GOLF. NOTES BY BULGER.

Otago Witness, Issue 2894, 1 September 1909, Page 64

GOLF. NOTES BY BULGER.

The 1 New Zealand championship meeting, which commences at Auckland on. the 13th inst., is attracting a fair repxejseoitatdon from Dunedin. Those who jntend. making the trip are H. C. Smith (champion), F Leifcch, O. W Rattray, H. S. Fenwick, C. G. Soolon, and T. A. Hunter (Otago Club), and J Forbes and E. Denny (St. Clair dub). The monthly medal competitions of the Ota-go Olub take place at Balmacewem oca Saturday, 4ih inst. In *he course of playing in the tournament at North Berwick recently W. H. Home, of CQiertsey, drove the ball from the thirteenth tea to the edge of the thirteenth jrreen. The distapeje from the teeing ground to the hole is 476 yds, and the length of Horne'e drive was 469 yds, white Rowland Jones and O H. Mayo are said to have laid* their tee shots only 15yds or 20yda short of Home's. Thjs extraordinairy drive constitutes a record in driving. Although it is difficult to get an accurate measurement of tha great drives which are known to have beep made, it is recognised that the record drive hitherto was that of Mr Edward Blackweld ,in 1892, when from the eighteenth, tee at St. Andrews he struck the steps of the home hole, the distance being 366 yds. -The late Lieutenant Taifc, in 1893 at St. Andrews, drove 341 yds 9in. The record drive by a lady was made by Miss Whigham, of Prestwick, in the ladies' championship Westward Ho! ;n; n 1900, when at the seventeenth holes she drove 234 yds. Home about two years ago made a very big drive, but tire distance was not properly marked. At the thirteenth hole at North Berwick the ground dips, and Home had the advantage of a strong following wind as well as of a very dry ground. It is not easy to exraot any useful lesson from the feat© of endurance that ere occasionally chronicled in connection with golf matches. Quite recently Mr T. T. Gray and Mr H. B. Ferrier, two well-known members of the Edinburgh Burgess Golfing Society, payed eight rounds of 18 hoks in one day. They began at 4 a.m., and finished their eighth round substantially in the dark at 10 p.m. A brief interval only was allowed for luncheon, and Mr Gray, a very fine player, and presumably the younger of the two competitors, had an average of 82 for his eight rounds, his best round being- 77. He gave five holes of a handicap to Mr Ferrier each round, and won. Apparently Mr Ferrier holds th& view that a round of 18 holes is not a sufficient test for ecratch and plus players. That may be willingly conceded, but if one ■round is not enough a.sswedly eight rounds on end are m the nature of a golfing test carried to the point at least of individual abuse. They prove the point of physical fitness, but they do not necessarily prove which of the two played the better golf. Neither does 6uch a long-drawn-out test serve to throw dight upon any "useful .theory of preserving the body from fatigue, on was the case not long a#o with the " long day's" golf of the septuagietnarian Captain Molesworth at Westward Ho! In this case Captain Molesworth played from early mornmg until darkness, carrying his own clufcs, and subsisting on a biscuit or two, a little water, andl an apple. Then, he walked home three miles, and" finished tha evening pJaying billiards, showing no symptoms of fatigue next day. A curious case of the influence of a change of climate affecting a player's game for the worse is seen in the experience of Tom Vardon, who has been in America lately as a competitor for the United Sta/t'es Open Championship. The sudden heat wave in America found the Sandwich r*rofessional unaccustomed to play up to his true form uncteir it, and he was never really in a position to challenge +he supremacy of the leaders. The dry heat of America had the same influence on, Willie Pa.rk when he went over there a good many years ago to play. In onei of his matches the heat was so great that the gutta balls had to be carried round the course among the ice of a champagne cooler. The climate also affected Park by causing an unpleasant outbreak of carbuncles on hie meek. When Taylor and Herd firefc visited Pau they found tho atmosphere so rarefied and li«?ht compared with the Homo element that they complained of always driving orar the top of the ball with a quicbeir swing. The same influence of climate wa<» felt by the professionals who visited Mexico a few years ago. Climate may account, indeed, for the want of sustained success which accompanies Ma<Ky'«s jinie htre _aa oompireJ with the better form he invariably shows at Biarritz and other places in the sunny south. Probably, however, it is mainly a question of speedier adaptability on the part, of sqnvp players who r-hanjre thtu'r climate occasionally as compared! with others. But thft first contact of the golfer from other and brighter lands with our heavier and more humid atmosphere must make some little difffi-rsuoe in the general level of his same until he has stayed long enough to be acclimatised. It is interesting to note how proverbially short is the polfing memory in respect of many of ..he fashions in clubs which large .sections of golfers beiat-.d from time to time. To judg« by what js spoken and written to-day about the Dread noujrht driver among golfers on-p- would imagine that a very broad wooden head at the end of a whippy shaft was a. real discovery of the golfer of to-day. As a matter of fact, the n«w form of club is quite a eene-raXion old. The Dreadnought ie nothing more than the old Bap driver, which used to be a familiar feature on many links during the era of tbe gutta ball. The Ba.p took its name from the broad scone familiar on all Scottish breakfast tables, because th-e broad head, wirh abundance of wood' in it as the resilient driving power, was the | cnlv familiar natural object, to which it could hs liken-fd, and the description was psrf-ectly apt. The same observation applies tc the "fishing rod " club, nie-aninsr a driver perhaps a couple of inches longer in the shaft than the normal and accepted standard length. Such clubs -were quite well known in. itfoa feather ball era, and the writer has several of them. In golf .as in | other arts and pastime*, it is indeed notoi riously true that there is nothing new under j the sun. Willie Park many years ago inI vented a loftar with a coneava face, so -as i to enable plenty of back spin to be put on the ball, and to minimise ite run on landing on the firreen. Several v«ara afterwards come builders wer? tSamolishin^r an old house in Leith belonging to the parf»' years of the seventeenth eenturv. and lo ! ! among the rubbi.-h of the foundations fchev : turned out in old lcfrin-g iron madei with [ the identical concave face of Willie Park*

