With Jack Nicklaus’s Memorial Tournament on the calendar this week, platitudes will abound for this year’s honoree, Tony Jacklin. Rightfully so, since Tony is the last European since World War II to win the U.S. Open, and remains the most successful European Ryder Cup captain in history.

But the biggest focus will be on the act commonly known as “The Concession.” It occurred in the 1969 Ryder Cup at Royal Birkdale (site of this year’s Open Championship). On the final green of the final day, Nicklaus conceded Jacklin’s two-foot putt which led to the first-ever tie in the Ryder Cup. And the two have been milking that act ever since. They named their only co-designed course “The Concession,” and Jack’s Web site refers to it, in typical Nicklaus subtlety as “The greatest act of sportsmanship in golf.”

OK, giving a two-footer to one of the best putters in the game was a decent thing to do, but to call it “the greatest act of sportsmanship” is a stretch. The Ryder Cup wasn’t much of an event at the time, and as Nicklaus acknowledged immediately after shaking Jacklin’s hand, “I felt like he would have made it anyway.”

To find the greatest act of sportsmanship in golf, you have to go back to 1926 and look at one of the greatest amateur players not named Bobby Jones who ever lived. Jesse Sweetser (second from left) a track star at Yale who won the NCAA individual men’s collegiate golf championship two years after taking up the game, arrived at Muirfield for the finals of the British Amateur having amassed quite a record. He’d won the U.S. Amateur in 1922, and in the process handed Jones the biggest thumping of his career, an 8-and-7 shellacking in the semi-finals. He went on to beat Chick Evans in the final. At Muirfield, he was attempting to become the first native-born American to win the British Amateur and the first man in history to win both of the game’s major amateur titles.

He was also sick. At the time everyone thought Sweetser had a bad cold, maybe the flu. The diagnosis of tuberculosis wouldn’t come until the voyage home when the ship’s physician placed him in quarantine and had him moved to a Coast Guard vessel before entering New York harbor. But when Sweetser left his room at the current Greystone Inn and went to the first tee, he was barely able to walk, and the coughing was at a fever pitch.

Then Sweetser caught the break of a lifetime. A.F. Simpson, the other finalist, missed his tee time. Simpson’s car had broken down outside North Berwick, and even though he was scrambling to get there, rules were rules, and the committeeman in charge informed Sweetser that Simpson would have to forfeit. The title would go to the American.

Sweetser would have none of it. Not only did he refuse to accept the concession, he ran into the Muirfield clubhouse and locked himself in the men’s room. “I knew they wouldn’t let the title go unclaimed,” he said later. “So, I waited them out.” 

An hour later Simpson arrived on a bicycle, his clubs tied to his back like tent poles to a climber. The match proceeded and the very ill Sweetser won 6 and 5. 

Unlike Nicklaus and Jacklin, Sweetser rarely discussed what he had done for Simpson. “It was a long way to travel to have something like car trouble determine the outcome,” he would tell a few friends.

Upon his return to America, Sweetser spent time in and out of hospitals and sanatoriums, including a stint at the Asheville, N.C., TB Sanatorium, which will host a golf tournament in Sweetser’s name the same weekend that Nicklaus honors Jacklin. Sweetser became a stockbroker, and retired as the vice president of Martin Marietta, now Lockheed Martin.  He also served on the editorial board of “The American Golfer” magazine, edited by Grantland Rice and featuring instructional contributions by Bobby Jones. Sweetser died in Washington DC in 1989.

On the day of his death, Georgia senator Sam Nunn read a touching eulogy into the Congressional Record from the senate floor. “Each time I joined Jess for a game of golf and strolled down a fairway with him I sensed that I was witnessing a part of history,” Nunn said. “He competed against and won against Bobby Jones, yet adapted easily to the modern era ushered in by Arnold Palmer and Jack Nicklaus.

“He had an uncanny ability to recall shots he had hit a half-century earlier, to remember the layout of holes he had not seen in 40 years, and to simplify golf to its most basic terms. In golf, you often encounter players who have the ability to focus singly on the task at hand. Jess Sweetser was a man with a strong competitive drive, as evidenced by his record of successes, but he was also a consummate gentleman. He would share his vast experience with the game as easily as one greets an old friend.

“Perhaps golf is no more complicated than that. Or perhaps it is life that is not so complicated when it is enjoyed by a man of such grace and talent as Jess Sweetser. With Jess, life and golf were inseparable. Though his friends and family will miss Jess, we will never forget the contribution he made to the game he loved so much.”

We should also never forget that man who locked himself in the men’s room until his opponent could arrive: because that is the greatest act of sportsmanship in the history of golf.

Photo courtesy of the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers, Muirfield, Scotland.