H. W. HATTERSLEY A POPULAR GOLFER

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29366, 19 November 1960, Page 5

H. W. HATTERSLEY A POPULAR GOLFER

f~|NE of the most familiar and v popular figures in the field contesting the national golf championships at Invercargill is one of Australia’s greatest amateur players, H. W. Hattersley. He first visited New Zealand for a Kirk-Windeyer Cup match 30 years agp, and he has been back on several occasions since then, not only for golf. New South Wales amateur champion three times, and twice

holder of the Australian title, Harry Hattersley was noted for his tremendous length from the tees. At Shirley before the war, in a Kirk-Windeyer Cup match, he drove the seventeenth green so easily .that his ball went out of bounds fence. In his younger days, Hattersley devoted himself to sport enthusiastically. He was a senior Rugby Union player and cricketer in Sydney, and he was prominent in

rifle shooting, athletics, rowing and surfing. Twice the Manly team of which he was a member won the Australian surf boat title.

One of Hattersley’s oldest friends in New Zealand is the Wanganui amateur golfer. B. M. Silk. Hattersley played Silk at Hamilton in 1937 and was beaten in the semi-final of the amateur championship, at the thirty-sixth green. Nineteen years later he was again beaten by Silk in the first round of the amateur, and this time it was at the nineteenth.

Hattersley feels that Otatara is a lovely course, and a perfect championship test. At Paraparaumu last week, he said, it was possible to reach greens on holes 480 yards long with two shots, easily, but at Otatara it was not so easy, and every shot counted.

Because he knows many people in New Zealand, Hattersley likes to bring his wife with him and spend his holidays in the Dominion, but he is not certain what he will do next year.

But this quiet-spoken Australian will need no reminding of the welcome he will always have from New Zealand golfers, for he has always offered a perfect example of how the game should be played.