Mike Westrum Wins 4th Bobby Jones Award in 2011

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Last Updated on Tuesday, 20 December 2011 16:59
Written by BOB JONES

Mike Westrum won his fourth Bobby Jones award in 2011. Mike shot a two-under par round of 70 with a net 69 at Oakhurst on December 18, 2011. Congratulations on the round that won you the Bobby Jones award.

Permit me a little history;

Of his thirteen titles Bobby Jones collected four of them, (considered major championships at the time), within a single season. No amateur or professional golfer, before or since has beaten that record. Jones retired from playing Championship Golf at the age of 28. Jones had chosen to play as an amateur, and not a professional, because he had other ambitions in life.

 During his championship years Jones beat everybody in the world, worth beating, both professional and amateur. Jones under pressure could and did score seven 3’s in a row, hole a putt of forty yards, break his own course records the day after he had set them. But he was the sort of golfer who could come to the last three holes of a major championship leading by eighteen strokes, and then limp home four over par.

In 1929 Jones traveled to Pebble Beach to try and win a third straight US Amateur Championship.  He lost in the first round to somebody the public had never heard of, yet Bobby Jones was singularly the greatest Amateur golfer of his era, and probably the greatest amateur golfer of  all times.

“The rules of the game whatever they were, I have respected sometimes even beyond the letter, and it seems to me that there is little excuse for playing the game in a haphazard way. I have always thought if a game is worth playing at all, it was worth making some effort to play it correctly”.  Bobby Jones.

Bobby Jones sank his final putt on the 11th hole at Merion C.C. to win the Grand Slam, by a margin of 8 and 7. After Jones ball went into the hole, his caddy retrieved the Spalding Black dot ball and kept it for 30 years until using it in an afternoon match at his Philadelphia golf club here he lost it.

You did good Mike.