Golf In U.S. Expensive

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31215, 12 November 1966, Page 11

Golf In U.S. Expensive

rpHE tremendous wealth behind the leading golf courses in the United States has impressed the Christchurch sportsman, Mr A. N. Bailey, who is being trained in golf instruction in America. Mr Bailey was employed recently by the Toledo Country Club, the most exclusive club in Ohio. It has an annual gross turn-over of about 400,000 dollars and employs a permanent staff of 40. The entrance fee is 1500 dollars, and although the club is open for only seven months each year, members are debited 55 dollars every month. Not surprisingly,

many of the members are millionaires and many migrate south to Florida during the winter months. The club is closed from the end of October until early April. The Inverness course, the scene of the national opens of 1920, 1931—when W. Burke defeated G. van Elm after a 72-hole play-off—-and 1957, in Toledo is the finest course he has played on, said Mr Bailey. A new course, only 10 miles from the Toledo Country Club, is being built over a 6800 yards lay-out with a proposed par of 71. Already one million dollars

has been spent on the construction and there is much work to be completed. The construction site is dotted with bulldozers, tractors and men making lakes,

flattening hills, clearing trees and putting in bunkers and greens. The greens are being sown by a new process. A sticky base substance holds the soil together after the grass, grown earlier in a nursery, has been blown on to the green by a machine. Before

being used the greens will be topdressed four or five times to get the desired even surface.

Mr Bailey considers that the American courses are far more difficult than those in New Zealand. The holes are generally longer and contain more traps and water hazards.

Mr Bailey has left the Toledo Country Club and will next visit the Wilson factory in Chicago before spending some time at the National Golf Foundation, a large organisation responsible for much of the progress of golf in the United States.

Before returning to New Zealand he will visit San Francisco and hopes to play on some of the more famous courses on the west coast of the United States.