Hey, Those Foreigners Are Closing The Gap

HOLE	YARDS	PAR	HOLE	YARDS	PAR
1	367	4	10	314	4
2	403	4	11	163	3
3	342	4	12	316	4
4	424	4	13	409	4
5	522	5	14	513	5
6	370	4	15	404	4
7	354	4	16	351	4
8	161	3	17	466	5
9	310	4	18	356	4
OUT	3253	36	IN	3292	37
				3253	36
				6545	73

A hundred years ago the only people who played golf were the Scots. They had started to play the game in a rudimentary way as far back as 1100, some scholars say, though they are not prepared to bet their bottom shilling on the exact shape the game took in those remote days. The first golf club we know of, Royal Blackheath, was established in 1608 outside of London to accommodate the interest of James VI of Scotland who had become James I of England . However, it was not until the middle of the 18th century that the first permanent golf clubs were formed, the Honourable Company of Edinburgh Golfers in 1744 and the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews shortly afterward in 1754. By 1858, a century ago, there were some 38 golf clubs in existence. These included most of the other "classical" Scottish clubs (such as Prestwick, Carnoustie and North Berwick) in addition to a mild sprouting of foreign clubs founded by groups of Scots transplanted to foreign climes; Old Manchester in England ; Royal Calcutta (and later Royal Bombay ) in India , to which the jute trade had drawn as settlers the representatives of many Scottish companies; and Pau in southern France , just north of the Pyrenees, where golf was started by two Scottish officers who had been stationed in that area during the Peninsular War and who, some 20 years later, returned on holiday with their golf clubs and began to play on the plains of Billere.

A hundred years ago, the guttapercha ball had been "perfected"—it had been introduced some 10 years before—and the game was definitely on the verge of its first considerable expansion, but from the point of view of tournament play, golf was very young. There was no British Open and there wouldn't be for another two years. The inauguration of the British Amateur was a full 27 years away. The runner-up in that first Amateur Championship in 1885 and winner of it the next two years was Horace G. Hutchinson, then a young man in his mid-20s, an age at which most good athletes were not attracted to golf in those days. Hutchinson, from North Devon, represented the first English golf club in which the guiding catalysts had been Englishmen, as opposed to Scottish colonists. Charles Kingsley, the novelist, was an intimate friend of Captain Molesworth, one of the club's founders, and as Robert Browning, the gifted golf historian and not the poet, has written, the members of that club—with a breadth of view golfers have not always been celebrated for—took the name of their course from the novel Kingsley had been working on during a stay in the good captain's house: Westward Ho!

The purpose of this brief journey into the past, as is probably self-evident, is to point out how small and contained the game was, how far and how fast it has come in the last 100 years. What provokes this retrospection at this immediate moment is the fact that 1958 will go down in the file cards of future historians as a significant year in the game's relentless conquest of the green and brown corners of the earth: this autumn two great international competitions will be taking place together for the first time—on November 20-23, two-man professional teams representing over 30 countries will be meeting at the Club de Golf in Mexico City in the sixth annual Canada Cup match, already more than an embryonic classic; a month or so previous to this, on October 8-11, four-man teams of amateur golfers coming from some 30 countries will be convening at the Old Course in St. Andrews for the first World Amateur Team Championship and its Eisenhower Trophy. Bob Jones , whose illness has prevented him from traveling abroad since the war, has agreed to go over as captain of the United States team and has shipped his electric cart across so that he will be a mobile leader on the Old Course. Jones 's keen involvement epitomizes the hold which this new event has already gained on the minds of golfers throughout the world. As the chairman of the Championship Committee of the Royal & Ancient recently put it, "The match should be exciting, but above and beyond that it will be an occasion. Everyone will be there, from everywhere. Just picture the Big Room of the R&A clubhouse swarming with people of all colors, talking away in many different languages, all having something in common without even trying."

In a different direction, one of the riddles of our contemporary civilization is that the enormously increased means of communication haven't always made for better communication. There are, for example, a surprisingly large number of Americans who have the lingering idea that we are the only nation that knows anything at all about golf and that any one of a hundred of our amateurs could go over to, say, Spain and carry off the Open championship while wearing street shoes. If this is a little wrong, it is also somewhat understandable. Since the mid-'20s when Hagen went all the way to the top in the British Open four times and Bobby Jones completed the shatteringly successful American invasion of the game's historic home, it is true that the United States has dominated golf and sparked its progress in many laudable directions. The American development of the scientifically interbalanced set of steel-shafted clubs has made the game far more playable for the countless average golfers of the world, and this ranks only behind the invention of the rubber-cored ball by Coburn Haskell of Cleveland at the turn of the century as our most important technical contribution. For another thing, our professionals have long led the way in exploring and refining the modern technique of hitting the golf ball, and for this they deserve tremendous credit. Our winter professional tour, in a wondrous way, has become something of an Oxford and Cambridge of golf, a university of higher learning attracting players from all the other continents eager to improve their skills by studying at the feet of our acknowledged masters. But where some of us seem to go wrong is in thinking that simply because we have been in the forefront of the game for three decades now we alone love it, understand it and produce players of marked ability. This isn't quite so. In the last decade especially, the golfers (both amateur and professional) of other countries have been closing what had been a large gap between our degree of proficiency and theirs, and today it is not a predetermined thing at all that if an American team enters an international competition it will be a sure winner. The recent renaissance of golf in Great Britain , for example, has seen their teams take the Ryder and Curtis cups, and their amateurs could very well complete the sweep by winning the Walker Cup next spring, for they are a good crop. This last August in their annual match against a side of the top British pros, the amateurs beat them for the first time—and more than that, routed them by a score of 9�-5�.

