GOLF NOTES

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 130, 3 June 1937, Page 27

GOLF NOTES

The Old Course at Carnoustie, where the Open Championship is to be played in July, is to be extended to 7200 yards for this event by the construction of special championship tees at the fourthj eighth, ninth, and tenth holes. The last two holes, however, will remain unaltered,- for Carnoustie is commonly regarded as possessing the most difficult finish' of all the courses in the world, says "Golfing." At the last two holes, the -Barry burn (which we should have found no difficulty in avoiding at the earlier holes) becomes a formidable hazard, whose serpentine meanderings leave us the minimum of space in which to place each shot. . <

At the' 428-yard seventeenth the drive has to be "placed" on a long, narrow island of fair turf, enclosed by a bend of the stream, and anything of the nature of a hook will take the ball into the:water;.'while the stream has again to. be carried with the second shot. The eighteenth is even stiffer. Not only is it some twenty-five yards longer, but here the burn—which at this point attains the dimensions of, a small river,' twenty-five feet from bank to bank—flows right across the front 6f the green. . With the wind against the players, as it was during play for the last Open Championship contested there,, the carry becomes a formidable undertaking even for j the champions. > The difficulty of the hole, moreover, is enhanced by Ihe fact that the player dare not go "all "out" for an exceptionally long drive, in order to make the second shot easier. " The drive itself has to be placed upon an exiguous peninsula of turf, a trifle under fifty yards wide, enclosed by another of the convolutions of the übiquitous stream, and beyond that the fairway is still hemmed in by the boundary railing on the left.

Alliss, who in the last Open Championship played there was one of the most unlucky of its victims. In, the fourth and last round it happened that Alliss was one of the earliest players out, and he therefore did not know what he required to do to win. But he could hazard a shrewd guess at the figure that would be needed, and at this eighteenth hole he determined to "go for" the 4. In this, it may be said, events proved him entirely in the right,:for, a 4,-as ; it turned out, would just have, enabled him to tie with Tommy Armour for first place. Unfortunately, Alliss'sball was not lying