Another good story about Minikahda:
Minikahda was the scene of a major "grudge match" between Bobby Jones and Chick Evans that had a profound impact on both men. Here's a recount of this event and its repercussions, from a book by Curt Sampson called "The Masters":
"But Jones protected a secret, too: the game had ceased to be all sunshine. The more he succeeded, in fact, the less he enjoyed the whole adventure. More friends bet increasing amounts on him to win and were decreasingly shy about telling him of their wagers. His galleries grew exponentially each year. "With his fans--and he played in championships when spectators could reach out and touch him--Jones' patience was monumental," wrote Charles Price in his 1986 book, A Golf Story. "He took them all in good-natured stride--favor-seekers, storytellers, party-crashers, name-droppers, social opportunists, self-promoters, kissin' cousins, drunks, and other assorted pests." Jones suffered stomach pains and occasionally burst into tears in private, but only his intimate friends--Keeler, Rice, and the Colonel--knew about it. While Bobby hid the effects of the mounting pressure and uninvited interaction, the Colonel grew so nervous that he often couldn't watch his son's tournaments and relied on word-of-mouth reports from the battlefield. Bobby could hardly have missed his father's agitation. Another clue that big-time golf was becoming a big-time drag for Jones was. his atypical spat with another competitor, Chick Evans.
Their feud came to a head during the finals of the U.S. Amateur in August 1927. Jones versus Evans drew tremendous interest; if the planets aligned correctly, Chick might actually beat Bobby. The match took place at The Minikahda Club in Minneapolis, where Evans had won the U.S. Open eleven summers before. A special train brought scores of Evans boosters up from his hometown, Chicago.
Sparks often fly in the hand-to-hand combat of match play, and any number of things might have set Evans off. Perhaps Chick resented Bob's breeding and relative wealth or his success. Maybe he disliked the precise part in Jones's hair. Evans sold milk, wholesale, to restaurants and institutions and had a salesman's grin and showmanship and memory of first names. Jones, on the other hand, maintained a polite reserve. After muttering privately about Bobby for years, Evans went public with his complaints in an Associated Press interview, which was published widely on his seventy-third birthday, July 18, 1963.
Jones clobbered Evans 8 and 7 in their big match. But "it wasn't the beating so much as the way it was done," Evans said. "On the first tee, Jones told me I had teed my ball in front of the markers. Later he called me for putting my finger into the grass.
"On what became the last hole of our match, I putted two inches from the hole. I thought he might concede the two-inch putt. ... I looked at him and he just stood there, about a yard from me, and stared at me. I went up to my ball, and when I put my putter head down, it touched the ball.
"I looked up at Jones. `The ball didn't move,' I said. `It sure did,' Jones replied." Game, set, match Mr. Jones. Evans congratulated him sarcastically.
Jones, Evans said, used twenty-two clubs to his own seven (fourteen clubs were not the maximum allowable until 193 and thus "developed his game with his clubs rather than his skull." The best part of Jones's game "was his ability to sink long putts. He had to, because from fifty yards out he was pitiful." Evans also hinted at flaws in Jones's character, from getting to be too big for his britches to dishonesty about his status as an amateur.
Jones responded gently. "Mildly amusing," he told the AP. "If he really meant to say these things, then I'm truly sorry he said them." His private reaction contained a lot more heat. Evans's accusations were "tripe," Jones wrote in a letter to United States Golf Association executive director Joseph Dey four days after the Evans interview was published. Jones played the first nine holes in thirty-one and began the second nine with two threes. This put him six up; Chick didn't have the wherewithal that day to make up such a huge deficit to the best player in the world.
Jones contradicted everything Evans said, especially his version of the contentious ending to their match. Already beaten, Jones told Dey, Chick "preferred being the apparent victim of a misfortune to playing the long twelfth hole up the hill away from the clubhouse.
"I do not recall that I have ever said anything about this thing before, and certainly do not intend at this moment, or ever, so far as I know, to make public any of these circumstances."
Whatever the particulars of the spat, Jones had an enemy, and he knew it. And though he obviously thrived in the formalized battle of a golf tournament--as he would prove for all time in 1930--conflict upset him terribly. Grantland Rice described him as having "the face of an angel and the temper of a timberwolf." Just before or soon after the Evans match, Jones decided to retire from tournament golf. He had tired of controlling the wolf."