Rory McIlroy and the grandest prize in golf

The grand slam in golf is a feat almost impossible to imagine now. It meant winning all four golfing majors in the same year, and has only been done once, by the extraordinary Bobby Jones in 1930. Jones was awarded a ticker-tape reception in New York, and a golfing writer of the time with a feel for geometry called it ‘The Impregnable Quadrilateral’, a fortress that could never be taken.

Jones, a lawyer by profession and unimpeachably honourable in his play, was a canny young man as well as a remarkable player: he had backed himself for the grand slam at the start of the year with a British bookmaker at 50-1. He eventually collected $60,000, or getting on for $11 million today. Who wouldn’t look forward to popping down to Ladbrokes to pick up a slice of that?

Jones completed his unparalleled achievement in the US Amateur Championship at Merion golf course in Pennsylvania. Even now the local club historian bursts into tears if you ask him to describe Jones’s birdie shot on the 11th to give him an 8 & 7 victory (the tournaments were all matchplay then, rather than stroke play as now), and complete his slam. The other titles then were the Open Championship, the US Open and the British Amateur.

Now the slam means winning the Masters and the US PGA as well as the two Opens. Only one player has ever come close to Jones, and that of course is Tiger Woods, who held all four titles but not in the same calendar year, in 2000-2001. In itself this is a mind-boggling achievement which makes Woods’s defenestration from the top 100 all the more poignant. This extraordinary genius of a sportsman now lies at 104, sandwiched between Thorbjørn Olesen of Denmark and America’s Jason Kokrak, which sounds like the sort of thing that got Tiger into trouble in the first place.