Mark Frost - The Grand Slam: Bobby Jones, America, and the Story of Golf

In an average year lightning strikes the United States over 22 million times. Your chance of being hit by one of those strikes is 1 in 300,000: 7.7 casualties per million people per million lightning strikes. Lightning kills a hundred people a year in the United States alone, and critically injures over a thousand. An average bolt carries the power of 30 million volts, and somewhere between 10,000 and 200,000 amps, enough electricity to illuminate a hundred-watt bulb for six months. On July 10, 1926, lightning strikes detonated a naval ammunition depot in Mount Hope, New Jersey, killing nineteen people and injuring thirty-eight others.

On July 29, 1929, a young Atlanta lawyer named Bobby Jones and the members of his regular Monday afternoon foursome were making the turn onto the back nine at East Lake Country Club when they noticed a bank of towering thunderclouds building to the southeast. Bobby had grown up on the East Lake course, dodged a hundred storms during his life there, and decided they would have time to finish their round before the body of the storm threatened them. The first drops of rain began to fall as they putted out on the twelfth green, set near the right arm of the horseshoe-shaped lake that curves around the stately Tudor clubhouse and gives the course its name. As they made their way to the thirteenth tee, a bolt of lightning struck the tenth fairway less than forty yards to their right. Jones felt an ominous tingle surge through his metal spikes. He yelled to his buddies to make a run for the clubhouse, and they had no sooner changed direction than a second bolt hit a small tree at the back of the thirteenth tee, not twenty yards away, exactly where theyd been standing moments earlier. They sprinted across the small bridge that spans the northeast corner of the lake, leading back to the eighteenth green and clubhouse. Huddled under their umbrellas, Jones and his friends lost count of the lightning strikes hammering down on the course around them, a ferocious concentration of energy unlike any storm theyd ever seen.

As they hustled across the broad gravel drive, the last stretch of open ground before the safety of the portico sheltering the locker-room entrance, a monstrous bolt blasted the high double chimney on top of the clubhouse. The chimney exploded in a shower of bricks and mortar. Jones felt his umbrella collapse around his head and he blindly staggered the last few steps to the protection of the door. Safely inside, the men shared a nervous, gasping laugh of relief. When Jones discarded his umbrella and turned around, his friends gasped again: the back of his shirt had been ripped from collar to waist, and he was bleeding from a six-inch gash that ran from his right shoulder to the middle of his spine. A heavy fragment of the chimney had punched through his umbrella, struck him a glancing blow, and torn the shirt from his back. He hadnt felt a thing. Only now, as the adrenaline began to burn off, did he even realize hed been injured. The men shared a moment of silent wonder at how closeinchestheir great friend had come to certain death. Bobby was the first to break the tension with a jokethe golf gods were obviously displeased with him, but at least he knew where to send the bill for a new shirt. The luck of the Irish again: What else would you expect from a man born on St. Paddys Day? Drinks flowed from the jug of bootlegged corn liquor Jones stored in his locker, the worst-kept secret at the club; a survivors warmth rekindled in them, and the shadow passed.

When the storm moved through they walked outside and stared again in wonder: the driveway was littered, a debris field of bricks and mortar, some fragments scattered as far as the eighteenth tee box, three hundred yards away. Any one of those objects, thought Jones, could have killed him had it struck him on the head. He took it in stride, fully aware that no matter how much good fortune came your way, one day the final bill comes due. The gods get the last laugh. Time is on their side. A fatal blow had been struck, but no one would know it for twenty-five years.

The myth that lightning never strikes twice in the same place is exactly that; the mast atop the Empire State Building, for example, attracts on average a hundred bolts a year. Lightning of an equally powerful but more metaphysical variety had also centered Robert Tyre Jones Jr. in its sights on the old twelfth hole at East Lake, striking him square sixteen years earlier. Its impact changed the course of his life, propelling him forward to the abundant promise of this moment in 1929, already one of the celebrated names of his age and on the cusp of immortality, as surely as this second strike would lead to his ruin.

No matter what happens, keep on hitting the ball.