GAMES AND PLAYERS

Press, Volume XCI, Issue 27688, 18 June 1955, Page 9

GAMES AND PLAYERS

ATHLETIC SPORTS

[By MILES]

The Training Squad The Canterbury selectors, Messrs N. J. McPhail and J. D. Morton, appear to have made few omissions in their choice of 23 players as a training squad for the Town v. Country match to be played on July 2. The players chosen, with the addition of those found in the Country team, may form the Ranfurly Shield training but the selectors reserve the right to add to, or delete from, the 23 chosen. If there is any discussion on the rights and wrongs of the selection, it may be on the front of the scrum, from which two very likely prospects in J. Staines (Christchurch) and J. Stewart (University) may appear unlucky to be omitted. The big difficulty now confronting the authorities is the choice of the best fifteen from the 23 nominations, but everything points to Canterbury putting in the field a stronger team than that which held the shield last year. Answers to Correspondents

Bill 8., Christchurch. —(1) On M; «h 1. 2 and 3, 1912, a Davis Cup match was played between Australia (N. E. Brookes, R. W. Heath, and A. W. Dunlop) and United States (B. C. Wright, M. E. McLoughlin, and W. A. Larned). The game was played at Lancaster and was won by Australia, 5-0. (2) At Auckland in 1920 United States (W. T. Tilden and W. M. Johnstone) beat Australia (Brookes and G. L. Patterson), 5-0. Query. Riccarton. —B. P. J. Molloy played in four g&mes for Manawatu in 1951. Sprinter, Christchurch. —The opening ceremony will take place on the afternoon of Thursday, November 22. Athletics will commence on Friday, November 23. Off the Stage A good many familiar names are missing from the English county cricket championship this year. Two of the best known players who have left the county scene are Harold Gimblett, of Somerset, and Emrys Davies, of Glamorgan. Gimblett scored more than 23,000 runs and averaged 36;’ Davies 26,500 at 28. Davies took more than 900 wickets in his career. The Nottinghamshire fast bowler, Harold Butler, who took 948 wickets, ha& become an umpire, and so has Norman Oldfield, who toured New Zealand before the war. A very stylish batsman. Oldfield scored nearly 18.000 runs at an average of 38. Len Muncer, of Middlesex and Glamorgan, who scored 8600 runs (average 21) and took 753 wickets (average 21) has retired, and Kent has lost R. Dovey, a bowler with 777 wickets. The Nottinghamshire wicketkeeper, E. A. Meads, who made 447 dismissals, is another to go. Two Essex players who have given B re at service to their side have retired —A. V. Avery (14,000 runs at 34) and F. H. Vigar (8900 at 26, as well as 241 wickets). A rather depressingly long list also includes C. Oakes of Sussex '(11,000 runs and 458 wickets), H. Halliday of Yorkshire (8550 runs at 32), N. Hever of Glamorgan (333 wickets), C. Scott, the Gloucestershire pace bowler (531 wickets), and F. Jakeman of Northamptonshire, a forcing batsman who scored nearly 6000 runs at an average of 32. Mikus Regains Title Pram Mikus, who beat the Waimate boxer, Ross Sadler,.; at Timaru last year and subsequently lost his Australian middle-weight title to Carlo Marchini, regained the championship at Brisbane last week _ when he beat Marchini on points. Marchini bored in for two good rounds with left hooks and heavy right crosses but in the eighth round, and after Mikus played a tattoo on Marchini’s face for two rounds, Mikus piled up points while Marchini lost his temper. Mikus won on points. Then and Now “Who said, that?” asks a Wellington writer when quoting as follows from George H. Dixon’s “the triumphant tour of the New Zealand footballers, 1905”:—“As recently as '25 years ago our football was slow and uninteresting. and wholly devoid df the skill and cleverness that make it so fascinating to both player and spectator today. In those times the play consisted for the most part of long and ill-judged kicking, in which strength of foot played a more important part than length of head. . . Thei\i are few who will not agree that football in 1880 must have been drab and uninteresting to all but those most concerned with the game. At that time the game had little resemblance to what it was when Dave Gallaher’s team put New Zealand Rugby on the map with its wedgeformed scrum and deep playing backs. As a spectacle football developed in New Zealand, with the 2-3-2 scrum which placed New Zealand rugby on top of the world. It is just as spectacular today when the right players are taking part. County Cricket

