Bobby Jones, Stroke of Genius (Special Edition)

Rating:
Summary: Awesome
Review: It's hard to imagine that this movie did not perform better at the box office; it's by far one of the better movies this year, and certainly one of the best golfing movies. Everything about it is inspiring and beatiful...the story, the characters, the settings. I'll admit the pacing is not exactly fast, but the overall message makes up for this.

Rating:
Summary: A fine film about one of the greatest golfers of all time
Review: The name of Bobby Jones has an aura of greatness and gentility about it that still shines more than seventy years since he retired from competitive golf and more than thirty years since his death. In our age of money sports, it is difficult to conceive of how anyone could accomplish all Bobby Jones accomplished as an amateur. If you count all his victories at professional tournaments (for which he received not a dime) and his amateur championship victories (which had a much higher status than they do today), he is still second to only Jack Nicklaus and still ahead of such luminaries as Tiger Woods, Walter Hagen, Ben Hogan, Gary Player, and, well, everyone else. If you only count professional championships, Bobby Jones is still tied for eighth.

Oh, and he is the still the only man to ever win the golfing Grand Slam in a single season. The closest anyone has come is the amazing four straight majors by Tiger Woods a few years back. (Look, when Tiger was the defending champion at all four major championships, you have to acknowledge something near miraculous had been accomplished.)

Never mind that along the way he received undergraduate degrees in Engineering from Georgia Tech and in English from Harvard. He also studied law for a year at Emory University and was admitted to the Georgia Bar in 1928 (all before he accomplished the Grand Slam in 1930). He was also married in 1924. He and his wife, Mary, raised three children. Oh, and he founded and built Augusta National and founded the Masters Tournament.

So, no matter what you admire, pure sports accomplishment, sports history, nostalgia for lost nobility, the idea of a balanced life, or just about anything else you want to project onto his life, Bobby Jones lived a life worth knowing something about. This film, "Bobby Jones: A Stroke of Genius" is a good bio-pic that tells us about how Bobby Jones became the golfing prodigy he was and the toll winning all those tournaments took on him.

I had always had the vague notion that Bobby Jones simply retired because, like some Classic Hero, he had no more worlds to conquer. It may have been partly that, but it was also that the pressure he put on himself to win taxed him to his limits and he valued his family life enough to walk away rather than lose what mattered most in life.

This film does not look to demean Bobby Jones in any way or discuss those aspects of that time in the South that would be repugnant to us today sitting smugly in our culture of Political Correctness. Rather, this is about his golfing life and career and his relationship with his father, grandfather, mother, wife, Walter Hagen, and O.B. Keeler (the writer for the Atlanta Journal who followed Jones's career - here wonderfully played by Malcolm McDowell).

James Caviezel does a good job showing us the nobility that rose through the torment of Jones's life and Jeremy Northam does a fine job as the dissolute Walter Hagen acting as the foil for Jones. Is the film more hagiography that biography? Probably, yes. Could it have been darker and more demeaning of Jones? Also, probably, yes. But why? Jones earned his legendary reputation and that is part of his life as well. We should treasure such greatness rather than cheat ourselves of it by dragging it through imported mud.

A good film for everyone not just golfers. Oh, beware, there is a bit of profanity - I guess Jones swore when he was younger and became frustrated. The swearing, such as it is, is more endearing than shocking - at least in the way it is presented to us in the film.

Rating:
Summary: More Than A Sport/A Game
Review: With maturity comes interest in more important things. Jones' friend O.B.Keeler says them in this best golf film: 1) Money will ruin sport; 2) Life consists of much more than winning championships; 3) You've did so much for other people, e.g. winning championships for your dad, etc, now what are you going to do for yourself upon retirment from competitive golf? Build Augusta National!

This well acted life of Bobby Jones is so well done by the actors. Give them all credit, they masterfully created essence of this great sportsman's life. The drama is slow developing and is not sensational, thus swimming upstream in our cultural air. That is why I enjoyed it so immensely. For this reviewer it is in the class of "Chariots of Fire."

More like this. The world needs it.