lofter. The idea, therefor*, iia'd been translated into iron and wood by golfers who lived some hundreds of years before Willie Park's useful invention.— Field. The following remarks anent the long | drive mentioned above taken from the Field will, I have no doubt, be read with mll terest : — The general body of golfers-are inclined to be sceptical when they read of some abnormally long drive achieved by a player. This must be the prevalent feeling of most golfers when it wae announced from North Berwick that Home in this competition drove from the tee to the hole at the thirteenth green, a distance of 476 yards. One knows only too acutely how j difficult it is for the best and most experienced players to cover . 180 or 200 yards, but when more than double these distances is accredited to a single drive of a professional among a picked band of long drivers one is inevitably impelled to cry out, "Credat Judseus Apella." Yet there seems to be no doubt that in this case the fact is authentic — much more authentic than the former drive at Beekenham, cjaimed on behalf "of Home of something under 400 yards. There is some mitigation, "however, for the infirmities of mediocrity in the fact that, as in the case of the late F. G. Tate's record drive, the ground and the weather were highly favourable to Homes' achievement. Many indifferent reporters of golf matches in these days ignore the essential details that the practical golfer wants particularly to know. It has now to be made clear that these two important conditions favoured Home's tee shot— first, there is a downward slope at this hole, and the ground was hard; and, 6econd, a good breeze of wind was behind the player. No one at North Berwiok knew what happened to the ball when it fell after the carry ; probably it bounced on a piece of hicUden rode. All tfhat is known is that a ball was found to trickle on to the green by Vardon and Kidd, the previous couple holing out, and on looking back to see who were responsible for a breach of etiquette, the spectators following the match saw Home and companion leaving the tee. The marker accompanying Home and his companion granted a certificate ac to the bona fides of the drive, and no doubt ite value, commercial and otherwise, will be duty appreciated by the makers of the ball with which Home achieved this remarkable result. After all that is said about the achievement, is this a satisfactory method of establishing a drivewhich ehouid stand as one of the permanent records in the history of the game? No golfer of experience who examines the question impartially and without any tinge of parti pris whatever can admit that it is. No one will have the hardihood to contend that Home, though massively built, like Braid, Ray, and Massy, is, taken all through, a longer driver off the tee than any of these, or even than Duncan. In the late Mr F. O. Tarts' drive at St. Andrews there is the admitted "fluke' of hard frozen ground, and here in. Home's case there is the elope of the green downwards, the following wind., and the hardness of the fall. These are abnormal, not normal, conditions of any golf match, and it is indeed questionable whether any piece .of play, however sensational and extraordinary, should be accepted as a permanent record of achievement. Whet golfers want is something abnormal performed under normal conditions of match play— character of golfiing ground and relative calmness of weather. If wo all -tried to make record drives downhill over a hard strip of ground it is certain that Home oi any other professional would not long survive the ordeal of having the laurels plucked from their brows. Records: made over frozen ground or downhill with a strong following wind are" in reality valueless as incidents in- the game, and they have no more right to be accepted seriously than the frequent records which ere chronicled as having been broken by amateurs and professionals when playing a friendly match, perhaps with the tees shortened. To got rid of all this dubiety and confusion would it not bo advisable to "regulate" the making of record drives? Let the Professional Golfers' Association institute a prise for long driving at each succeeding Open Championship, the ground to be carefully chosen, the measurements to be carefully made by vigilant stewards. That is better and' more -'nteresting fun. than the deadly dull grind of four qualifying rounds which shall count for nothing in the final result. The amateurs could follow the same procedure at the Amateur Championship; and, as in each assembly there would be the pick of the two classes of golfers, it would doubtless be extremely hard for any players outside these cwo branches of competriors to upset the result within a year. Moreover, the present unsatisfactory position of establishing records in driving raises the important question whether the carry alone should be considered, or whether carry and run combined is the true test of long driving. Carry alone deserves to be considered, tor it is the essential feature of every drive, and the only detail of .t upon which the proud performer loves to dwell. In the run of a ball driven by a strong arm lu/_'k counts for everything. The ball may land on a ston-e, on a hard patch, on a slight downward slope, and in proportion as the tall is treated favourably or the reverse the run ie extended or curtailed. Here, then, is a good chance 'or some public-spirited amateur, anxious to set up driving records against which no critic can cavil, to establish an amateur and professional driving compctiton, carry onlj to count. Tho contest would be universally interesting not only to see, but to read about, and one of its enduring lessons would be to prove the fallacy, so cheaply accepted, that there is any golfer livirTg among professionals or amateui-s who can drive a ball on fanground and under fair conditions of weather anything approaching a carry of 300 to 400 yards. NEW ZEALAND LADIES' CHAMPIONSHIP. PALMERSTON N.. August 24. The New Zealand Ladies' Golf Championship was finished to-day in superb leather and in tlic presence of a crowd cf several hundred people. It is generally lecognised that the golf at this meeting has been of a higher standard than that at any previous New Z-ealand ladies' meeting, and the performance 1 of Mrs Bevan in the semi-final to-day iti knocking 5 more off the link's record will take a gieat deal of beating. Her 84 was only 2 more than the par of the gi^en, and wa.-, quite too much for Miss Humphrey, w lio was nevertheless playing golf that would have stood her well in any other heat. Both players showed splendid form. The Bran

