Ladies at Exmoor

For the last four years, most of the prizes for women's golf in the U. S. have been going to four young women of whom three--Virginia Van Wie, Helen Hicks and Maureen Orcutt--were in the field for last week's national championship at Exmoor Country Club in Highland Park. Ill. The fourth--Mrs. Glenna Collett Vare I--was more interested in her new baby than in golf. But there was someone to take her place: angular Enid Wilson, a tall, plain, extraordinarily placid English girl who has won her own national championship regularly for the last three years. Trying to win the U. S. title as well, she failed in 1931 and 1932. Last week she started out by winning the medal with a 76, three under women's par, a record qualifying score for the national. She met her first real match test in Charlotte Glutting, the New Jersey State champion who put her out last year. By winning that match, 2 & I, the British champion reached a semi-final round that was unusually perfect. It contained, besides Miss Wilson, the other three favorites, Misses Van Wie, Hicks and Orcutt.

The afternoon before her match with Miss Van Wie, Enid Wilson spent three hours practicing iron shots. She said later that was what queered her. On the first hole she drove badly, took a six. On the fourth, her approach was wild and she took three putts. On the fifth, her iron shot went into a bunker, cost her a 7. She took 44 strokes to the turn to Virginia Van Wie's smooth 37. It left her six down and she was still six down at the 13th green, where the match ended. It set the stage for a final in which Miss Van Wie's opponent for the title she won a year ago was her close friend and houseguest, Helen ("Billie") Hicks. Still a little chagrined at failing to qualify for last year's cham- pionship, after winning the year before, Helen Hicks, swinging her driver with a masculine wrist-flick and punching out her irons like a pro, had beaten square-jawed Maureen Orcutt 6 & 4.

At the seventh green of the breezy morning round, Helen Hicks missed a two-foot putt that would have made her one up. It looked serious at the time but seven holes farther on Helen Hicks might well have forgotten it because she was four up and it looked as though Virginia Van Wie's game had cracked completely. By lunch time, she had cause to brood about that putt again;.her opponent had cut her lead to two, with a fine four at the 16th and a good putt for another at the 18th. In the afternoon, with the wind dying down, they halved the first hole and Virginia Van Wie won the second, with a par 5 to Helen Hicks's 6.

As often happens in golf, luck and good playing went together. On the short 7th, with the match all square, the defending champion sank a 45-ft. putt for a two. It made her one up for the first time in 21 holes. Trying desperately to catch up, Helen Hicks had a good chance at the 9th, until her opponent laid her a dead stymie. A 75-yd. spade shot that stopped three inches from the cup at the 12th put Miss Van Wie three up. On the 15th, both balls were on the green in two, but Helen Hicks's had bitten into the soft turf and picked up a patch of mud. She putted three times to Virginia Van Wie's two and shook hands, grinning, with the champion.

Virginia ("Gino") Van Wie (rhymes with "tee") took to golf when she was 11, because her doctor thought it might help the back she had hurt playing football with a team of little boys. D. E. Miner, golf professional at De Land, Fla. where the Van Wies spend their winters, helped build up her game, encouraged her to enter her first tournament at 16. At 17, Miss Van Wie beat Glenna Collett in the Florida East Coast championship. The 73 with which she beat her again, in the national final last year, was the best round she ever played. Impeccable as a stylist, brilliant with her irons and steady with her woods. Miss Van Wie is not always as sure on the greens as she was last week. Once she won a match from Maureen Orcutt when, after she missed a putt of 12 in., Miss Orcutt missed one of six.

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