we attempted to thrill a Montana crowd."

Wisely, modestly, Colonel Lindbergh has devoted far more space to such events and to his training days at Army camps than to the deed which the U. S. has recorded on the same page with Washington crossing the Delaware and Peary reaching the Pole.

The book contains an emotional foreword by U. S. Ambassador to France Myron Timothy Herrick; and an account of the Lindbergh receptions in Europe and the U. S. (entitled "A Little of What the World Thought of Lindbergh") by Lieut. Commander Fitzhugh Green of the U. S. Navy, able journalist.

He Who Got Slapped

CIRCUS PARADE--Jim Tully--A. & C. Boni ($2.50). Before he became a literary man, Jim Tully was, as everyone knows, a he-man who got slapped hard by life. His thick red hair was badly tousled in roundhouses, barrooms, boxcars and worse. Hanging around a small-time circus was comparatively idyllic. All he had to do was help drive the tentstakes, feed the animals, chase vermin, and fool or fight the "rube" public in quiet sections of the South. He had much time to develop his "understanding" of the rudimentary humanities and brutalities of hand-to-mouth people and evolve the social viewpoint that was later to shock polished people into regarding Mr. Tully as a visitation upon polite hypocrisy.

Recent aspects of the Tully visitation have been disappointing. Classified with and by the elect as a hardboiled, outspoken cynic, Mr. Tully has been put to it to keep his crudeness spectacular and not merely crude, especially in his writings about the Hollywood notables whom he met when living with Charles Spencer Chaplin as strong-armed, sympathetic major domo. But these circus addenda to the Tully autobiography (Beggars of Life, 1924) return to a milieu wholly comfortable for Mr. Tully, where he can exercise his storytelling ability with no private emotion more complicating than a half-hearted wish to trade his literary life for the disheveled simplicity of a circus once more.

As a result, the stories are good stories. The circus people love and hate, give and steal, swear and sing with inflections nearly as much their own as Mr. Tully's. If the real Moss-Haired girl, half Swedish, quarter Indian and quarter Irish, did not actually wash her hair in stale beer and herbs, or if she was not the freak of virtue that Mr. Tully has made her, there was surely enough virtue and stale beer about her to make exaggeration more permissible than understatement. If the blood and thunder seem as pat as they are plentiful in "Hey Rube!" the riot story, that is only because Mr. Tully is a journalist of 0. Henryesque dexterity. Surely irate oil-drillers would spill some of the blood of a short-change artist like Slug Finnerty and a slicker like Slug's boss, Bob Cameron.

All brief, the stories are like body-punches from a bully-boy with chunky arms: how Denna Wyoming, the Negro lion-tamer, got chewed up by the blind brown bear; how Lila, the strong woman, died lovelorn, and had the calliope and elephant cage for her funeral; how John Quincy Adams, a Negro clown, got bathed with boiling tar. Sometimes the bully-boy stops punching to strew around some casual obscenities; sometimes he just reflects, idly, wistfully, comically. At all times his book is as close to life as a stake-driver's undershirt. Admirers of realism, and Americana, must roundly applaud.

*Down the Fairway--R. T. Jones Jr. & O. B. Keeler--Minton, Balch ($3.50). TIME, August 8, 1927