don-Cowper contest was also productive" ' of very fine golf. If was' a ding-dong battle from start to finish, and anybody's game till the last green. A very large crowd followed the final in the afternoon. Both players started nervously. Mrs Bevan was particularly nervous on the greens, and lost the first hole by 6 to 4. Five halves followed, and their each player a hole apiece, Miss Brandon turning with 2 up, and adding another at the tenth hole, only to lose the next three and to halve two more. Mrs Bevan then became 1 up, but lost the advantage at the seventeenth hole. Both were missing short -putts all along. The eighteenth hole looked like giving Miss Brandon a victory, but Mrs Bevan saved it , with a 12ft putt for 5. By winning the nineteenth hole with a 10ft putt in 3 Mrs Bevan took the championship. The scores were 96 to 97, and would have been brilliant but for missing the short putts. The Consolation Handicap resulted as follows.— Mrs Fulton (18), 1 down; Mrs Stafford (16), 1 down; Miss Abraham (18), square. The prizes were presented in the Municipal Hall to-night. August 26. Another delightful day was experienced by golfers, the weather being sumny, with a light cool breeze. In the second round of the Manawatu Challenge Cup and- Championship the only close heat was that be- - tween Miss Snodgrass and Miss "Gould, the 1 latter being defeated at the nineteenth) hole. Miss Braithwaite defeated Mr 9 Bloomfield. Mrs Bevan beat' Miss Cowper, and Miss Gorrie beat Mi«ss Christie by good margins. It the semi-final Mrs Bevan beat Miss Braithwiate by 2 up and 1 to play, and Miss Snodgrass defeated Miss Gorrieby 2 up, leaving 1 Mrs Bevan (New Zealand champion) and Miss Snodgrass (Westporr champion) for to-morrow's final. ' The 18-hol-e Bogey Handicap saw Mrs Guy Williams (5), with an excellent round of 85, only one abovo Mrs Bevan's record, tie with Miss Mill, who was all square. Mrs Bevan (3) and Miss Snodgrass (7) were both 1 down. Miss Hartgill won the approaching and putting competition. August 27. In the final for the Manawatu Golf Championship Mies Sncdgrass (Westport) defeated Mrs Bevan (New Zealand champion) on the nineteenth green. Mrs Bevan was ordered by a doctor not to play, but she did so, and was continually short on the greens, which were wet from rain. The golf was excellent, Mis 3 Snodgrass finishing in 92 to Mrs Bevan 93. Miss Gould won the Fourteen-hole Stroke Handicap. Mrs Guy Williamson, in playing off the Bogey Handicap, equalled Mra Bevan's new links' record of 84-. Miss Rattray (159 yds) won the driving competition, Miss Mills (151£ yds) beiajr, second. WESTPORT, AtMTust 27. Miss Snodgrass has had a rather remarkable record, having been lady champion of the. Westport Golf Club since its inception four years ago, twice' (including the present years) West Coast golfing champion, lady champion of two Westport croquet clubs, also of the West Coast, And the lady in the We6t Coast combined tennis ' championship. Her present pexformanco is all the more creditable because this season she has had comparatively little practice on the links.