Evening Star Newspaper, April 27, 1930, Page 81

Fiction Art The Sundoy Stad Magasine PART SEVEN. WASHINGTON, D. C, SUNDAY, APRIL 27, 1930. —_— Features Books 24 PAGES. The Spring Drive in Brita‘in Determined to Fight to the Last Putt, an A. E. F. of Golfers Is About to Invade Great Britain’s Links—The Strongest Array of Man and Woman Players Ever to Represent America in Annual Battle That Rages From Hills of Sunningdale to the Sea. URING the mnext few weeks thousands of Britons and Americans are going to think and v talk of par more often than they have been thinking and talking of parity. The cables that clicked all Winter long with un- exciting news of proposals to sink blueprint ships will soon be chronicling the actual sinking of putts. For the golf stream is flow= ing eastward across the Atlantic again, as it has flowed each Spring since the cannon ceased digging divots on the western front. Be- tween now and the middle of June it will carry to the rolling fairways of King George's green and bunk= ered isle the largest and most skille ful aggregation of golfers, male and female, amateur and profes- sional, champions, ex-champions and seekers after championships ever to leave our shores in one sea- son. Already the ladies of America’s golfing ensemble are on the ocean —Glenna Collett, Maureen Orcutt, Helen Hicks, Virginia Van Wie and more than half a dozen others— all of them headed for the rolling heathery hills of Sunningdale and a team match on May day with their British sisters of the straight left arm and the follow through. It is the first time that a team match ever has been arranged be- tween representative woman golf= ers of the two countries, but it will pot be the last. This week Bobby Jones will pack Calamity Ann and the rest of his cherished clubs and embark with his colleagues of the Walker Cup defense to engage tihe British ama- teurs in biennial battle for the trophy. They will fight it out with woods and irons in the middle of May among the high dunes and terrifying hummocks of Sandwich, where men go down to the sea in plus fours. WHEN these ladies and gentle= men start tramping the faire ways of England many of us who became a bit bored with the cabled chatter over eight-inch guns will relish news of eight-foot putts. Away with your endless columns about cruisers and submarines, pacts and parleys and fur-coated stenographers residing at the Ritz and eating in the Lyons Corner House! Let us hear of low-flying * brassies whistling down the wind. Let us hear of long drives and short pitches, of green grass, yellow gorse and purple heather, of Scotch mist and English showers, of the sand hills of Hoy= lake and the auld grey toun of St. Andrews, where Bobby Jones is going soon to seek another erown. Three days before the golf master of Atlanta Jeads his squad into battle for the Walker Cup, Miss Collett and the other feminine stars will be going around the links of Formby, near the mouth of the Mersey, in quest of the ladies’ championship, the only capital trophy in Brit- ish golf that never has yet been won by an American. Miss Collett is making her fifth at- tempt to capture it. Twice she has been beaten by miserable weather and twice by Weathered. Miserable weather may her again this year, but Miss Wethered will not, for that incomparably fine golfier again has re- tired from championship play. Neither win rain, cold nor the gloom of a bad English Spring ever kept her from the swift completion of her appointed rounds in something near to par figures. But one must not expect the same indifference to the elements on the part of the American women, for they have a habit of of their tournament at Formby the men will gather at St. Andrews for the amateur cham- pionship. After that Jones and some of the others players of the American Walker Cup team will remain for the open championship in June. In that latter competition, amid the brightest consfellation of stars that Great Britain and Europe can provide, they will be joined by a powerful contingent of American professionals To some of these American professionals the trip across the North Atlantic became almost an annual affair. They are the envy of the stay-at-home British pros. They pass their Winters gadding from tournament to tourna- ment all the way across the Southern half of the country from California to Florida. The Drawn for The Sunday Star b Al Austin Jewell. Shooting straight into the wind, he dropped a full-iron shot 1.ear the pin. BY EDWARD ANGLY. winners of some of these tournaments reckon their prizes in thousands of dollars. Unlike the pros of Britain, the Americans seem always to travel first class. Snapshots taken in midocean picture them driving expen- sive golf balls off the boat deck into the sea. They arrive at the course in “motors for pri- vate hire,” and spurn the half-a-crown lunches in the professionals’ tent on the championship grounds for the four-course meal in the visitors’ marquee. Their working clothes are almsot in- variably fresh and expensive, if a trifle gay in color for the British atmosphere. And they have a habit of appearing jn a different en- semble each morning, while Vardon goes about in the same old knickers and Ray in the same old slacks. THE wardrobes of the American professionals and the social standing which they as- sumed rather bewildered the conservative British onlookers in the early post-war years. The galleries used to pay as much attention to Sar- azen’s daily change of sweaters and Hagen's selection