Surrey’s lead of 35 points in the English county cricket championship suggests the county may equal the championship record of four successive outright wins. Surrey won the last championship in 1952, 1953 and 1954 Nottinghamshire won the title in the four years from 1883 to 1887. YorkAire from 1922 to 1925, and in four successive seasons, 1937, 1938, 1939 and 1946. Perhap’s Surrey’s most successful era was when it won in 1887 and 1888, shared the championship with Lancashire and Nottinghamshire in 1889, and went on to win outright in the three following seasons. American Golf Championship The United States open golf championship which began yesterday, is being played on the Olympic Country Club’s Lake Course near San Francisco. When the San Francisco open championship was held on this 6500yard tree-lined course, only two players were able to break 70. The five holes from two to six are thought to be as difficult as any open championship players will ever have to face. The second is over 400 yards uphill, requiring a very accurately placed drive; the third is 220 yards downhill to a tightly trapped green with a narrow opening; the fourth is a 420-yard dogleg with a downhill tee shot and an uphill second. The green is a large one, but the contour of the ground! hides most of the pin. The 445-yard par 4 fifth is also a dogleg, with the! tee shot downhill and requiring most accurate placing. The sixth, 433 yards, is also a 4, demanding a well-controlled iron second to a sloping green. Another difficult hole is the sixteenth, a double dogleg to the left, of 574 yards. The second shot here is one of the most testing; the fairway narrows between the trees typical of the course) to a very narrow point, where the second must be placed. An unusual feature is the last green, which slopes ; at an angle of 35 degrees from the horizontal. It was here that Ben Hogan once had four putts in a tourament round. But there is no hole to compare in size with the seventeenth at Baltusrol, New Jersey, where the 1954 open was played. It measures 620 yards. New Zealand Billiards Title The 1955 New Zealand amateur bil-i liards championship will be staged at Auckland. Play will start on August 22, and conclude on August 27. The tournament will be played under the two-life system, with heats of two hours and final of four hours of two sessions. It will be limited to 12 players. The West Coast player. Alan Twohill, 1954 champion, will defend his title. The Canterbury Amateur Billiard Association has received large nominations for the junior and C billiards championships. The list totals 68 players, 36 in the juniors and 32 in the C. Play will start on Monday, August 27. Schools’ Rugby The annual quadrangular tournament among Wanganui. Collegiate School, Wellington College. Christ’s College, and Nelson College will be played thi~ year at Wellington College on August 20 and 22. On the first day, Christ’s College will meet Wellington College in the early game, and Nelson will then play Wanganui. On the Mondav. the losers will meet in the preliminary i game, and (he final match will follow! it

I Borotra Retires Jean Borotra. now aged 58. has given up tennis in so far as major tournaments are concerned. But he is still fit and even now could - give most players a hard game. His fitness is the result of regular and strenuous exervises year in and year out. Borotra—the “bounding Basque”—is the last to retire of the three Frenchmen who dominated world tennis 20 years ago. The other two were Rene Lacoste and Henri Cochet. and their record at Win.bledon in the singels final was: 1924. Borotra beat Lacoste; 1925, Lacoste beat Borotra: 1926, Borotra beat H. Kinsey: 1927. Cochet beat Borotra; 1928. Lacoste beat Cdchet; 1929, Cochet beat Borotra. A Southland First

The Kew Park ilnvercargill) cycling track, - built by voluntary labour, is the only Olympic design track ih Australia or New Zealand, according to the “Southland Times.’’ There will soon be another—at Melbourne for the Olympic Games —but the Kew bowl will hold the honour of a "first’’ for Southland. The Kew track, built by officials of the Invercargill Amateur Cycling Club under the supervision of Mr Oliver Henderson, president, is 333 metres (352 yards) round, or five laps to the mile. The surface is only in need of a bit of retouching to make it as good as any similar track in the world. Hutton on Top

Of the cricketers playing during the present English season, the England captain, L. Hutton, has the greatest aggregate of runs. The leading contemporary English batsmen’s aggregates. at the start of the season, were: Hutton 39,413, D. C. S. Compton 34,004, John Langridge 33.104. W. J. Edrich 31,741, J. Hardstaff 31,100, C. Washbrook 28,128. A. E. Far’-' 24.649. J. D. Robertson 24.235. H. E. Dollcry 22,630. D. Brookes 22.369. G. Cox 21,506, J. F. Crapp, 20.727, and R. T. Simpson 20,282. The bowling list is: R. T. D. Perks 2131 wickets. W. E. Hollies 1994. D. V. P. Wright 1834, A. E. Bedser 1341, J. Young 1258, Ray Smith 1213, J. H. Wardle 1192, C. Gladwin 1169, J. C. Laker 1141. J. E. Walsh 1126, R. O. Jenkins 1089. Fifteen batsmen, headed by J. B. Hobbs (61,237) have career aggregates greater than Hutton’s at the start of the season. Perks’s wicket aggregate has been exceeded by 14 others, led by Wilfred Rhodes with 4188 —the only ) an to take more than 4000 first-class wickets. The Four-Minute Mile

