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Before Tiger Woods, there was Bobby Jones, the only golfer ever to win the "Grand Slam" — in his era, the US Open and Amateur and the British Open and Amateur — in one year, 1930. Sickly as a child, Jones (played by a stiff James Caviezel) becomes a national icon, retires at age 28, and founds the Augusta National Golf Course (home of the Masters). In between, he gets married and suffers from a stomach ailment. Nothing else happens. It’s a nice, pat bio-pic chock-full of drawn-out moments; even the opening credits, after informing us that it’s a Rowdy Herrington film, go on to tell us that the man whose claim to fame is Road House also produced, conceived, wrote, and directed this ordeal. Albeit maudlin and manipulative, Bobby Jones is affecting — for a while. What slows the film down is the inescapable harangue of greatness. Even Jones — in a moment that seems pulled from Caviezel’s performance in The Passion of the Christ — seems assured of his triumph as he predicts his sweep. Fortunately, Jeremy Northam is on hand as Jones’s boozing professional nemesis, Walter Hagen, and Malcolm McDowell checks in as the avuncular sports writer O.B. Keeler. Bobby Jones the golfer did indeed play strokes of genius; Bobby Jones the movie settles for par. (120 minutes)
BY TOM MEEK
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