Evening Star Newspaper, August 3, 1930, Page 89

Golfer Warren G. Harding, also Presi- dent of the United States, presented the team cup for which the clubless golfers compete, AYBE you can remember the days when the requisites for golf were these: High blood pressure, a sockful of the better bank stocks, and a membership, at $1,000 per memb rship, in a golf and country club. Nowadays you don’t need the high blood pressure.. You don’t need the bank stocks. You don’t even need the club. For public links golf has not only risen to the point whore there are at least 200 mu- nicipal courses in the United States, but it has produced a champion who has done something that even the peerless Bobby Jones has never done. Carl Kauffmann of Pittsburgh is the champion, and he has won the national public Nnks title three years running. And while Jones has won the National Amateur four times. his were not consecutive victories. Xaufmann, at the municipal course of Jack- sonville, Fla., will b>gin on August 5 a battle to retain for a fourth year the Standish Cup, emblem of the king of the clubless golfers. Eaeh year the tournament competition for this trophy and for the Warren G. Harding Team Trophy is a little tougher, for the pay-as-yous play courses are not only increasing in numbers but_improving in the quality of play. 2 - ):se tournaments are handled by the public Mn«s section of the United States Golf Associa- tion. They are open to “all amateur golf players who are not members of nor enjoy privileges of a private club maintaining and supporting its own golf course.” Qualifying rounds are played on all courses which plan to send a representative or a team. The Standish Cup goes for one year 1o the individual winner. The winner is also given a gold medal, while the runner-up gets & silver medal and the semi-finalists bronze medals. Th> inter-city team competition for the Harding Trophy, played at the same tourna- ment, brings to the winning city the Warren G. Harding Trophy, and each of the four players whose aggregate for 36 holes wins the team title is also given a gold medal. <auffmann at Jacksonville will face an entry Mst of at least 150 individual players. The team entries have been gradually increasing from 18 in 1924 to 23 in 1929, and even more cities may send teams this year to try to take the ritle and the Harding Cup from New York. KAUF’FMANN is another of the golfers who have arise’n from that greatest of all the golf schools, caddying. From the time he was a kid of 10 until he was 16 Kauffmann was a caddy at the Country Club of Pittsburgh. That’s great training for a future golfer. He sees so many things a golfer ought not to do. The Pennsylvania State championship at Oaimont in 1921 was Kauffmann’s first com- petitive gesture. There he was among the qualifiers, but was eliminated in the second round. At one time he was a member of the Stanton Heights Golf Club, but he found that he had too little time to play to make mem- bership worth whils, so he discontinued, and has been playing the public links ev:r since. His ‘home course in Schenley Park in Pitts- burgh, an 18-hole, 4,432-yard municipal layout run by the park department. For'this champion hasn't a whole lot of time to play golf. He is a secretary with the Mesta Machine Co. of West, Homestead. Between his work. his golf and his mother, with whom he Mves ‘and ‘to whom he is very devoted, Kauff- mann has little spar: (ime. He gets out on the Schenley Park couise an average of three eve- THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, AUGUST 3, 1930. Champ of t n; he Clubless Golfers When the “Pay-as- You-Play” Public Links Golf Stars Get Together This Week for Their Tournament at Jacksonville, Kauffmann of Pittsburgh Will Again Be Seeking the Championship He Has Already Captured for Three Years in a Row. Keufimann is called “The Schenley Sphinx” from his home course and his habit of doing nothing on the links but play good golf. pings & week, playing six, seven or eight holes. He plays ne Winter golf at all, and begins his Summer’s }inks activities about the middle of Msy. The Pitteburgh qualifying tourney and the mational public links play are the whole extent of his competitive program. Kaufimann's mute, stolid ways on the course @éuring pisy bave earned him the title of “The Schenley Sphinx.” But off the golf course he is gemial-mannered, agreeable and not in the least the untalkative person which many—even writers who have covered his tournaments— believe him to be. He keeps to himself during play, he says, for a simple reason: He has found that he plays better golf that way. “Wm you are playing you are out to win,” he says. “That's natural. If I appear unduly morose or quiet, it’s because 1 play my best game that way. Others, perhaps, can talk. That's their