“There are no lonely peaks in athletics. I shall never feel lonely again.” writes Roger Bannister in the “Sunday Times” after L. Tabori, of Hungary, had beaten Chris Chataway and Brian Hewson in a mile race in which the three did better than four minutes. Each of the English runners clocked 3min 59.8scc and the winner 3min 59sec. In his summing up Bannister says: “I felt both happy and sad for Chataway. He had generously set the pace in the crucial third lap of the first four-minute mile at Oxford, and had frightened Landy to produce the second four-minute mile by keeping at his shoulder until the bell at Turku in Finland. Now at last he had proved himself over the mile distance, which though not his best distance had always been his first love. Yet in the moment of success Tabori overtook him and cheated him of the double victory we hoped he anight have shared with Hewson. Who can say how many milers will join the select fraternity before the end of the present season? The days of lonely splendour in athletics seemed to have ended with Gundap Haegg. Many will rijn miles in four minutes, but it will never be easy.” Unofficial Record An unofficial record of Imin 51.5 sec by an Australian runner has been set in America by Jim Bailey, former New South Wales middle-distance run-, ner. Bailey, who won the Australian half-mile title at Hobart in 1951, and again in Sydney three years later, is now a student at the University of Oregon. He went there after the Empire Games last year. Bailey’s time is n tenth of a second faster than the Australian record set by Don Macmillan at St. Kilda on the evening of February 23 last. Bailey’s previous best was Imin 52.45ec at Bendigo last year. In the Empiad 880yds final he pulled out because of a severe foot injury. Golf Magazine

The hold golf has on the sporting public in the United States may be dei duced from the size of the programme printed for the open championsnip last year. It includes a diagram and description of the course at Springfield, New Jersey, articles on previous i championships, on turf culture. New ; York’s courses, tips to spectators, on golf qhampions—to a total length of 272 large pages. A Rugby Genius ! Percy Bush, whose death occurred in England recently, played a part in J checking the victorious run of Dave ‘ Gallaher’s 1905-6 team in the still talked of game against Wales. In its tribute to Bush “The Times” says ■ that he had the temperament of an ; undoubted genius and was one of the . greatest drop-kickers .of his day (he ) almost put one over in the test against the All Blacks) but was also fatally liable to make the mistakes of over- ( confidence. It was one such howler, says “The Times” which cost Cardiff their game against the New Zealanders. Bush “speculated” to kick a ball dead while it was in goal, missed and gave G. Nicholson the second . try of a 10-8 score. It is not difficult to believe that the singers of the . “Sospan Fach” took a long time to forget Bush’s lapse but in the Rugby world generally he is remembered more especially as the missionary who took Rugby to France. He went to France first in the employ of a commercial firm, worked for the French Government during the - 1914-18 war, and Was then appointed British consul in Nantes. Bush’s eight Welsh “caps” are dated in British records as being obtained between 1906 and ; - '*n This does not imply that his game against New Zealand (on December 16. 1905) has been forgotten but that a British season is regarded as occupying the second of its two years, since the Home Countries normally play their internationals after January 1. Sport in the Soviet “In tne 17 months since my flight from the Russian intelligence service I have studied international sports with paticular interest from the viewpoint of a fan and a former athlete in the Soviet Union. I was at once I amazed by the gulf between United States and Soviet attitudes towards sports,” writes Yuri A. Rastvarov in “Life.” “I believe that if Americans do not learn just how complete this diffei’ence is before next year’s Olympic games, they may be in for some rude shocks. Americans have to realise that such terms as ‘amateur’ I and ‘voluntary’ are totally irrelevant in I the U.S.S.R. Soviet teams arc not ; ‘organised’; they are assembled as parts of a great State machine. Soviet teams do not ‘play’ at their sports; they work at them. In the past two years the world has watched Soviet athletes make a stunning impact on international sports. Soviet teams and competitors have travelled to more than 15 countries, while from Moscow has come a lavish stream of invitations to foreign groups ranging from a British soccer club to a Japanese wrestling team. Most of those who have accepted these Russian challenges met crushing defeats; in 1954. for instance, the Russians beat the Canadians at hockey, the British at soccer, the Norwegians at skating. Last July a crew of Soviet oarsmen carried away Britain's Gra.id Challenge Cup at the Henley regatta. Soviet participation in inch international competition has little to do with ‘coexistence.’ certainly even less to do with recreation or sportsmanship for its own sake. The objective in this field was laid down in a 1948 I decree, and it is exactly the same as i in all othes: world supremacy."