Meet the Man Behind the Bobby Jones Legend
By Greg Evans
Bobby Jones fills the annals of history sporting books as one of the greatest golfers to ever pick up a mashie. He is known the world over, printed and talked about today because of his brilliant golf game. Behind the scenes, though, was an eccentric, hard-drinking writer and journalist responsible for the spectacular black and white headlines and prudently crafted articles about Bobby in the local and national rags, newspapers that brought the world to people’s doorsteps. This writer befriended the young golfer Bobby Jones in 1916, and together they created not just a world-class golfing sensation. Together, they created a legend. The remarkable man that Bobby Jones called “the greatest golf writer that has ever lived” was Oscar Bane (O.B.) Keeler, better known in golf circles as “Pop.” Pop was born in Chicago on June 4, 1882, on Rush Street. He liked to joke with people that he was “the first white child born in Chicago.” He was known for his ribald limericks and eidetic memory capable of reciting at the drop of a hat quotables and classical lines of canon literature that would have an audience on its feet laughing and cheering.
At the age of four, his family moved to the small town of Tate, Georgia, in Pickens County, where he grew up attending Marietta High School. It was in high school that he studied Latin and Greek and found a true lifelong love of words. Pop was an awkward young man, a hypochondriac with poor eyesight and no real direction in terms of career aspirations. He bounced around from one low-level job to the next like a lost pelagic fish.
After graduating from high school, he worked in a bank, a railroad office, an iron foundry, a marble finishing mill, another railroad office, a fertilizer company, as a promoter of a silver mine in Mexico, and in the office of a fire insurance agency, where he was a bookkeeper. He created an inefficient technique for bookkeeping that was so peculiar that no one after him could figure it out. Along the way, he married and had two children. His marriage was in no way made in heaven. There was constant bickering and financial instability. His wife had been raised in an exceedingly affluent home spoiled by life’s luxuries and leisure. The future looked grim.
Pop’s mental decline finally reached its zenith. He felt like he was suffocating and trapped with no way out. It was then that he decided to go down to the Chattahoochee River and drown himself. “I would go out to the Chattahoochee River and throw a rock off the bridge, without turning loose of the rock,” he would say while retelling the story later in life. One night, he did go down to the river. He stood on the bridge and gazed down at the dark churning water, but like most everything else in his fractured life, he didn’t see this plan through. Instead, he returned home.
Pop’s only aspiration was to work for a newspaper, though all his attempts over the previous 10-plus years had been soundly rejected. The reasons were always the same- a lack of experience. Pop was determined, though, to become a journalist, and in December 1908, desperate and deep in the quandary of depression, he offered his services to The Atlanta Georgian for “free” until they felt he was worth being paid. “I even had to supply my own typewriter!” Keeler said. The paper, seeing no real downside, took him up on his offer. His very first story made the front page of the paper. Eventually, he was hired on staff, earning $18 a week, as much as he had earned at any of his other failed endeavors. He went on to write over a million words and 500 columns for the Associated Press alone. He rubbed elbows with fellow journalist Ernest Hemingway. Argued the rules of tennis with baseball great Ty Cobb. Witnessed all 13 major championships won by Bobby Jones. Sang a duet in a drunken performance with famed opera singer Enrico Caruso in the lobby of a hotel at 4:00 in the morning and wrote the, now famous, obituary for Yankee great Babe Ruth.
Pop was a natural with words. Once, when asked about marriage, he said, “Matrimony is like a batter in baseball. The wife is the pitcher, the husband is the catcher. The wife gives the signals, the husband catches all the foul tips on his shins and finger joints. And when the box score is announced, all of the batters’ errors are passed balls, and there are no wild pitches.”
After a year or so with The Atlanta Georgian, he spent the next three years writing for the Kansas City Star, where he worked beside Ernest Hemingway and covered a variety of stories from lifestyles to crime to sports. He returned to the
Georgian in 1912, and it was a year later that he found a passion for writing about golf, a subject that would become an obsession for the next 37 years. Pop’s interests were as varied as his eccentricities. There was never a pretty lady who passed by that Pop didn’t notice, and often attempted to engage in conversation with his favorite pick-up line, “I love you madly, shall we flee together?” He was a boxer in his youth and a competitive rifle shooter. He loved baseball and football and made numerous trips to the Rose Bowl. He was interested in zebra racing, gambling; he followed local criminal trials, and he loved a practical joke. Everything he read or saw stuck in his head like an encyclopedia that he could tap into at any time.
In 1915, after 10 discontented years of marriage, his wife divorced him, taking the children with her to her family’s estate in the countryside near Marietta. It was just another one of his life’s failures that he was forced to swallow. He delved even further into his work and into his golf game, not to mention drowning himself in whiskey when the opportunity presented itself.
Pop first began playing golf as a boy during summers in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Despite his love of the game, he was never better than an average amateur player and never once in his life broke 90. He was so dedicated to the game that he even kept clubs at his office at the newspaper. Pop was in the office one day, bragging about his new driver and how well he could hit with it. His friend and colleague, Fuzzy Woodruff, set an egg on a piece of chewing gum as a tee on the floor and placed a golf ball on top of it. He then challenged Keeler to take a full swing, hitting the golf ball without hitting the egg. Pop accepted the challenge and took the greatest swing of his life. He smashed the golf ball along with the egg, splattering it across the newsroom. Fuzzy later said, “If a restaurant owner could spread an egg that far, he could retire in six months.”
One day, Pop was playing a round at East Lake Country Club and reached the green on the 15th hole in regulation. He was on the edge of the green and glanced up to see a robin on the fringe looking for insects. Pop stopped his routine and said to his playing partner, “Holy cow! How can a man putt with robins stomping around?” It took him four putts to go 30 feet to the hole. Pop traveled with Bobby Jones over 150,000 miles in 16 years. Although Bobby’s immortality was not placed upon him solely by his splendid swing and even though he isn’t the most winningest golfer of all time, his name is possibly the most famous in the sport, not in small part due to Pop Keeler. It was Pop who wrote about the miraculous victories and gut-wrenching shots with a Shakespearean dramatic flair and wit of an old-world newspaperman. H.G. Salsinger of the Detroit News said it best, “While Jones composed his epics, Keeler sang them to the world, and they seemed all the finer for the manner of singing.” He got his name etched amongst the greatest sports writers of all time and possibly the greatest of all golf journalists.
When Bobby was invited to take part in a radio show series on golf, Pop was there to make sure Bobby used the right words. It was a partnership that worked and never failed to live up to the hype. In 1927, Pop was heavily involved in the writing of Bobby Jones’ autobiography called Down the Fairway. He wrote about when Bobby Jones retired from competitive golf at the age of 27 and headed to Hollywood to become a movie star with Warner Brothers, filming “how to play” golf movies. He created the storyline, typing 10 pages of error-free copy an hour, painting a portrait of Bobby Jones with intimacy, portraying him as the regular guy he was. He used the same animated exculpatory style he applied to his golfing articles.
The duo that became one of the preeminent partnerships in all of sports history, Bobby Jones defining victory and Pop Keeler taking it to the mainstream, linked their names forever. No two fellows were better equipped to ride that rollercoaster, working side-by-side, than Bobby Jones and Pop Keeler. Champions are made on the fields of play, but legends like O.B. Keeler are created late at night and in those early morning hours by the clicking and clacking of an old typewriter.