Two events which took place last year brought into bold relief the advances foreign golfers have made. First, there was the Ryder Cup match last October which we lost for the first time since 1933 and lost in a rather shocking fashion, dropping six and tying one of the eight singles matches after having ostensibly wrapped up the cup for another two years by taking a 3-1 lead in the first day's foursomes. I shall always remember two related conversations whenever I think of that 1957 Ryder Cup match. About a week before the event took place, during a visit to the Midwest I happened to sit in on a conversation at a golf club between the resident pro, a fine young player from the Southwest, and two members of the club. They were voicing the careful opinion that the British might have a chance since our team didn't include all of our best players—Hogan, Snead , Demaret and Middlecoff, for example. "No need to worry just because some of those oldtimers aren't going across," the young pro said with a facile wave of the hand. "I know all of the boys who made the team, I played against them on the circuit, I've watched them a lot, and I can assure you they're terrific players. They are loaded with talent and they're tournament-tough, magnificent competitors. In fact, I think they'll give us a much stronger team than if we lugged some of those old stars across again. They've had it." The young pro's prediction was that we would drop two points, three at the most.

TOO GREEN

A week or so later, on the Sunday morning on which the papers carried the news of the British victory, I happened to drop into the club again. Everyone in the grillroom was talking about the Ryder Cup match—even granting the difficulty of adapting to foreign conditions, it seemed absolutely incredible that our team could have been handled the way they most certainly had been by a group of uncelebrated British golfers. I joined a table where the pro was explaining how it had happened. "I've been predicting all along that we would lose," he was saying with a facile wave of the hand. "That wasn't any representative American team, not without Ben and Sam on it, or Cary or Jimmy. These young kids we sent across aren't bad boys but, let's face it, they're pretty green. I used to play with them out there on the circuit, and I usually would give them a stroke a side to make a match of it. It all boils down to this: we sent a bunch of boys on a man's errand." Perhaps the real lesson to be learned from the loss of the Ryder Cup was the obvious one: on a given day a group of British pros, playing determined golf, are now again capable of defeating a team of excellent American pros who are slightly off the stick.

About three weeks after this the sports world suddenly became aware of Torakichi (Pete) Nakamura and Koichi Ono. These two Japanese pros were expected to do fairly well in the 1957 Canada Cup match, since it was being held on their native heath, at the Kasumigaseki Country Club outside of Tokyo . However, no one looked for them to carry off, as they did, a competition against the likes of Snead and Demaret, Dai Rees and Dave Thomas of Wales , Peter Thomson and Bruce Crampton of Australia , Stan Leonard and Al Balding of Canada , Peter Allis and Ken Bousfield of England , and Harold Henning and Gary Player of South Africa , to name the most formidable rival teams. Nakamura and Ono won going away, 9 shots ahead of the runners-up, Snead and Demaret. There was nothing fluky about their victory either. They indeed putted better than anybody else, but they also played at least as well as anybody else from tee to green. Although this Japanese triumph was far and away the most stunning episode in Canada Cup history, it was not the first time a team other than the United States had won the match. Argentina (Tony Cerda and Roberto de Vicenzo ) captured the first Canada Cup congregation at Beaconsfield (outside of Montreal ) in 1953. Australia ( Thomson and Kel Nagle ) won in 1954 at Lavalsur-le-Lac (also outside of Montreal ). Then there followed two American victories, Chick Harbert and Ed Furgol finishing first at the Columbia Club in Washington in 1955, and the dream team of Hogan and Snead repeating the following year over the " Burma Road" course at Wentworth in England .

A lot of the credit for this enlivening state of affairs should go to the late John Jay Hopkins and the unknown man (or men) who worked out the format for the Canada Cup. First, by setting it up so that the competing nations would send teams of only two men, it was made possible for the golf-small countries to be adequately enough represented, for while there will not be a whole brigade of able professionals in a country like Belgium or Colombia or Korea, there usually are a couple of players of caliber. This format at the same time eliminated the embarrassing margins that would have resulted for the United States and the other major golfing countries had six- or eight-man teams been called for, and teams of this size had been conventional in international golf over the years. In addition, the unknown planner (or planners) had a stroke of genius in establishing a method of scoring for the event that was both simple and different. A team's score is the aggregate of both of its two players' total scores—for 72 holes of medal play. For example, Japan 's winning score last year was 557, compounded from Nakamura's 274 (68, 68, 67, 71) and Ono's 283 (73, 70, 68, 72). This makes for continuing pressure on both players which is quite different from four-ball play where a hot golfer can carry an off-form partner without its showing too gravely on the board. To stay in the running in Canada Cup play, then, both members of a team must perform well, and the fine thing about this is that it puts the emphasis just where it should be: on the team rather than on the individual. There are a number of people, by the way, who think that the administrators of the Canada Cup would be wise to eliminate the tabulations and the prizes for the best individual scoring since this merely detracts from the team aspect of the meeting.

The Canada Cup match is sponsored and conducted by the International Golf Association, an organization founded by the late Mr. Hopkins, the American industrialist. Its present head is Frank Pace Jr. , the former Secretary of the Army, who succeeded Mr. Hopkins as President of General Dynamics, and its man-in-the-field is Fred Corcoran , the veteran golf promoter who must surely be the most traveled Bostonian since Francis Parkman first hit the Oregon Trail. The IGA has always selected excellent and interesting courses and, all in all, has operated its tourney on a very high plane.