At Prestwick

The Himalayas, high sand hills on the fifth fairway; the Alps, a huge dune on the 17th; the Cardinal bunker, guarding the third green with banks so steep it has to be shored up with railroad ties--these are three of the most famed golf hazards in the world and they all lie on the Prestwick course, near Troon, where the British Amateur Golf Championship was played last week. They were by no means the major difficulties that faced the nine U. S. entrants who waited over after the Walker Cup matches at St. Andrews to play in the Amateur. There are no qualifying rounds for the British championship. Any golfer with two guineas and a handicap of three or less can send in his name. Scotland is full of obscure but able golfers who, in the 18-hole matches that decide every round of the British Amateur except the final, are capable of beating almost anyone in the world. In the draw last week, seven of the U. S. Walker Cup team were in the harder upper half. In the first round, George Terry Dunlap Jr., U. S. Amateur champion, played what he later called the most extraordinary match he could remember. G. P. Pakenham-Walsh, an oil agent home on leave from India, was five up at the 14th tee. Dunlap won five holes in a row, took the match at the 22nd hole. An unemployed Scottish carpenter named James Wallace beat, 3 & 2, H. Chandler Egan, U. S. Amateur champion in 1904-05. Next day spectators were indignant to find that the score board carried only the name of winner and score, that programs with names of opponents cost 70-c-. In the first of two matches between U. S. entrants, Johnny Fischer of Cincinnati put out Gus Moreland; in the second. Dunlap had another narrow escape, this time winning 1 up against A. William Breault of Detroit, who, abroad on a holiday, had entered the tournament for exercise. The match the gallery followed on the third day was between Fischer and Jack McLean, usually considered the best amateur produced in Scotland since the War. Two down on the 17th, Fischer lipped the cup with a 20-ft. putt. McLean slipped his ball past a half stymie, halved the hole, won the match. The Prince of Wales arrived in time to see the finish of the two best matches on the fourth day. In one Johnny Goodman, U. S. Open champion, lost to Leslie G. Garnett who learned to hit 275-yd. drives at Addington. In the other, Scot Wallace, who by this time had put out Cyril Tolley and Eric Fiddian, beat McLean, 1 up. The quarter-finals were comparatively one-sided. Dunlap beat Alex Walker, son of Whiskey Distiller Sir Alexander Walker, 3 & 1. Wallace, now followed on every round by a mob of cheering Scots, put out one of the richest players in the tournament, Francis Francis, whose wife is a London musicomedy actress named Sunny Jarman, 3 & 2. The other semifinalists were Garnett and William Lawson Little, burly 23-year-old Stanford junior who reached the semi-finals of the U. S. Amateur last year. In the semifinals, Little found himself outdriven on almost every fairway. He was 1 up at the 18th but Garnett sank a 20-ft. putt to square the match. On the 19th green, near a railroad track, Garnett heard the noise of a train, looked up just before he putted, missed his shot, lost his match. A gallery of 10,000 followed Wallace and Dunlap, cheered every time Vallace sank one of the putts that got him three birdies on the second nine and the match at the 17th, 2 up. What drew a crowd of 12,000 to the final was the fact that only two U. S. players in the last 30 years--Sweetser in 1926, Jones in 1930--have won the British Amateur. What the 12,000 saw was something much rarer, one of those mystifying rounds which, built of luck, confidence and skill in exactly the right proportions, can make the game of golf appear to be a form of magic. Before the match Little said to a reporter: 'T feel like I might shoot some pretty good golf today." The match ended, for all practical purposes, on the first green where Wallace three-putted and lost the hole 5 to 4. After that he stumped bravely around the course, hammering out a mediocre 80, partly because his attention, like the crowd's, was less on his own game than on his opponent's. On the 505-yd. third, Little put his brassie shot on the green and sank a 15-ft. putt for a 3 to Wallace's birdie 4. On the sixth, he holed a 20-ft. putt for a birdie. On the 461-yd. 13th he just missed a putt for a 3. On the 14th, his second shot hit the flag-pin. At the 18th, he had a lead of 12 up and a medal score of 66, which was three strokes less than the course record. On the 23rd, Little had the match and the honor of having won the British Amateur without losing a single hole in the final round--14 up and 13 to play, the most one-sided score on record. Lawson Little learned to play golf on links built on the site of a Chinese graveyard, when his army-officer father was stationed at Tientsin. A club rule said: "Ball may be lifted and dropped from open coffin without penalty." By the time Lawson Little entered Stanford, where he majors in economics and belongs to Chi Phi fraternity, his golf game was steadily in the 70. A good all-round athlete. Little likes golf well enough to train for it, ran three miles before breakfast every day for the Walker Cup matches. When Little was chosen for the Walker Cup team. Shot-putter John Lyman (see below) unsuccessfully proposed that Stanford award him a major sport "S." He will get one for winning the British Amateur.

Before hurrying to catch a boat that will get him and the other U. S. golfers back in time for the U. S. Open at Ardmore, Pa., June 7, Little had time to receive the huge cup from the Marquess of Ailsa and say: "I would need all of Shakespeare and Webster adequately to express my thanks. . . . The cup will be kept nice and shiny. . . ."

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