Bobby Jones was a true prodigy.
From ESPN:
Starting at the age of 14, Jones spent seven lean years conquering himself. Starting at the age of 21, he spent eight fat years conquering everybody else.
At 14, when he first entered a major tournament, he was considered a sure shot for greatness. When he hadn't achieved it by the ripe old age of 20, many were considering him a failure.
Of this period, Jones said, "I was full of pie, ice cream and inexperience. To me, golf was just a game to beat someone. I didn't know that someone was me."
Robert Tyre Jones Jr. (he was named after his grandfather) was born on March 17, 1902 in Atlanta to well-to-do parents. A sickly child, he was 5 before he could eat solid food. In an effort to add some robustness to his frail frame, the family bought a summer house next to the fairways of Atlanta's East Lake Country Club.
At 6, Jones was swinging sawed-off golf clubs. At 7, he was mimicking the swing of Stewart Maiden, the country club pro. "He was never lonesome with a golf club in his hands," Maiden said. "He must have been born with a deep love for the game. He was certainly born with the soul of a perfectionist."
At 11, he shot an 80 on the old course at East Lake. His father looked at the card, then his son, and with wet eyes hugged him. At 14, with high hopes and lots of national press, he played in his first U.S. Amateur, winning two matches before being eliminated in the third round.
"Bobby was a short, rotund kid, with the face of an angel and the temper of a timber wolf," Grantland Rice wrote in The Saturday Evening Post in 1940. "At a missed shot, his sunny smile could turn more suddenly into a black storm cloud than the Nazis can grab a country. Even at the age of 14 Bobby could not understand how anyone ever could miss any kind of golf shot."