At Garden City

The Garden City Golf Club, where the National Amateur Golf Championship was played last week, is an extraordinary institution. No women have ever been allowed in its low oak-paneled clubhouse. The course, sprawling over four sandy miles of Long Island's central plain, is dotted with ghoulish hazards placed there by the late Walter J. Travis, the club's most famed member and the best golfer in the U. S. at the turn of the Century. Most famed hazard designed by Golfer Travis is a deep pit. the size of a giant's grave, beside the 18th green. Into that pit legend says that Golfer Travis never sent a ball until the semi-finals of the Amateur Championship in 1908. Then it cost him the tide that he never again came close to winning. Garden City's older members, poised comfortably in their leather chairs in the glass-enclosed lounge that runs along behind the famed green, have wondered ever since if they would again look out on a scene which, for pure excitement, could match the Travis tragedy. Last week they looked out on two.

The first scene was a hurricane. Whipping in from the Atlantic Ocean, the storm that was doing millions of dollars of damage elsewhere along the coast hit Garden City the day of the semifinals. Golf tradition, imported from Scotland, where hurricanes are unheard of and where anyone who waited for a tine day would rarely play at all, says golf is an all-weather game. Officials of the U. S. Golf Association refused to hear of a postponement, sent Scotland's Jack McLean and New York's George Voigt, Cincinnati's Johnny Fischer and Omaha's Johnny Goodman, out to play their matches. While the golfers staggered around the course, the older members, having waited 28 years for a great golfing spectacle, sat down to squint instead at what Fate had substituted for it. Long Island's worst storm in years submerged the greens, made ponds out of traps, raised whitecaps on the pond hole. It drenched the handful of officials, caddies and eccentrics who followed the two matches. Finally it blew down two huge tents, put up to house a restaurant and the press. From their lounge windows Garden City's older members saw no golf at all. One match ended on the 17th green, when Goodman's putt, whacked with a midiron, failed to roll 30 ft. across the green. The other ended on the nth, when McLean was 8 up on Voigt after 29 holes.

The second scene came late the next afternoon, at the end of the 36-hole final. In the morning, with an old injury to his ankle aggravated by the weather, Fischer had finished two down. In the afternoon round, McLean, a pale-faced, teetotaling Glasgow whiskey salesman who has won the amateur championship of Scotland three times, had increased his lead to three at the ninth. Three putts by McLean on the loth, nth and 13th had given Fischer two holes and a stymie had gotten him a half at the 16th but at the 18th tee he was still one down. Both men had put their tee shots on the green. McLean had putted first and was close enough for a sure 3. If Fischer missed his 12-ft. putt, it meant that for the first time since Harold Hilton did it in 1911, a Briton would win the U. S. Amateur Golf Championship. If he sank it. the match would have to go on to an extra hole. A tail, thin, amiable, blond young man. who, because he has never before reached the final in the Amateur, has been accused of lacking courage, Fischer leaned over his ball. He struck it firmly and it rolled into the cup.

When the ball disappeared some 7,000 golf fans raced down the first fairway to watch the playoff. Fischer almost drove the green, McLean was short and pitched over into a trap. He came out well and when Fischer's chip was 20 ft. short the gallery began scrambling for places on the next hole. But Fischer stepped up and, going boldly for his third successive birdie, holed his putt for the match & title.

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