way of playing. I don’t believe any one should criticize a player’s actions on the ¥nks. Every one employs the attitude that puts him on his best game. That's all.” There's just a little insight into Kauffmann's success. When he is playing he is entirely cbsessed with the matter at hand, and his usual reticence has sometimes been mistaken for snobbishness. Kauffmann refuses to predict his own success in this year's tournament to make it four in a row, but he feels sure of the triumph of his Pittsburghers in the team competition. The Pittsburgh golfers won the trophy in 1927 and 1928, but lost to New York last year. Now they want the Harding Trophy back where they feel it belongs. Barring some unforeseen accident in the qualifying round at Pittsburgh, Kauffmann will be on hand at Jacksonville. There he expects his toughest opposition for the championship to come from Bob Wingate, on whose home course the tournament will be played. It is & fine 18-hole course of 6,202 yards, par 72, partially maintained by its own fees and par- tially by city appropriation. It has a good club house with lockers and baths. Wingate was runner-up te Kauffmann in Cleveland in 1927, and playing on & course with which he is perfectly familiar, Wingate is given the best chance te dethrone the three- time champion. Kauffmann has no ambition to cross niblicks with Bobby Jones in the big tournament, and is reticent on the subject. ‘“Jones is, in my estimation, the greatest player who ever picked up a club,” he says, “but I have never had any particular ambition to meet him either in the open or the amateur, I have been a Spectator at these affairs several times, but the more companionate spirit and feeling that one ep- counters at the municipal tourneys pleases me better.” THERE is a marked difference between the “big tournaments” and the public links competitions. And that is natural, for the wraditions behind each are different, It may seem odd to refer to the “tradition” of anything so recent as public links champion- ship play, and yet this year's play-off will be the ninth. Municipal aand public links golf is a lot older in the United States than you® might think. It is just rounding out its thirty-fifth year. 8o far as it can be determined, the first man to get ‘the idea of using a public park for golf was, appropriately enough, a Scotsman. Robert Lockhart, in the Spring of 1888, looked over the broad green turf expanses of Central Park, and found them good. Being a Scotsman, he thought of golf. And he went out and played. But the ever-alert police of the period put a stop to the practice as dangerous to - innocent bystanders. e In the Spring of 1895 a group of young men in New York City asked the Park Commission- ers to lay out a nine-hole course in Van Court< landt Park for their use. The commissioners answered that they couldn’t grant the use of public land to private parties, but saw no rea- son why a course shouldn’t be laid out which should be open to all who wanted to play, just as were the tennis courts and other public playing fields.” Further, they did something about it, and a course was ready for play in “July of 1895. Within four years patronage had become so heavy that a regular 18-hole layout was built. : Although the present tournament as played at Jacksonville this year is only the ninth one under the U. 8. G. A, there was some sort of a public links tournament on that primiti: Van Courtlandt Park course in 1896. five contestants finished the course in and the winner, C. M. Hamilton, The ninth player in the order of scoring was Walter J. Travis, who took 110. MUNICIPAL golf took an upward soom at the turn of the century, and President William Howard Taft was one of its enthusi- - astic boosters, because, among other reasons, “it is the least injurious of outdoor games to the landscape features of our parks.” b The old idea that a golf player had to be a pillow-paunched old banker with hardening of . the arteries began to disappear. The young blood began taking to golf about the time the debutantes began taking to synthetic gin, and with almost as much enthusiasm.. And not only that, the bank stock requirement went by the board in a big way. And a lot more—golf had suddenly become a game, not for the coupon-clipper exclusively, but for the butcher, the baker and the candle- stick maker. é From one of the most highly exclusive of games, golf became in 10 years probably the fi'n"fl democratic. And all due to the public With the rise of golf to an almost: unchal- lenged position of popularity, the _national public links tournament has become increas- ingly important, not only in itself, but as a hatchery for first-class compeittors in the other events. : (Copyright, 1990.) George Voight got his start as a_publie links player in Washington, D. G