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"You're not Bobby Jones." My tone was accusatory, but the man at the door of my Pullman compartment gave me a wan smile. "Bobby is indisposed." No, I said to myself, Bobby is dead. Bobby's been dead for 35 years. It was midnight, and I was hungry and cranky. "Aren't you going to invite me in?" He was weaving with the rocking motion of the train, a middle- aged man wearing round, wire-rimmed spectacles, a creme-colored sport shirt and a tweed jacket. "I was expecting the ghost of Bobby Jones," I said. "The e-mail said, 'Midnight, the Lake Shore Limited.' I flew to Chicago, grabbed a cab at Midway, ran to the Amtrak counter. . . ." I felt my blood pressure spiking. "The golf ghosts have always visited me. I've never had to chase after them." The man cocked his head and made a tut-tut sound with his tongue. " 'His mind was filled with a single thought: that of his happiness destroyed for no apparent reason,' " he declared. Registering my blank expression, he added, "Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo." Emboldened by my continued silence, he entered the compartment with a peculiar wheeling motion and sat awkwardly in an armchair, his left leg extended stiffly. And that's how I met the ghost of O.B. Keeler.
An hour later a porter arrived with a tray of food-Waldorf salad, prime rib, steak fries, asparagus and chocolate cake- and a bottle of Early Times, which Keeler immediately opened. "You could get this during Prohibition," he said. "It was considered a medicinal whiskey." Sipping from his glass, he winced. "Probably didn't do much for my health."
I was over my disappointment at being stood up by Robert Tyre Jones. In O.B. Keeler I had the man Jones considered "the greatest golf writer who ever lived," the newspaperman who traveled and roomed with Jones for all 14 years of his tournament career, the man who penned several Jones biographies, cowrote Jones's autobiography, created and narrated Jones's instructional films, and functioned as his friend, mentor, press agent and factotum. O.B., they used to say, was the only man who could call Jones "Rubber Tyre" to his face. O.B. was the man who borrowed the term Grand Slam from baseball and applied it to Jones's 1930 sweep of the four major golf championships.
"Bobby suggested the train," Keeler said, watching me light into the prime rib. "We traveled more than 150,000 miles together, and it was usually just the two of us, like this, watching America rush by. We'd take our meals in the Pullman because Bobby disliked the limelight. The stares of strangers made him uncomfortable." He reached for the bottle and poured himself another finger-only now, I noticed, the bottle had a Jim Beam label, and Keeler didn't wince as it went down.
"How did he handle parades?" I was thinking of the gaudy tributes that had greeted Jones upon repatriation in 1926 and '30, when he had thrilled American golf fans by winning British Open titles.
"Not well," Keeler replied. He picked up an asparagus spear with his fingers, bit off the tender end and chewed.
" 'Fame is like a river that beareth up things light and swollen.' " He raised his eyebrows, challenging me to recognize the quotation. "Francis Bacon," he finally said. "I, on the other hand, love mob scenes. To steam up the Hudson with fireboats spraying the sky, to ride up Broadway with the ticker tape flying. . . ." He discarded the half-eaten vegetable.
"What about the mobs that followed Bobby's matches?"
"The gallery had no effect whatever on Bobby," Keeler said. "He didn't care if its component members hung on his next shot with bated breath or read the newspaper, so long as they did not walk about or talk while he was making the shot."
Our conversation continued in this vein for perhaps an hour. I'd pitch a question about Jones, and Keeler would bat it back, pausing only to refill his glass. I was most interested in his characterization of Jones as a man of delicate temperament, prone to temper tantrums as a youngster and then tormented by performance anxieties that would force him into early retirement.
