The Auckland Star WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 7, 1933. DOWN THE FAIRWAY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 237, 7 October 1933, Page 8

The Auckland Star WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, The Echo and The Sun.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 7, 1933. DOWN THE FAIRWAY.

For the ctiuse that lacks assistance, J'or the wrong that needs resistance lor the future in the distance, And the good that ke can do

The curate in one of Barrie's plays, asked what his parish is like, replies that he is told the wicket is quite good. Similarly there must be golfers who see towns and even cities as suburbs of golf courses. "Auckland? Rather a pretty place. The Middlemore links there are not bad, and they tell me that this Titirangi course, where the New Zealand championships are to be played, is quite promising. Now, to go back to that tenth hole to-day, where I went wrong ..." For the chatter about golf is endless. There is no game that has a more extensive "shop." Auckland in general, and the Titirangi Club in particular, are to be congratulated on having secured tlio championship this year. The meeting in a sense is a national event. Golf cannot compete with football or cricket in popular interest, but it has a large following, and among those who do not play it or watch there are many who like to read

about it. Tliey are interested in "holing in one," in grim fights to the thirty-seventh hole, ancl in the wonderful/Indian summer of Arthur Duncan. The younger generation may find it difficult to realise that there was a time when golf did not excite this interest. Forty years or so ago golf was so strange a game to the masses of Americans that "Mr. Dooley," in his remarks about it, could say that if your wife goes to see the game, and her name is in the paper, "that counts ye wan." No humorist of to-day woidd think of writing such an extravagance. The game is not more of a national game there than it is here, but everybody realises that it is not confined to the rich, and great players like Ilagen and Bobby Jones are national figures., t

Golf lias conquered a large part of the world, but not all of it. Tennis is still byfar the most universal of games, and the conditions of playing assure it this preeminence. Golf is perhaps too restrained to become universal, and there are obvious 1 difficulties in providing space for everybody. Originally it was a game for all classes, and to-day in Scotland it is popular in a sense not found elsewhere. Once a team of blue-jerseyed fishermen went to London to play a Parliamentary team headed by Arthur Balfour, and one would like to round off the story by stating that they won —onlj' they did not. Like other games, golf has been elaborated and made more expensive. The "shirt-front" wicket has its counterpart in the elaborately prepared course. But just as village cricketers get a lot of fun out of the game, so do golfers who walk round courses far below championship standard. And apart from the pleasure of play, golf has probably done more for the health of men and women than any game ever invented. Its chief characteristic is its concentration. To play really well one has to practise and practise and practise, from imaginary shots in the bedroom to weeks in bunkers. It is a grim game in that there is little room for that display of personality that so often adds to the pleasure of cricket. Pressing and exuberance of all kinds are fatal; in golf Greatheart cannot stride to the wicket prepared to do or die, nor can Spofforth call up the last ounce of his strength for an effort that will smash through his opponent's defence. Characters like Jcssop, Johnny Briggs and Parkin have no place on golf links; everybody must walk sedately and swing correctly and within his strength.

We find, however, this paradox, that this tight-lipped game—"billiards gone to grass" as a cricketer described it —which lacks the lusty individualities and eccentricities of cricket, has produced a vast body of humour. The very seriousness of golf, that intense preoccupation which feels a foozle like a wound, probably has been more prolific of jokes than any feature of any other game. It is a huge target inviting ►arrows, and they have been shot gleefully, from the famous of all jests—about the Minister who would have to give up not golf, but the meenistry— to that recent one of the player who says to his opponent in the middle of a round: "It's only right that you should know

that I love your wife," and is reproved: "There you go, trying to put me off my game." Humour lives on such opportunity for contrast and exaggeration. "Driving," quoted the Oldest Member, "is a science, approaching is an art, and putting is an inspiration." The whole is fused into something that to its devotees is a game and a religion.

WAIKATO FARMERS.

Co-operation has been severely tested, like other forms of business management, by the difficulties of recent years, but the record of that prominent Waikato concern, the Farmers' Auctioneering Company, provides an instance of the way in which an organisation of this kind, when soundly managed, is able to weather hard times. By building up its strength in more prosperous times the Company was well equipped to survive a period of lean years, and it is to-day in the position of being ready to expand its operations as conditions justify. The liquidity of its assets, following a progressive reduction in outside liabilities, particularly since the onset of the depression, and the upward movement of profits now revealed, are indications of the success of the Company's policy. Of course, one favourable factor has been the greater stability of the dairy industry as compared with sheep farming, for it is with the dairying branch of production that the company is mostly concerned, but dairying has had to encounter sufficient difficulties to make the task of the directors of such a company no easy one. The position of the ' company testifies to the prosperity of the ; Waikato, and is a good augury for future I expansion of the industry on sound lines. I