of shoes as they did to the clubs these golfers chose. If Britain's pros felt envious of their prosperous American rivals, they also had cause to admire their skill, if not their sweaters. Of the last nine British open cham- pionships, six have been won by American professionals and. two of the remaining three were captured by Bobby Jones. Since 1921 the championship cup has remained only one year in its islahd home. Unlike the tourists who go to Europe to take in cathedrals and capitals, the globe- trotting golfers of America are a strictly post- war development in international intercourse. Championship trophies seldom crossed frontiers in the years before the war. American entrants in British tournaments were decidedly rare and little esteemed. Up until the war Arnold Massy, a Frenchman, was the only foreigner who ever had won a British open championship, and the late Walter J. Travis, from America, was the sole outsider to capture the amateur title. Travis' victory was achieved in 1904 at Sand- wich. The British consoled themselves with the thought that Travis had been born in Aus- tralia, even though golf was unknown to him until long after he entered the United States. There grew up a legend that Travis had won not so much by good all-around golf as by magical, not to say miraculous, and lucky putting. He used a center-shaft putter, called a Schenectady for short. After he had gone home with it, and the championship as well, the wise and worthy gentlemen who sit in the parliament of golf at St. Andrew decided that a Schenectady putter was not a fit and proper implement for inducing a golf ball to drop into a tin cup, and, so deciding, barred its further employment in the United Kingdom and the dominions beyond the seas. Years of championship games went by after that without another serious threat from across the ocean. Then came the war and the sus- pension of championship play. Each Summer since the peace American golfers have crossed the Atlantic and added brilliant pages to the honored history of the eight celebrated courses of the championship rota—Sandwich, Deal, Westward Ho and Hoylake in England and St. Andrews, Muirfield, Troon and Prestwick in Scotland. The fillip given to the competitions by the entry of the Yankees quickened the in- terest of the public to such a point that the galleries grew and grew until on a Friday afternoon in June of 1925 more than 30,000 men, women and school children swarmed and scurried over the links at Prestwick, in the beloved Ayrshire of Bobby Burns, to see one Scottish-born American, MacDonald Smith, try to win the championship. Special trains rolled down from Glasgow packed with golf enthusi- asts and all the schools and factories in the nearby towns were closed. Partly, perhaps principally, because the crowd was so big and so bothersome, Smith, who needed only a 78 to win, took 82 distressful strokes. After that the British adopted the American practice of charging admission to champion- ships. Since then the crowds have been smaller and more manage= able. When Smith lost at Prestwick Prestwick for that championship of 1925 the lowest medal score that ever had been made on the course was 732, and championships had been played at Prestwick since 1860. Barnes in his very first round turned in a 70. Smith went out the same day and cut the record down to 69. Such is the American contribution to the long story of the Ayrshire golfing country. Sandwich has recorded a longer and more brilliant page of Ameri« can victories. Eighteen years after Travis took the amateur trophy away from England the British open was won for the first time by a native-born American, Walter Hagen. That was in 1922. Jock Hutchison of Chicago had won it the previous Summer at St. An- drews, but St. Andrews was Jock’s birthplace and that is where he learned his golf. Besides, as the Scots will remind one to this day, Hutchins would never have been in the play-off and never would have won if Roger Wethered had only kept his foot off his own ball, & clumsy accident which incurred & penalty that permitted the Ameri= can to equal the young Englishe man’s score for the four rounds. But when Hagen won at Sandwich the two players who finished closest to him were both Amerie cans. From that windy afternoon dates the begining of American su- premacy in international golf. T!l:i: Americans were back &% Sandwich again in 1923. AM the amateurs of the Walker Cup team were there that year to play for the St. George’s vase, the oldest and most treasured trophy for medal play among amateurs. Two of the visitors, Francis Ouimet of Boston and Dr. O. F. Willing of Portland, Oreg., led the field with a handicap of 16 strokes. Now, in little more than a fortnight, the amateurs of Britain and America will be play= ing at Sandwich again. Sandwich is a pleas= ant spot and a glorious course. The shore of a few days, is less than an hour’s run down from London, either by train or car. It is esteemed as one of the best inland courses in England, a formidable test for any golfer’s skill. Bobby Jones whizzed around it one day with a 686, followed by an afternoon score of 68 to lead the pack qualifying for the British epen. No one ever had treated Sunningdale that way be- fore and nobody is likely to treat it that way again, for the course is a long one over hilly country, with trees and sand and heather to trouble the man who strays from the straight and narrow path between tee and green, ‘Whatever the weather, the American women's