A GULF ROMANCE

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXVI, 16 June 1932, Page 8

A GULF ROMANCE

ARTHUR HAVERS AMBITION AFTER ECLIPSE (By Charles Whitconibe, British Captain v. America) (Specially Written for “The Mail") One of the most inspiriting features of recent golf has been the reincarnation of Arthur Havers —for I am sure that his revival is rapidly qualifying to deserve such a description. Nine years ago, when Havers was 23, lie won the British Open Championship. In doing it, lie checked the begiiiiiitfg of American supremacy in the event; a supremacy that hud ilicu lasted only two years. But after brief prosperity, a blight settled upon his game. He had the misfortune to become unattached. With no ciub to serve and through the sheer misfortune of things in general, lie receded farther and further until there seemed little chance that he would ever again be acclaimed a star of golf. Meanwhile, the Americans resumed their annual capture of the British open title. Suddenly Havers began to revive last year, and now he has established himself as one of the three or four British players with the best chances of bringing the American conquest to ail end at Sandwich in June. If he were to achieve such a triumph again after a long interval of almost complete obscurity, it would he one of the real romances of golf. EXTREME EXPERIMENTS In his early days, two growing characteristics were to be seen in Havers. In the address lie was turning the face of his iron club farther and farther away from the hall every time I saw him; it was becoming so pronounced as to convince one tiiat he must be trying to evolve a way of his own of applying the maximum degree of “cut”—or stopping —spin to the ball. To be sure, plenty of first-class players practise this principle in a modified form, and in due proportion it is good. The perfect iron shot is that which runs only a few yards, and which, pitching slightly on the left, breaks towards the pin on the right. This is the shot, which, as exemplified by Mr John Ball, Mr Harold Hilton, Mr Robert Maxwell, Vardon, Braid and Taylor at their best, can he controlled with greater certainty than any other. Ir, is promoted by the little trait of having tho fact of he club lying slightly away from the ball during the address, because, at the impact, the club comes just sufficiently across the hall to create the “cut” spin without causing a slice. That seems to be an elementary fact. But Havers was becoming a wholehogger; one wondered when he would perfect himself at tho super-cut shot. Another curious feature of his methods was that, in playing low-flying shots with back-spin, he would graze the. ground for eight or nine inches—sometimes a foot—in front of where the hall had lain.

Here, apparently, was in progress another scheme for developing the discoveries of past masters. From time immemorial, the method of playing a back-spin shot has been to strike a descending blow at the ball so us to pinch it at the impact between the club and the ground, and only rajeh the bottom of the arc of the swing after the ball has been hit. In this way the club comes into contact with the ground just after the impact; it then grazes tho turf for an inch or two. On the evidence of all the best playei s, and nlso of one’s own eyes, this is how hack-spin is imparted. Some twenty years ago when there lived people who could remember young Tom Morris, that St. 'Andrews prodigy, who won the open championship four times—--1868, 1869, 1870 and 1872—and died at the age of twenty-four, they said that he played the shot to perfection. In a later generation, Vardon was its outstanding master; then Braid became famed for it. It is tho very antithesis of the iron shot—the average amateur’s lion shot —which comes into contact with the ground immediately behind the ball and produces a high flight.

GROPING FOR PROGRESS Havers had evidently resolved to improve upon the ways of his predecessors. His great height and long reach gave him every facility to extend this operation of grazing the ’ground in front of the hall, and pinching the hall between the club-face and the turf at the impact so as to produce the hack-spin in a greater degree than anybody had achieved before him. I watched Havers closely one day. In places he was clipping off the top soil for a full twelve inches in front of the hall—not deeply enough to check the passage of the club and yet deeply enough to remove the closely cut grass. If it were necessary to pick out the strongest feature of Havers’ game, one would select unhesitatingly Ins wooden club shots against the wind. They are tremendous. He is, in all circumstances, a peculiarly gifted individual amongst the world’s longest drivers. Best of all, however, are his drives into a heavy head-wind. As he addresses the ball, he braces his arms, and as he takes the club back he opens his shoulders in a way that reminds one of nobody so much as Mr Edward Blackwell when he was supreme as the hitter of tile gutta-percha hall. He has the chance of being the greatest “come-, back” in golf.