Off the tee: Tribute to Jones has real passion

If golf is a religion, as many would insist, Bobby Jones must be its patron saint.

So it seems only fitting that the actor who played Jesus in the controversial film The Passion of the Christ takes on the role of the great American golfer in Bobby Jones Stroke of Genius.

The film, directed by Rowdy Herrington, will be released this month in the United States, shortly after the US Masters, the tournament which he inspired on the Augusta course and built under his guidance.

Jones, born in Georgia in 1902, at the age of 28 won the amateur and open championships of both the United States and Britain - a feat unlikely ever to be matched. He promptly retired from competitive golf.

He never turned professional but won 13 major championships in eight years. In his last nine US Opens he was first four times and second four times. He won three of the four British Opens he contested.

Jones was also one of the most highly educated men to play the game successfully. He held degrees in engineering, literature and law, graduating at the Atlanta School of Technology and then Harvard.

He was modest about his achievements and quick to praise the modern maestros who played at Augusta, admiring the power of Jack Nicklaus in 1965 with the comment: "He plays a game with which I am not familiar."

Jones in his later years was confined to a wheelchair. He died in 1971 and the US Masters is a memorial to his greatness.

Jim Caviezel had a couple of problems in taking on the film role: He is left-handed and couldn't play golf.

The thought of teaching Caviezel to swing like a PGA tour professional was daunting enough. Then he had to be taught to swing right-handed. And, to make matters worse, he had to swing like Jones.

But Caviezel poured himself into the task. He purchased instructional films Jones had made in the 1930s, and watched them over and over again. He was already very athletic, having been a college basketball player and having recently learned to fence for his role in the movie The Count of Monte Cristo.

He then got some professional golf instruction from Jim Hardy, who also teaches tour pros and is a partner in golf course design with Peter Jacobsen. Bobby Jones IV, the golf great's grandson, later said he was impressed by the swing's authenticity.

Director Herrington admitted to both elation and fear because he himself is a golfer and golf fan, and he realised the magnitude of what he was about to take on.

"It's been a dream come true," he said. "I went to the Old Course in St Andrews, East Lake in Atlanta, Brookhaven and Augusta National. We filmed on all these courses, places that had never allowed a feature film crew before, and it was thrilling.

"It really speaks, not to me or to our producers or to the great crew we had, but to the one person who gained us entry into all these places: Bobby Jones."