Golf Central

On this day in 1934, the great Southern gentleman, founder of the Masters and one of the fathers of American golf Bobby Jones admitted that he was having a problem with one key component in his golf game. That's right, Bobby Jones had a case of the yips.

It's something we can all understand (OK, you can ... some of us can knock in putts with the regularity of a metronome), but it is pretty scary (or re-assuring, take your pick) when one of the grandest figures to grace the game of golf in the last 100 years fesses up to having a bit of trouble drawing the old flatstick back ...

For the record, Jones made his confession just eight days before the start of the inaugural Masters Championship (then called the Augusta National Invitation Tournament). Jones had an excuse: He had retired from regular "competitive" golf four years earlier. But it's nice to know that Jones was human. He finished 13th in the '34 Masters, by the way, his best finish of the dozen Masters he entered ...

And it was on this day in 1949 that the PGA of America showed that the US having "freed the world" in World War II wasn't good enough to open its borders, with the executive committee voting 8-3 to keep the match-play major an all-American tournament. This ruling excluded one of the greatest players of the time, the South African and IGWT Hall of Famer Bobby Locke ...

In the real world: On this day in 1942, doctors John Bumstead and Orvan Hess became the legends in the medicine world by successfully treating patient Anne Miller with a dose of penicillin ... and in 1964, gangster hitman Jack Ruby predictably went down for murder in the killing of Lee Harvey Oswald, the JFK assassin ...

Strangely enough: On this day in 1997, US president Bill Clinton was rushed to hospital for a two-hour operation his knee after ripping apart the quadriceps tendon in his right knee after taking a fall on some fancy marble steps at the stately abode of golf legend Greg Norman in Florida ... And some think that Republicans in the US Congress were a bit rough on Bill Clinton over the Lewinsky affair ... Ouch!

In sport: On this day in 1960 the great basketball legend Wilt Chamberlain of the Philadelphia Warriors set an NBA playoff record by scoring 53 points in a game. Now, assuming the lifelong bachelor/lecher Chamberlain nailed the 20,000 women he claimed in his autobiog to have slept with over a 20-year period, that means that Wilt would have also bagged 2.73982607 babes later that night. Hey, if you're gonna lie, at least make it a tall tale ...

So it’s penblwydd hapus! as they say in Wales, to Chelsea prima donna Nicolas Anelka (29), one third of music visionaries Hanson, Taylor Hanson (25); sensitive jock and actor Chris Klein (29); and American porn star Eva Angelina (23), not that we know anything about that.

It's also a happy birthday to the 1963 British Open champion Sir Bob Charles, the stylish left-hander who still probably the best golfing Kiwi, who was born 72 years ago today in Carterton, NZ ... Last year, Charles became the oldest golfer to make a cut on the European Tour when his second-round 68 beat his age by three shots in the Michael Hill NZ Open ...

It also would have been the birthday of a wacky-looking fella named Albert Einstein (b. 1879). Genius, granted, but Einstein ultimately failed in his attempt to find a unified field theory to encompass gravitation, subatomic phenomena, and electromagnetism, or Bobby Jones' yips … so there ... 'Til tomorrow! ...