Amateur Clubmen

The Brae Burn course, where the National Amateur Golf Championship was decided last week, lies in the shape of a green diminutive South America among the neat suburban back yards of West Newton, Mass. It is a hard course, harder than it was nine years ago for the National Open. In the qualifying rounds, no one broke 70 and 157 was good enough to get into the playoffs. George Voigt. playing in a green sweater and bright green stockings, slouched around the course last week with a cheerful, sarcastic expression and won the medal with 143.

In the first day of match-play, five former champions -Von Elm, Marston, Sweetser, Ouimet, and Chick Evans -were put out of the tournament. Voigt, after beating Sweetser, played through the quarter finals to meet Phil Perkins, the British Walker Cup Captain, in the semifinals. Bobby Jones, playing better every day, after going to an extra-hole to eliminate Gorton, the homeclub entrant, beat John Beck 14 and 13.

The day of the semi-finals Jones finished his morning round 9 up; after lunch, while Voigt and Perkins started out, he stood on the practice tee driving ball after ball through exactly the same trajectory far down the fairway to where two caddies waited to pick them up. After every perfect drive, Jones' face grew darker. Then he went out on the course and played six more holes with Phil Finlay, a shaky, hard-hitting Harvard boy; by this time he had won his match, 13 up and 12 to play.

Voigt and Perkins were fighting it out a little harder. The gallery was rooting for the quiet lanky Lancashireman, who never spoke except to his caddie whom he called "laddie." They saw Voigt go one down in the morning round; in the afternoon, Voigt lost the sixth hole when his ball landed in a brook at the foot of the green. He kept on losing holes after that and the match was over on the 14th after they both played in from the rough around the green to halve the hole. Perkins, for the first time since he had started his afternoon round, threw away his cigaret without lighting another. They walked back to the club house in a drizzle; Perkins carried an umbrella with a bamboo handle while his caddy walked in the rain, eating an apple.

The first hole at Brae Burn is 337 yards with a brook at the depth of the fairway, just below the green. Smart golfer', use an iron from the tee for a long pitch to the green rather than take a chance on driving into the brook. When Jones and Perkins went out to play their match, Perkins took an iron out, Jones took a wooden club -and a six for the hole to Perkins' four. Perkins was one up until the fourth; then Jones evened the match. At the end of the morning round, Jones was 6 up; at the end of the match, on the ninth green that afternoon, he was 10 up. Perkins threw away his cigaret again and walked over to shake hands, saying in his high, polite voice, "Well played, Mr. Jones." Bobby Jones, winning his fourth national amateur tournament in five years, smiled for a moment and then he looked strained and tired as he had looked hitting practice drives before the second round in his semifinal.

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If Jones on the final green at Brae Burn was thinking of future tournaments in which he must try to achieve the perfection which he can never much more nearly approximate than he does now, he might have envisaged himself as a chubby and more cheerful old fellow, winning the U. S. Senior Golf Championship. One such, Charles H. Walker. 61, last week won this tournament at Rye, N. Y., with a score of 158 for 36 holes.