Golf in England

U. S. golfers have learned that the British Amateur golf championship takes a lot of luck. The elimination match rounds are only 18 holes, giving any unknown with one good round in his system a chance to knock over a celebrity. Only three U. S. golfers have ever won it: Walter Travis in 1904; Jess Sweetser in 1926, reeling with fever in a final against a player who did not know how to use a brassie; and Robert Tyre Jones II in 1930, beating down luck with mechanical golf.

Last week on the parklike Muirfield course near Edinburgh, with its gnarled trees and its fairways straight as streets, a U. S. unknown, Leonard Martin, beat last year's unknown winner, Eric Martin-Smith, and then was beaten himself by another unknown. The entire British Walker Cup team was eliminated short of the final round. All the U. S. players, none of them high-rated, were soon put out. From the quarter-finals on, the play was almost entirely among unknowns over a deserted course in howling wind & rain. In the finals lucky John De Forest, last year's runner-up, son of Coal Tycoon Baron De Forest, defeated 22-year-old Eric Fiddian 3 & 1 in 6 hrs. 35 min. for the required 36 holes, the longest final in the tournament's history. The two boys were appointed at once to the last two places on the British Walker Cup team.

Meanwhile at Saunton in Devonshire it was raining, too, as a flock of U. S. women, fresh from a team victory over British women (TIME, May 30). qualified for the women's British Open golf championship. The rain stopped long enough to let Miss Maureen Orcutt play around in the phenomenal scores of 73 & 78, winning the medal and putting the U. S. flag alone on a British golf club's flagstaff for the first time in history.

Her total of 151 was extraordinary over the Saunton Club's "joke" course. It is built over sand dunes with eccentrically narrow fairways and little slanted postage-stamp greens. The holes are not long but are often blind. The hazards are waist-high heather, bogs, bulrushes, traps like sand quarries, shore winds.

When the 18-hole elimination match play began, the U. S. ranks were decimated at blind random. One of the first to fall was Medalist Orcutt, 2 & 1 before a Miss Jean Hamilton.

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