RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31551, 13 December 1967, Page 27

RANDOM REMINDER

TOP WEIGHT

It is common knowledge among those who have escaped contamination from this form of foot-and-mount disease that golfers are little more than beasts of burden, getting about as much pleasure from their rounds as oxen at a water well. The golfers themselves will subscribe to the view that it is a hard life. They have, to put up with the incredibly good luck of their opponents, and their own incredibly ill fortune week after week; they have to buy all the golf books and pore through them, looking for the golfing grail; they have to buy new clubs at regular intervals, balls cost an enormous amount And even if the

trundler has taken much of the hard work, away from carrying golf bags, there is the depressing knowledge that month by month their prospects of doing something sensational are receding. And of course there is the dreadful difficulty of getting enough golf in during the course of the week to retain whatever sort of form the player regards as normal. It means having to fly through business appointments to get away after lunch; the strain of being a business executive is sometimes unbearable. It was this sort of pressure which persuaded one Christchurch golfer that he was really getting old. He had an appointment at the course, had very little

margin of time in his favour when he set off, his car developed a fault, and he made a hurried call on the way to a friend who ran a garage. The friend fixed things up swiftly, and our hero reached the course only minutes late. But as he played his round that day, it seemed to him that the strain of it all was telling. It seemed difficult to pull his trundler up the little hills at Shirley; he did not play well. For months afterwards. he felt that golf was really becoming too much for him. Six months after he had called at the garage, he discovered that in the bottom of his golf bag there was an enormous great chunk of lead.