INSIGHTS

BOBBY JONES. HOW American his name sounds! He loved the game of golf, and few have ever played it so well. No one has ever been more of a gentleman. In one glorious year, 1930, as an amateur (he never turned professional), Bobby Jones won the U.S. Open, the U.S. Amateur, the British Open and the British Amateur-golf’s grand slam. It had never been done before, nor has it been done since. And when that year was over, Bobby Jones retired from competition to reign, as Bernard Darwin wrote, as the “champion of champions” until the end of his days.

But it was a ceremony in Bobby Jones’ honor, held 28 years after his 1930 triumph at Younger Graduation Hall in St. Andrews, Scotland, that provides the inspiration for this piece. Jones was there as captain of the American team for the World Amateur Golf Team Championship. Before he left for Scotland, he received a wire from the town clerk of St. Andrews asking him whether he would be willing to receive the Freedom of the City Award. Jones agreed, without realizing the prestige associated with the award. Only a handful of people, Jones discovered when he reached Scotland, had ever been chosen to receive the honor. The only other American was a non-golfer named Benjamin Franklin.

Bobby Jones was revered in St. Andrews. More than 1,700 people attended the sold-out award dinner. There was a short, gracious speech by the provost, who reviewed Jones’ career and described the feeling the people of St. Andrews had for him. Then Jones gave an emotional response, saying toward the end, “I could take out of my life everything except my experience at St. Andrews, and I’d still have a rich, full life.” At the conclusion of the festivities, as reported by Herbert Warren Wind in Sports Illustrated, Bobby Jones and the provost left the stage, got into an electric golf cart and rode out of the hall. The crowd came to its feet and spontaneously burst into the old Scottish song, Will Ye No’ Come Back Again?

That was everything a tribute should be: unforced, full of affection, perfectly realized. In that moment, Bobby Jones was made to understand how much he meant to the people of Scotland and the depth of their feeling for him because of the way he played the game and the way he lived his life.

This, of course, is what tributes should do but too often don’t. The most ghastly tributes are delivered by oleaginous preachers at the funerals of people they don’t know. People you know and even love are laid to rest with empty words and vacuous homilies by men who have the unfortunate and impossible task of delivering professional and packaged tributes. I know of a school where the board recognizes teachers after a certain length of service with motions filled with “whereases” and legalisms; the same identical motion is made about each teacher. Only the name changes. No danger of a catch in the throat there.

If tributes are to work, they must thoroughly befit the person and the occasion. If they are to succeed, they must drive out impersonality and false or feigned emotion. The best of them can even contain a gentle edge. When John Updike received the Edward Macdowell Medal in 1981, novelist Wilfred Sheed gave the introduction: “John Updike could have picked up this award any time from about the age of 22 on. It was particularly galling back in the Fifties, if you were trying to be a Boy Wonder yourself, to realize that this young pup was already there, patenting brilliant images so fast that there soon wouldn’t be any left. All we could do was wait for the fellow to burn himself out, which he was obviously bound to do. So here he is today, still brilliant, and still, somehow, eternally, the youngest guy in the room.”

But what do you do when tributes are expected yet hardly deserved? What do you do when a person has poured all his energy into something that still remains determinedly mediocre? Now the performance is over, the book is written, the marketing plan is completed, and your friend turns, eyes shining, face flushed with excitement, to you, his wise and trusted friend, and awaits your enthusiastic, generous, unqualified tribute. What do you do-the play was interminable, the book was banal, the marketing plan was a gift to the competition-to avoid crushing your friend’s spirit and at the same time maintain a remote connection to intellectual honesty?

You might consider the strategies of people with friends in the theater, the people who depend on the power of language to equivocate and kindly dissemble. After seeing a friend give an uninspired performance, Noel Coward would simply say, “Incredible.” Benedict Nightingale, a writer for The New York Times, recalled a friend who, in similar uncomfortable circumstances, would shake his head and say, “Good wasn’t the word.” Another expression that can walk both sides of the street is, “Marvelous to have seen you,” which another of Nightingale’s friends uses. The performer is so pumped-up when he hears it that he only focuses on the “marvelous” part; Nightingale’s friend retains his truthfulness because, he explains, “They are people I like, so it would be marvelous to see them anywhere.”

Tributes that succeed most because they communicate best are distinguished as much by their eloquence as by the power of their feeling. What can a commander in chief say to a mother in Massachusetts who, it was reported, had lost five sons in the Civil War? President Lincoln wrote: “I feel how weak and fruitless must be any words of mine which should attempt to beguile you from the grief of a loss so overwhelming. But I cannot refrain from tendering to you the consolation that may be found in the thanks of the Republic they died to save. I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom.”

In this case, the tribute rings absolutely true, and yet Lincoln did not know the woman. But he understood the war, and he felt the losses. He spoke for the country in the most personal way. That letter to Mrs. Bixby completely answers the question: What should a tribute do?