At Hoylake

Near the first tee on the deceptively innocuous-looking course at Hoylake, England, stands a ramshackle hotel where chickens sometimes wander in the corridors. Its proprietor is famed John Ball, who won the British Amateur Golf Championship eight times in 24 years from 1888 to 1912 and played in it every year till this one. No one nowadays is likely to duplicate John Ball's extraordinary record. Unlike its equivalent in the U. S., the British Amateur is played without qualifying rounds. A golfer needs to be exceedingly lucky as well as able to reach, through a long succession of 18-hole matches, the 36-hole final. At Hoylake last week, golfers who had never been heard of before, golfers once famed and long forgotten, popped up as though they had been hiding under stones. After a week of play, most of them had popped down again, leaving four semifinalists of whom two were the most interesting players in the tournament.

One was a dark mustachioed 54-year-old Scotsman, the Hon. Michael Scott, fifth son of the third Earl of Eldon, uncle of the present Earl. He had long ago won the Australian Open twice and the Australian Amateur four times, but never an important tournament in England. His scrupulously courteous self-confidence indicated that he considered this a curious oversight which deserved to be corrected.

The other was 24-year-old George Terry Dunlap Jr., son of Manhattan Publisher George Terry Dunlap, who learned his golf at Pinehurst, N. C., where his family has a cottage and where he has made a specialty of winning the Midwinter tournament. He went to Princeton for five years without graduating, captained the golf team, won the Intercollegiate twice. This winter, working for Hemphill, Noyes (stock-brokers), young Dunlap had small chance to practice golf. Three weeks before play at Hoylake started he began to think about entering the tournament, boarded a boat the next day.

Scott and Dunlap--who had put out Sandy Somerville, Canadian holder of the U. S. title--played their match to the biggest gallery of the week, 3,000. Dunlap was two up at the sixth. Scott holed a fair-sized putt to win the seventh, squared the match with a smashing eagle 3 on the long eighth. At the 15th green Scott was 4 up and Dunlap was out of the tournament.

The other semifinalists were beefy Cyril Tolley, champion in 1920 and 1929. who has lately done most of his golfing in the U. S., and a capable Scotch player named Thomas Arundel Bourn, 23 years younger than Scott. When Dunlap lost, everyone knew what to expect: Tolley would beat Bourn and then take the final. Instead, playing on a course he distrusts because it imposes eccentric penalties on his long drives, Tolley lost to Bourn in a tight match, after 20 holes. Next day, Scott made matters easy by piling up a 5-hole lead in the morning. In the afternoon he won match, title, the distinction of being the oldest Amateur Champion on record and the assurances of old John Ball that there was "still plenty of time" to equal an even more imposing record.

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