Home from golfing holiday

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33609, 10 August 1974, Page 44

Home from golfing holiday

Victory in the British amateur golf championship would not be beyond the scope of most nf the present Freyberg Rose Bowl representatives.

This is the view of the former Australian, Auckland and now Canterbury representative, D. N. Turner, who fulfilled a long-held ambition by playing in the British tournament at Muirfield in June. Turner has returned to Christchurch after a golfing holiday which also included competing in the qualifying rounds of the British Open.

Turner exceeded his own expectations in winning his first four matches and reaching the last 16 of the amateur championship, before he was beaten at the seventeenth by T. W. Homer (Britain), the eventual champion.

The British championship is a major drawcard for the world’s leading amateurs. The match-play event had 256 entries, including about 50 from the United States, and 62 golfers on handicaps of two were ballotted out. “British professionals consider the Muirfield course, when the wind is blowing from a certain direction, as tough as any in the world,” Turner said, “It blew from that direction for the week of the championship. “Under these conditions I would defy any golfer to break par (71), and as far as I know no-one did.” On many occasions Turner used his driver off the fairway in an attempt to reach the long par-fours — most of them measuring well over 400 yards — in two. “I never made the first and last holes hitting into a hailing headwind,” he added. Apart from the winds, which usually gusted between 35 and 45 m.p±M and

blew at 55 m.p.h. for two days, the golfers faced further hardships from the narrow fairways, tight lies, and fairway bunkers. The fairway traps, heavily loaded on one side, were placed to catch drives around 250 yards. It left little room for error off the tee. "If you played short, it was virtually impossible to reach the long par fours with your second,” Turner said. “Once you landed in a bunker there was only one way out — with a sand wedge.” Turner’s accuracy off the tee put him in good stead. He played his best golf in the first round when he beat the 18-year-old S. Hadfield, who is considered one of the brightest British hopes for the future.

His other wins were against the Scottish scratch player, B. Mackie, two up; the London amateur, J.

Grimsdick, at the nineteenth; and the 1948 Wimbledon tennis champion, R. Falkenburg, an American now living in Brazil, at the fifteenth. Against Homer, a 30-year-old company director who had won the title in 1972, Turner had some distinction. “I was one up after 10, and that was the only time Homer trailed an opponent in the tournament” Turner failed by four strokes in his attempt to qualify for the British open. He returned scores of 77 and 83 at the par-74 Fairhaven course. Turner is keen to resume his golfing activity and intends playing in the New Zealand amateur and open championship this year. His most pressing assignment is on August 25 when he plays for Town against Country. The Kaiapoi course will seem like a sheltered haven in comparison to wind-swept Muirfield.